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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

This is why it blows my mind that scooters are effectively banned in San Francisco. They’re such a perfect solution for inner-city travel.

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Scooters are not a perfect solution. They are maybe part of the solution to the global problem of congestion, but how do you travel the last miles when you are 70 years old or you have a baby and it's raining ? Scooters only solve the problem for a specific segment of the population, not for everyone.

Electric scooters in particular.

These things look pretty amazing. https://www.gogoro.com

In many ways, I think solutions like this are just kicking the can. Travel in a place like Bangkok for one day. Red lights look like the start of a motocross rally. There are even motorbike taxis. And motorcycles deciding the sidewalk doubles as a bike line is a common sight. But traffic is still completely brutal. That's also with city wide subway and airtrain transport options as well.

The problem is simple. People need access to the roadways in a fashion that grows linearly to low exponentially. But the capacity of the roadway capacity stays constant with an occasional constant bump. Even if you suddenly toss every single driver on a scooter, it's just one of those constant time bumps. You'll eventually bump into the exact same problem of a constant road capacity against an increasing roadway access demand.

You need a way of linearly, and indefinitely, increasing traffic capacity, not one-off constant value work-arounds.

Check out the Boring Company. This could be the solution. Tunnels can be stacked below the city just as deep or deeper than you can build up.

Amount of potential traffic can't grow without limit. People need space to do other things. That puts a natural limit on the amount of traffic because people don't go places just to get there. They go places to do something when they get there.

The big underlying factor is population increase, both permanent increases of the local population and temporary increases from visitors. Though I imagine there are also other factors even beyond that one that also increase traffic. It's probably safe to say that increased income results in more activity involving transport, for instance. I'd agree there's definitely some theoretic cutoff where it becomes practically physically impossible to squeeze any more people into an area, but I'm not sure how practical it is to consider that since you're hitting major dystopia long before you get to that point.

Scooters aren't banned. They are now regulated. Scoot and Skip just showed up.

That said the regulation does sounds a bit overbearing

They would be perfect if people rode them in the street, in the bike lanes.

I don't understand why cities even allow cars. For example Amsterdam would work so much better if the roads became bike/electric-scooter* lanes with limited car access.

In New York (well, Manhattan), London and Paris it would work even better because you have a subway.

That would also solve the air quality problems of those cities in one fell swoop.

* Gas scooters - particularly two-stroke - are a relic from the past and need to be banned.

It wouldn't work in Paris, with the current infrastructure, there's a lot of places that can't be easily reached with a car. In addition, there's a lot traffic that goes through Paris from one subburb to another.

You mean the Uber parking lanes?

Yeah, no shit. I own a bike and hardly ride it because if I ride on the sidewalk I’m screamed at for endangering pedestrians; if I ride in the street lane I’m screamed at and cut off by drivers for going too slow; if I ride in the handful of bike lanes I’m at extreme risk for being cut off by an Uber taxi, Lyft taxi, delivery vehicle, or some random person in a car and they always say “I’ll just be a second you can go around me!!” but if I do then I’m in one of the other two areas and here comes the screaming and the maybe dying.

So if I can’t get there by walking, busing, train, or biking in wide open spaces, I’m just not going because damn, people in cars sure do act entitled to the spaces where I’m supposed to be and think nothing of swinging that two ton block of deadly metal around in ways that may smear their paint but could injure or kill me with little effort.

Two companies got the permit from the city and started service yesterday.

The kick scooters, you mean? Not the motor kind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y6fYNT3es4

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