The secret life of teen scooter outlaws | Hacker News Reader

The secret life of teen scooter outlaws

theverge.com

42 pointsTomte58 comments

So, in America where 15 year olds can get a driver license (and a full drivers license when they turn 16), are not allowed to ride a scooter which can go a lot slower then a car AND is a lot less dangerous to the public because they are not driving a three thousand pound death machine.

I can understand that the companies don’t want underage kids driving it but why would the police enforce a breach of a private contract?

I really don’t understand why riding one when underage is against the law. Sure, they are not very safe, and things such as blowing a red light are a lot more dangerous but doing that in your car is A LOT more dangerous and also more dangerous towards other people. Can someone shed some light on the issue because I really don’t see a reason why it should be forbidden, given they know the rules of the roads. And that would simply require a drivers license which most teens in the US seem to have anyways.

Scooters are probably a greater danger to themselves. And when it comes to law-making protecting children is the premise no one can vote against. Even if teens driving cars were an empirically proven greater threat to children.

Teens get a lot of supervision and training before being allowed to drive. They take classes.

It's not quite a fair comparison. Though maybe you could argue that a driver's license is enough to let a teen use a scooter.

No license is required to ride a bicycle, and I'd wager that a bicycle is more dangerous than a scooter, since it weighs more and goes faster. I think bicycles just get grandfathered in.

Not that I want licensing for bicycles or scooters, mind you! I bike to work every day, and it's indisputable that much smaller vehicles going much slower are way, way safer than cars and trucks. 37K people were killed in vehicle crashes in 2016, the most recent year for which I can find data.

Where I live you need a four day $650 course that you need to book months in advance to ride any scooter at all. You also need to pay for annual registration and get insurance.

A few provinces over, they are talking about asking for a bicycle license in some newspapers. It's way out of hand here.

Because these scooters do not have infrastructure designed for them, they might as well be more dangerous than cars, both for the rider and third parties.

For example, in the Netherlands, this is indeed the case, and in the Netherlands there are bicycle paths, although I am not sure if that helps or increases the amount of accidents or their severity.

Data: https://www.swov.nl/en/facts-figures/factsheet/road-deaths-n...

What is the risk of a fatal crash in Dutch traffic for different modes of transport?

>they might as well be more dangerous than cars

this is dumb. cars weigh 1000x more than these scooters.

A dumb teen isn't going to try to drive a car on the sidewalk. I've seen teens drive scooters on sidewalks. You can't lane split with a car, you can with a scooter.

Cars have a greater ability to be dangerous, but maybe scooters are more dangerous because of how they can be and are used. I do not actually know, I've never looked into numbers.

The fact that scooters can be used in such ways is not a compelling case that they're more dangerous than cars. If anything, what strikes me is that a scooter on the sidewalk seems outrageous to some people, by contrast, largely because it's just a banal fact we're all accustomed to that cars kill people by the tens of thousands every year.

The exact same can be said for bicycles. They go the same speed, they have to be used in the street and not the sidewalk, and bicyclists can be just as careless and oblivious on the road. Yet there is no age restriction for riding a bike on a roadway; you can bike down a 45mph road perfectly legally the day you get your training wheels removed.

The problem is not the scooters and who rides them, it's the danger posed by cars. Cars have to be physically separated from other forms of transport. Buses should get their own lane to beat car traffic, bikes and other lower speed vehicles like scooters or even runners should stay in the bike lane. This is a transportation issue, not a scooter issue, and you can't fix it with an age restriction.

There's a graph at the bottom of https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/maatschappij/verkeer-en-vervoer/tra.... It's in Dutch, but should be understandable if you Google Translate and click "Show table".

Basically, bikes are not very dangerous except for people over 60.

>I can understand that the companies don’t want underage kids driving it but why would the police enforce a breach of a private contract?

Police in the US exist to protect private property, not people. It's the basis of our entire economy and system of government. The same reason police will go on an international manhunt costing millions of dollars for someone who robbed $10,000 from a bank.

A handful of cities/states where overbearing paternalistic government is in vogue are not representative of all of America.

In most places the cops wouldn't blink twice at anyone on a scooter so long as they're not riding like an ass in traffic.

You read the headline and think it's fine, kids shouldn't go crazy in traffic, and you click on the article and it isn't bōsōzoku on Vespas, it's random teenagers on an electric-assisted kick scooter. If the parents don't take decisive action soon they'll buy bicycles and ride them to the library to read banned books. And the next year they'll listen to wild jazz in the park.

Being cooped up with tiger parents in exurbia can't be good for mental health.

There are obvious parallels with the view on biking and biking helmets in the US versus the Netherlands: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/28/17789510/bi...

There are clear health and environment benefits to people biking, or taking a scooter like this. Even for the people who keep driving, it reduces traffic jams. The Netherlands has discovered that to make people bike, you need to not require helmets, and find other ways of making it safe: build dedicated bike paths, don't blame the victim when a car runs over someone without a helmet, etc.

Rather than ostracizing them as "outlaws", the same should be done in this case.

Looking around America generally and how things are done here and attitudes around driving and transportation just gives me little faith things will actually improve here.

Yesterday my fiancee and I went on a bike ride around the neighborhood. At one point, we heard music and the whine of an electric motor approaching from behind. A moment later, an adolescent on an electric scooter comes barreling along with headphones blasting music into his ears. Without slowing down or even a glance to either side, he enters the intersection to a relatively busy 30mph residential road (where cars frequently go 35 or 40+, easily, as it's a boring 1 mile straight shot). The kid casually swerves around as he crosses to narrowly avoid being t-boned by an SUV from the left. The blank expression on his face betrayed no concern or surprise, only casual indifference as he rode on as if nothing concerning had happened. The car didn't honk, maybe they never even saw him. Looked like they were on their phone.

I hate watching this kind of stuff happen. Makes me cringe.

What's that Seinfeld joke about people who's brains are too stupid to protect themselves? :P

PSA: Cars vs cyclists or other unprotected travelers are 3,000 pound weapons. Watch out and gear up.

I could take your experience (which is shitty, I admit) and multiply it by 5x or so times and that would be my experience with cars everyday.

At least the cars have a crumple zone. If I had to hit a tree at 40mph I'd rather be inside a recently built car than anywhere else. Cars are actually extremely good safety devices, it's really the whole "moving at 70mph" thing that causes the deaths.

The dislike of cars really is the dislike of having to move at high speeds for two hours daily just to survive in society. Fast-moving scooters would make that problem worse because they won't to much to protect you in a crash.

>> "If I had to hit a tree at 40mph I'd rather be inside a recently built car than anywhere else."

Personally I would like to be in an M1 Abrams or a bulldozer or a freight train.

There's some truth in that. As we get further from the most recent spike in the price of oil our vehicles tend to evolve in that direction.

I can only imagine how bad the 3pm traffic would be if the soccer moms were allowed to drive M1 Abrams.

"I've got two kids, I neeeeed the space".

Vehicles are safer for those inside them at a given speed, sure. The problem is they're much less safe for anyone outside them (i.e. pedestrians and cyclists), and they're also capable of getting up to much higher speeds too.

As a pedestrian I would surely rather be hit by a bike going 15 mph than a car going 45 mph. Bicycles also don't have blind spots, so they're less likely to hit a well-behaving pedestrian to begin with.

>As a pedestrian I would surely rather be hit by a bike going 15 mph than a car going 45 mph.

Remember, the topic at hand is motorized scooters: which are perfectly capable of moving at 45mph. We can't think of them like they're bikes.

TFA says they can only go up to 15 mph.

TFA says they’ll do 25 mph downhill, actually.

Anything with wheels will go pretty damn fast on a steep downhill. Skateboards too. Not many people are riding them this fast because it feels terrifying.

I think you're confusing mopeds with scooters. Scooters, as being discussed here, are definitely slower than bicycles. These ones in question are electronically limited to 15 mph and are also practically limited by having really tiny wheels. Going fast on them on a downhill feels fucking terrifying. A bicycle, on the other hand, feels much saner, and I routinely get mine up to 25 mph on downhills without thinking much of it.

>enters the intersection to a busy 30mph road (where cars frequently go 35 or 40+, easily)

well I think we've found the problem. We don't enforce the rules for the vehicles that have the potential for the most damage.

I think it's an American problem of treating 18 year olds like 14-16 year olds. Same goes for drinking. Why can't we trust (young) adults like other countries do?

My problem with them is when they drive them under my wheels. The skateboarders going down the local hills at 30 mph in traffic with no brakes are bad enough, fortunately, there aren't very many of them.

>Why can't we trust (young) adults like other countries do?

Because higher drinking age leads to less drunk driving (in the US, at least). That's the reason the drinking age is 21. Unfortunately.

If we had a culture of responsibility around alcohol consumption, we wouldn't have such a problem.

Interesting, some states are raising the age for cigarette purchasing to 21.

Or a system of transportation that is not cars.

> Because higher drinking age leads to less drunk driving.

This may be the cause of a poor or non-existent public transportation system. Once you have an efficient public transportation, you have alternatives to reach home after having drinks. Otherwise, it's your own car or Uber which is an expensive option.

And yet I have never encountered such a careless attitude wirh regards to DUI than in the US. Age alone is clearly not the only thing that matters.

I do agree but how is this related to the story? The issue is people under 18 riding the scooters, not people 18+.

This is another example of age-based discrimination. Take a random adult and a random teen and the chance the teenager is going to be more smart, agile, conscious and simply decent are fairly far above zero. There are a lot of decent and stupid people among both teens and adults. There is little reason for people above 13 to have more limited rights than people above 18.

Driving statistics would imply this is far from true for the general case.

How do accident rates compare for an 18 year old with 2 years of driving experience vs a 50 year old with 2 years of driving experience?

My wife got her license at 24 (after returning from China). I guarantee her numbers are far better.

What if there were driving statistics that imply people of a particular skin colour or gender participate in car crashes more often? Would it justify discriminating against them and limiting their rights? Should every particular member of this group be made responsible for the mistakes of the others this way?

There are. Males pay more than females in the US. They just plain take more risks, especially in their youth.

> the chance the teenager is going to be more smart, agile, conscious and simply decent are fairly far above zero

True. And the chance that the teenager will be overconfident, inattentive, unaware of risks, or take dumb risks to impress some girl/guy are also above zero, and often pretty close to one.

True. But how much sense does it make to believe a 18-year-old one is going to be so much more reasonable than a 17.5-year-old one that it would make such a fundamental difference worth such a difference in legal rights? Time doesn't even exist objectively, needless to say, the idea of using it as a precise measure of a character maturity is a disaster.

Not at all. Just look at insurance prices based on age.

I've heard a lot of scooter-hate - really reminds me of skateboard hate. The common retort is safety and driving rules.

My response is we should be teaching kids to drive (scooters/bicycles/motorcycles/cars) as if the environment were much more chaotic - like a race/motocross track, and like many countries in the world.

When I drove in countries where traffic was chaos - I found it was just as I learned to drive on the motocross track on a motorcycle as a kid: key rule try very hard to not hit anyone and try very hard to not be hit. Don't get bent out of shape - enjoy the ride.

I'm not suggesting that we change our driving regulations to be more chaotic - but a different approach to training and changing our attitude while moving through traffic might help.

In normal countries kids learn riding a bicycle from their parents at the age of 6 and ride to school at grade 3. Only babies walk to school, regular people ride!

The demand for safe bicycling creates a demand for a safe road environment.

Also, when you are finally 18 and earned your driving license, you aren't going to go overboard and attack a cyclist for using the road, because a month ago you were one of them.

On the other hand, I watched a teenage boy ride a Lime scooter onto a highway 880 on-ramp yesterday.

Clever kid taking the safest route, 880's usually a parking lot.

City planners and politicians in the USA would be wise to consider the root cause of the scooter surge rather than worrying too much about the side effects. People want to get around without buying an expensive heavy machine. Scooters solve the "last mile" problem of public transportation in sprawled areas.

It's clear that automobile-centric urban planning cannot work for large cities. Yet, there are always screaming loud voices protesting anything that affects their ability to drive in perfect comfort and speed.

I wish we had politicians with the courage to ignore those people and make the infrastructural changes we need to keep our cities functional and pleasant as our population continues to urbanize.

> Most said they ignored the rules to use the scooters out of necessity

If it's "necessary", one wonders what they did last year when there were no scooters.

A year is a long time to a teenager.

I don't know about these kids but I took the bus around town when I was a teenager.

A scooter would be far more convenient.

More convenient? Sure, but that's not "necessary".

The probably had to make a lot more compromises having to wait around for inefficient transport, be it bus or borrowing someone's car.

Got a ride from their parents when their parents were using a car instead of a scooter.

How much does a good electric scooter cost that lasts a few years for an adult?

The ones used by bird and lime are around $500.

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