A motor-propelled machine going 15 mph doesn't belong on the same surface as a baby stroller, a senior citizen, or a person with a disability.
They belong in the bike lane (which should exist in the first place), and their speed should be capped in areas of dense foot traffic.
I disagree, you can ride a scooter on a sidewalk safely and I need to do it from time to time. Of course, I don't prefer it. But it's pretty easy to do safely and it shouldn't bother anyone if done correctly.
The rules I follow:
1. Go much much slower.
2. Stay far away from other people and blind corners.
3. Always assume a person is about to make an erratic movement
4. Never pass closely to a person. When passing, go their walking speed + 1mph. It should be a similar speed differential to passing someone when you're walking.
5. If you have no space to pass, you need to go walking speed until space opens up.
6. if the sidewalk is too packed, just get off and walk it.
7. If you have far visibility (no blind corners, doorways, storefronts, etc) and there is no one in sight, let'er rip.
It all depends on the conditions. You should never blow by people at 15 mph. I commuted partly on 5th street in downtown Los Angeles and never had an issue, a close call, or had someone bat an eye. The goal is to blend in with other people walking.
If scooters require knowledge, thought, and skill to ride well on a sidewalk, then the two obvious answers are a) require training and a road test, or b) ban them on sidewalks. I don't much care which we go with, but having recently almost gotten flattened by some rental e-scooter idiot on the sidewalk, I think we need to pick one.
lots of things only have etiquette and no laws.
Laws are nice too, but getting people to follow them is equally tricky.
And regardless, if etiquette is needed for safe and effective sharing of the sidewalks, it's up to these scooter companies to make sure that etiquette training happens before they accept money and turn somebody loose. Otherwise it's classic "privatize the gains and socialize the losses" foolishness.
For example, I almost never see people reserve the passing lane for going fast or passing which is dangerous. People almost never use blinkers. Except, unlike scooters, they are driving vehicles that weigh two tons and are going 65+ mph. And they even require licenses.
So that's a pretty low bar, and not very damning if scooters have some etiquette issues.
i only go on sidewalks when I need to. So scooters are still worth it even if you are safe on sidewalks.
Keep it simple. "Can" but people won't. There is reason in this post ... but the law should remain that riding on sidewalks is illegal.
"Trusting" strangers on scooters to slow down is unwelcome heart-burn, as a pedestrian. "Will they slow down for me? Will they move off to the side? Will my dog stray into their fast-moving path? Will my dog, who freaks out for any person-riding-on-vehicle, freak out as this scooter crawls past? Do I need to pull the neck-collar on my dog hard so he stays sufficiently close to my feet as the person riding on the vehicle passes?"
None of this thinking should be necessary for a pedestrian. Keep the law set. Stay off the sidewalks.
Go further, require license-plates for scooters, to track infringement of riding on the sidewalk. Report scooters dragged into the lane. There is something fundamentally "not right for a metropolitan" about these smallish, easily misplaced vehicles.
Skip Scooter https://i.imgur.com/K6RuVzE.jpg
More Skip https://i.imgur.com/ZkdndG1.jpg
That's why I believe they should be enforceable rules aka laws.
I'm a hard-line rule following bicyclist, but I have no control over the other cyclists that blast past me at red lights. What are we supposed to do, render our nonexistent authority over them? I suppose I can say "please don't do that," but I try that and it has no effect.
Given how few of the riders are wearing helmets, they seem to at the very least be unaware of the risks they are taking.
> ... and others safety.
Power is intoxicating. Being in a more powerful vehicle on a surface shared with other less powerful vehicles makes some people ignore others' safety, or discount the way in which their actions imperil others.
Anyone who has ridden a bike/motorcycle in regular traffic can attest to that experience around cars: you assume you are invisible to them. I've seen many high-powered cars/trucks/motorcycles swerving and accelerating dangerously around less powerful vehicles in traffic.
Similarly, I've seen motorcycles driving fast down bike lanes to get around car traffic.
It's a similar situation between the scooters and pedestrians on busy sidewalks.
This is exactly the reason why I ride my bike on the sidewalk even with a bike lane that is divided from the automobile lane with a white line.
I don't care what laws exist, I am not risking my life riding in a bike lane that is really seen as a large automobile lane.
These are great ideas. Write them into your representatives. Designated street-side scooter parking would also be a plus. Not only does it signal to drivers "consider another option," it also deals with the scooter litter problem.
(To form, San Francisco chose the worst of all options and coronated two companies chosen by bureaucrats to run amok in the city.)
When they first launched in LA, this wasn't the case, it was just as much of a free for all as SF. SF succumbed to regulatory capture, but LA was able to figure out a way to allow all of the companies to exist in a better way.
Note that I was told that in some parts of LA, the organization is still pretty bad, but I was in Brentwood, Santa Monica, downtown, and Venice, all of which were in reasonably good shape.
So I'm not surprised you have a totally different view. Your view is going to reflect the values of the people around you. You may be surrounded by polite people.
Take riding on the sidewalks. Any sensible person would understand that operating a vehicle moving 15-20mph on a 3-foot wide sidewalk, in a dense urban area with people coming into/out of buildings, delivery personnel wheeling hand trucks, small children, parents with strollers, people walking cats and dogs, etc is just dumb. Yet, I see kids in Oakland doing this daily, and even though it's codified into the Oakland Municipal Code that this is illegal (motorized vehicles on the sidewalk), people do it anyway.
I got so fed up with this, I (intentionally) veered about 6 inches left walking on the sidewalk last week, causing someone going ~15mph to get knocked off of the scooter. Other times, I just stand in the middle of the sidewalk and play chicken. I weigh 240lbs so it's usually pretty effective.
It is indeed up to the law to legislate what is and isn't allowable behavior. But at the smallest scale, it's neither possible nor desirable to get a cop standing on every block, or surveillance cameras everywhere. You just have to trust people will exercise some level of decency and concern for others, which seems notably absent from day-to-day interaction where I live. You can't change that with laws.
It certainly would be amazing if national incentives could be set up to redesign streets nation wide to favor bikes and pedestrians in the same way we do cars.
It puts all the risk on the cyclist. I have had numerous friends get hit and run while riding bikes on bike lanes, most recently a friend died from it.
I'll happily receive any citations for riding my bike or e-scooter on the sidewalk, and take full responsibility for any accidents I get into. It's not even up for discussion in my mind.
In the UK: > In 2015, two pedestrians were killed and 96 seriously injured after being hit by a bicycle. But every year more than 100 cyclists are killed and more than 3,000 seriously injured on British roads
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cycle-safety...
Your statistic regarding UK pedestrians being killed/hit vs bicyclists being killed/hit isn't strong as it's probable that nowhere near as many bicyclists choose to ride on the sidewalk as compared to staying in bike lanes and roads. That is, if more bicyclists opted to ride on sidewalks, the incident rate would certainly increase.
Additionally, rationalizing this in terms of the risk towards the bicyclist just comes off as selfish: "I'm not comfortable with the risk I'm facing while bicycling on the roads, therefore I will put pedestrians at risk instead."
Perhaps instead of endangering pedestrians, something more constructive would be to engage politically to improve the situation (maybe you do this already, if so, awesome!).
Nobody would accept having "painted walk lanes" instead of sidewalks, but for some reason this is considered an acceptable norm for bikes.
A bike lane really isn't safe enough to get people on bikes and scooters into it. It needs to be a separated cycle track like what is common in Copenhagen. This takes more space, but increases capacity of the whole road (the cycle track has more capacity than the driving lane it takes away).
There are a zillion other benefits too - more active/healthier population, higher retail spending along the cycle track (https://its.ucdavis.edu/inthenews/the-complete-business-case...), higher property values, only taking 30lbs of metal with you on every trip instead of 2000lbs, potentially local fuel source (food from nearby rather than oil or electricity from afar), etc etc etc.
Also, bicyclists seem to seriously hate the scooters. I'm not entirely sure why, but it seems to be that they're just not used to having much traffic on "their" paths.
If the bike lane laws disallow motorized vehicles, then how does the sidewalk law allow it? It sounds like the laws need to be updated to allowed motorized electric vehicles capable of going up to some reasonable maximum speed in the bike lane. Basically the inverse of the law that prevents mopeds and golf carts from going on the freeway today.
until then i'm fine with scooters being encouraged (but not forced) to use less busy roads, and tolerating them on sidewalks for major roads without bike lanes.
I live downtown Minneapolis and have been almost hit by scooters multiple times. They are everywhere. I have no problem with them, but please follow the rules. I've had people on the scooters yell at me to get out of the way both oncoming and from behind.
This summer when I was in San Diego for a half marathon I was standing on the sidewalk waiting when out of nowhere a scooter rider was crossing the street, hit the sidewalk curb, which was higher than they expected, and endo'ed right next to me. It was almost like the latest South Park episode. The scooters can be tricky to ride for new people, are fast, and really should only be used while wearing a helmet.
Talking about such, is there any data on accidents caused by e-scooters? (percentage wise e.g. vs bikes)
10 mph is more than enough to injure someone on collision, especially if that person is frail. Average human walking speed is 3mph. Runners average 10mph, but a running human has a lot more control over their momentum than someone in a vehicle, because they are expending their own energy to move, rather than using an external propulsion system, and they aren't on wheels.
> Talking about such, is there any data on accidents caused by e-scooters? (percentage wise e.g. vs bikes)
I don't know, but except for small children, bikes are already banned on most sidewalks in cities with a lot of foot traffic. Some adults choose to ignore those rules, but that's a different issue.
If the only argument is one of how much damage would happen in the case of a collision, bikes and scooters belong with pedestrians and not with cars. We don't need to speculate what happens when a car hits a bicyclist, it happens every day and the common outcome is that the biker dies.
There has to be a better argument for sentencing bikers and scooter riders to death.
At the core scooters don't really change that much about transportation vs bikes or simply running. However, they can be really convenient. So, it's going to be interesting to see how things evolve.
Wow then, you must be really worried that 3 feet away a 2 tonne vehicle can go 40mph. And you should, they kill around 40,000 people every year.
That said, I think it took about 4 hours from my arrival a few weeks back to nearly being run down from behind on one of the streets with a narrower sidewalk. A lot of riders definitely weave around people and generally expect walkers to get out of their way.
On the plus side there weren't a lot of parked e-scooters blocking sidewalks but there were some and I saw even more in Atlanta this past week. Not enough to be a meaningful problem for pedestrians but certainly for anyone in a wheelchair or mobility scooter.
You don't see much of anywhere near that much around Toronto.
I'm strongly in favour of more scooters/e-bikes in the city (and fewer cars), and I'm also strongly in favour of writing tickets for anyone who is antisocial enough to ride on the sidewalk.
If traffic cops spent a week or two rigorously enforcing the law, I bet you'd see a sharp drop-off in this behaviour.
(However given the number of cars, including cop cars, that I see blocking intersections after the lights change, I'm not sure that there's really a commitment to enforcing traffic laws in SF, even where this would be a revenue-generating activity).