Just this week in Vantaa, Finland three 12-year-old girls piled onto one of those electric scooters you subscribe to with an app and proceeded to get run over by a car at a crossing, killing one of them
The app is supposed to have an age restriction but it’s easy to bypass and you’re not supposed to have more than one person riding on one, which people routinely ignore
I hate seeing kids and teens speeding around dangerously on those fucking things and then just leaving them laying around on high-traffic bike routes because they don’t give a shit since they treat the scooters as completely disposable
Fucking awful bazinga-brained Silicon Valley-ass idea and business model. Actually, there are also bikes you can use with an app but curiously you don’t see kids doing reckless shit with those, almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible 
Your complaints are indistinguishable from those levied against bikes. Multiple kids have been piling onto the same bike since forever. It’s even made its way into Boomer/Xer nostalgia bait about riding around your neighborhood with your first love on your handlebars. I guarantee you the death rate is higher for kids on bikes than for scooters. I say this as somebody who loves being a cyclist and uses a bike for literally all of their chores.
And yet people don’t play around with rentable bikes in the same way for some reason
Yes they do what the fuck are you on about. We did all kinds of stupid shit on bicycles as kids, I’m astonished I didn’t have more broken bones as a kid.
I don’t see piles of rentable bikes littering the streets. You occasionaly see one abandoned in a bush but usually people return them to the proper bike stands
seems like designated areas to leave rented machines & some kind of penalty for leaving them where-ever is more in order. which also fixes the absurdity of a truck going everywhere a scooter person has at the end of every night to pick them all up-charge-relocate
Yeah, the current implementation utterly reeks of lazy tech bro mentality
Ngl the fact that they don’t have designated return spots is one of the reasons they’re useful. There’s no way in hell my apartment complex is going to install bike share racks outside each building, the scooters are useful precisely because other people will just leave one in the parking lot where I can take it and I can ride it all the way home.
If my city was forced to put up return racks I guarantee the closest one would be by the bus stop, a 10 minute walk away.
functioning within the fantasyland where something that isn’t completely necessary for the techbro company to make a ‘profit’ is done at all, i think we can dream bigger than the inconveinient way things are already set up. more frequent drop-offs than bus stops, more frequent bus stops, drop-offs at common destinations we know lots of people will use them: public buildings, multifamily residences, etc.
also obviously this could only actually work as a publicly owned and organized system
People don’t return them because proper scooter stands don’t exist lmao. Bike share systems actually have physical infrastructure showing where you’re supposed to return the bike. I worked for one of these scooter companies, “proper parking” was just somewhere on the sidewalk that isn’t obstructing traffic. These are solvable problems, not something inherent to electric scooters.
I’d be happy if people left them on the side of the road but no, it’s always on the road where they often proceed to fall over and block the path even more
That’s another problem entirely IMO, fact is kids are going to do stupid shit with whatever vehicle you give them.
Which is why the apps are supposed to be age-restricted
So they’re not free floating?
That’s because they throw them in the canals
Throw them all in the pit, I say.
It really seems like your complaints are about kids doing kid shit but you know that is stupid so you launder them through complaints about newfangled contraptions
My main issue here is the business model, not the e-scooter itself
I think easy access to essentially disposable motor vehicles incentivises stupid behaviour. If these were their own scooters I assume they’d treat them with more respect
lol you don’t interact with kids very much do you
Would they leave their e-scooters blocking random streets though
We can agree this is an issue, but in my area at least this is also a large problem with the dockless rental bikes.
Where I live I’ve seen a couple of abandoned rental bikes but typically people seem to use them properly. The people that use them seem to be mostly adults, though whether this is because of the app being more effectively age gated or the bikes being adult-sized, I’m not sure
I also assume a bike is just less attractive for random joyrides
Edit: they’re also less available, since you can only get them from docking stations spread around the city that you’re also supposed to return them to
I don’t think the e-scooters business model is losing out on 2 paying customers as they pile 3 at a time onto one and then also those customers getting killed. I know they’re all run by bazinga tech companies but even that one’s too far
They do though??? They absolutely do. Children in particular. Fucking around on bikes is like one of the top things children do.
They might do it a bit less with the rented bikes than the rented scooters but that’s just because most kids have their own bikes
Bikes are considerably slower, especially when ridden by children and also obviously don’t move under their own power on level ground. It’s weird that people are in favor of giving children access to motor vehicles in this thread.
The term “motor vehicles” has long been used to refer exclusively to cars, trucks, and motorcycles. You can’t extend this to electric-powered personal transport vehicles like bikes/scooters/skateboards/unicycles and keep the same scary connotations.
You don’t think theres a significant difference between unpowered personal transport(or assisted power bikes) and those with electronic motors that move entirely on their own power?
No I think there’s very little difference between unpowered personal transport and those with electronic motors allowing them to go 15 miles per hour, which at least here is what the scooters are limited to.
Not risk wise. I think more people want to use them because they don’t have to put in the physical effort. Which is good. But then with greater scale you see greater quantities of bad behavior. Cyclists are relatively rare in most US cities.
You don’t think a kid can find a steep hill if they wanna go fast
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Might’ve been bad wording on my part, wasn’t sure what to call them
E-bikes are not slower than e-scooters. In fact that’s my biggest complaint about the fact that my city only has scooter rentals and no bikes, the bikes can go faster and are way easier to ride.
I don’t think doublepepperoni wasn’t talking about e-bikes though, just regular rental bicycles. At least those are super common around here because they’re subsidized by the city while I’ve barely ever seen a rental e-bike.
Bikes aren’t motor vehicles