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Comment by colept | Hacker News Reader

Loved BIRD when they first started here in San Jose but now they're painfully slow (~12mph) while Lime has managed to keep top speed around 20mph.

BIRD has an edge in terms of availability but I find myself taking one to find a Lime.

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I played around with the scooters in San Jose during WWDC last week, and I have to say that I preferred the Bird ones. While the Lime ones did have a faster top speed, they were also slower to accelerate. When driving on the sidewalks there's a lot of slowing down, so getting back up to speed quickly is more important in my opinion. Plus ~12mph is fast enough IMO, it feels dangerous to go much faster than that.

Why are you driving on the sidewalks? Please stop doing that!

With a top speed of ~12mph, the scooters are way too slow for the road. It's much safer on the sidewalks. The sidewalks in downtown San Jose are also quite wide, so there's plenty of room for pedestrians and scooters to share.

I'm going about that my speed on my bicycle, much of the time. "Too slow for the road" has a meaning on the interstate highway. Someone who says that about city streets needs to go back to driver's ed. It's fine that the speed limit is 35mph. If you can drive that and safely pass slower traffic, do so. If you can't, slow down!

Perhaps the argument amounts to "driving a scooter on the road makes me feel unsafe, and I'd rather make others (pedestrians) unsafe to make myself feel safer." Seems typically selfish.

12mph is way too fast for a sidewalk. (Thus these scooter sharing startups will die.)

If an olympic athlete who runs at 12mph did his daily run on a sidewalk, people would be really, really angry. 12mph is fast. A police officer would stop him.

I disagree. Bikes aren't much faster .

Worth noting that this depends on the locality.

For example, in Singapore it is very much illegal to ride them on the street. They're relegated to sidewalks, footpaths, and cycle paths.

https://www.straitstimes.com/sites/default/files/articles/20...

Bird slowed down their scooters to maintain battery life and because it was part of the terms of their settlement with Santa Monica. I assume they simply applied that software update fleetwide.

But, seemingly, only the newer ones with the paddles for both the acceleration and braking are limited to 12mph. The old ones still go faster in my limited experience.

Maybe they can't get OTA updates?

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