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Comment by Matt3o12_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

>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.

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