People are gonna die on these things and kill other people if they haven't already. These scooters have no place in my city.
Scooters solve a niche in the "not quite big enough to be regulated like a motor vehicle" transportation segment. There's no inherent reason they can't be used in public spaces.
The only reason scooters are an "issue" is because they are new and that newness results in them existing in a legal gray area that causes people to feel entitled to all the speed of real vehicles with all of the responsibility to operate safely that a pedestrian has (i.e. none other than your understanding of physics and desire not to be hit by other traffic). This "issue" will be solved eventually if scooters do become popular enough to take part in accidents actually harm people with any meaningful regularity.
Bikes on roads are required to obey the same signals and markings cars do, as well as staking in their lane (if one exists). Plenty of bike paths have separate lanes for walkers/joggers and bikes...the closing speed of one can be an order of magnitude higher than the other....
>The only reason scooters are an "issue" is because they are new and that newness
No, operating a powered vehicle on sidewalks is nowhere near as novel as you think it is, and the courts should have no difficulty addressing the fining/prosecution of those that do so. I don't know why people think "battery-electric scooter/skateboard" requires a paradigm shift in how to define a moving violation.
>This "issue" will be solved eventually if scooters do become popular enough to take part in accidents actually harm people with any meaningful regularity.
Great. We just need a sufficient number of electric-scooter related deaths and injuries to overcome the natural inertia of the criminal justice system &&|| trial bar. Then someone will fix the problem.
So she was facing a liability for fixing the car, perhaps some sort of insurance fraud on his part, AND her insurance was going to list an incidence of her "striking a pedestrian." Fortunately she found out there was some CCTV footage that exonerated her, but all of that just so some drunk a--hole can zoom around on a scooter and the scooter companies make money?
If you make a claim and the other party doesn't have insurance (it's unlikely the law requires someone to have liability insurance for their bike) and you need to make a claim, you could be SOL, but that's really a problem with how insurance companies operate.
You can rarely hear them coming (I don't wear headphones or anything), and they'll zip by with enough speed to cause serious harm.
What if I had stepped to the side? Or done a stretch and moved my arm to the side?
I'm not trying to be in physical therapy for a year or more because you can't walk your bike from the nearest corner to wherever you intend to park it.
As far as requiring these things be in bike lanes, it's all well and good to say that. But at least in my city, there seems to be a ton of confusion from bike riders, cars and pedestrians alike about what the exact laws are, let alone reliable enforcement of these laws.
Cops are rarely going to see misuse anyway, so that wouldn't have helped the parent poster.
This is like Ford rented someone a car for off-roading with FWD, no seatbelts and racing slicks, didn't ask for proof of a license or any experience driving at all, and they ended up driving off a cliff.