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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Here in Singapore they have a very bad reputation after some nasty accidents with pedestrians.

They're banned from the streets and sidewalks are a joke locally. I think they would be an awesome way to commute if you have bike lanes to share?

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Yeah, I can see that for sure. This week I came about two inches from serious injury. Some yutz was riding one of the new powered rental scooters downhill on a narrow sidewalk. He was easily doing 25kph. I was talking with a friend as we waited outside a restaurant; he brushed past me just as I was stepping back. If I had done it a second earlier, I would have been right in his path with nowhere for him to go.

Bike lanes could be a better place for them. But a lot of the riders I see are tourists or scooter novices. A busy urban bike lane is not the right place to learn a new mode of transport.

I don't understand the thought process around scooters and ebikes here in Singapore. They say they want a car-lite society and then make decisions that guarantees to make this difficult.

I agree. The city feels _designed_ for cars. There are lots of streets that are more or less not crossable in CBD without walking forever into one direction and try and find a pedestrian crossing.

Drivers are aggressive to the point that I nearly got ran over on zebra crossings multiple times.

Sidewalks are okay for pedestrians, but the (nice) "tables outside" culture paired with the (arguably nice as well) "everything is sheltered from sun and rain" attitude leading to lots of pillars/narrow ways it's nearly impossible to ride a bike/scooter.

Seeing as most roads are 2 lanes each direction i think they should just reappropriate one of the lanes for bikes, ebikes and escooters. They would only need to do that on core routes which are already catered for cars by expressways. They should also introduce a test and license that let's competent riders ride at more practical speeds than the 25kmh. I already ride my bike at speeds of up to 40kmh on the flat under my own power.

I wonder how much of the bad rep locally is the special kind of FUD that sometimes accompanies new technology, and how much of it is a mix of bad actors and inadequate law enforcement. A lot of these accidents were cases of assholes riding escooters.

The escooters aren't banned from sidewalks, but I don't know what the alternative is here. They're too slow to be on the roads and like you suggest, we don't have dedicated bike lanes throughout the island.

That said I know of people who can commute to work through the PCN and I'm so jealous of them.

I'd say it's a bad local situation (no bike lanes to speak off, narrow crowded sidewalks) and bad attitude.

The joke is that a scooter comes with a Bluetooth speaker, playing EDM music at full volume.. and that joke is somewhat based on the situation here.

There were a number of really bad accidents as well, those scooters can be really heavy. Run over a kid or an old woman, bonus points for driving off afterwards, and the bad rep is hard to avoid.

I like the tech, the climate here would be quite ideal for these things. Unfortunately there's no good place to ride them so far..

I would say, that's because a few people ride them like they are super badass, blasting loud shitty music and going at indecent speed on the sidewalk (which is totally not badass).

The one in the article are limited to 15mph, a colleague of mine rides one limited to 60km/h (37mph).

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