Lime scooters are causing some issues for Brisbane's vision impaired community | Hacker News Reader

Lime scooters are causing some issues for Brisbane's vision impaired community

abc.net.au

50 pointsclouddrover28 comments

I loathe those scooters. We have about six different scooter companies here and they are a nuisance. They are left all over the place, in public walkways. And they are mostly ridden on sidewalks.

It still amazes me to see mostly healthy young adults that cannot walk a mile or two with their own legs.

Leaving them out and riding them on the sidewalks is definitely a problem.

But not wanting to walk two miles to a shop or restaurant is not a matter of inability or even of effort, it's a matter of time management. A two mile walk might be pleasant but would completely blow away my lunch break or interrupt progress on a project. There are limited options within a given walking radius, and adding a car, bike, or scooter makes this radius hugely larger. Parking a car or driving in traffic is a pain, so scooters and bikes are a useful - not lazy - solution.

We need ubiquitous scooter and bike racks, and respect from cars.

Anecdote. I was in China a few weeks ago, Shanghai to be precise. Me and my wife were walking around the city and there is scooters everywhere (the ones you sit on) and they're electric and because of this you don't hear him! A few times this caused me the scare the sh#t out me when suddenly one of these things comes from behind at high speed. Very annoying...

Yep, and most of the kids ride them like it’s a race so they’re weaving in and out of people like it’s a race track.

I can't stand those scooters. Many people drive with them without being careful to other traffic. Some of them just swerve around in bike lined etc

They're something of a plague in my home town as well, they're strewn all over the pavement/sidewalk/footpath(/whatever regional word), even when there was barely enough room for pedestrians.

Perhaps the users/distributors of these things aren't trying to come across as inconsiderate, but that's certainly the end result.

Pedestrians need their own space. These scooters shouldn't mix with pedestrian traffic at all

>Pedestrians need their own space. These scooters shouldn't mix with pedestrian traffic at all

Not sure how this is any different than suggesting that cars need their own space and that bicycles shouldn’t mix with motor traffic at all.

Up to a point that's true. Low-speed roads are fine for mixing bikes and cars but once cars start going twice as fast as bikes (say, 40-50kph) you need separated bike lanes to have a safe biking experience. If you don't, bikes are likely to cause either massive safety risks or huge traffic slowdowns, which themselves can be a safety risk.

The same can be said for these scooters. Pedestrians walk at about 5kph; Lime scooters (at least the Lime-S ones) can go up to about 25kph. That's 5x the pedestrian speed; that's like biking on a road where people drive 100kph.

These scooters should be treated like bikes, not like pedestrians. A safe traffic segregation would be pedestrians separated from bikes separated from motor traffic, with anything going above 10kph classified as bikes.

It’s suggestion that pedestrians and scooters not being able to share a space at all, that I find equivalent to a suggestion that motorists and cyclists should not be able to share a space at all. I also don’t buy your suggestion that a difference in speed of 15-20kmph is the same as a 70-80kmph difference in speed. There’s plenty of situations where it’s safe to ride a scooter at 20kmph on a footpath, and from what I’ve seen, riding a lime on a foot path involves a lot of entirely safe speeding up and slowing down.

In an ideal world, there’d be enough room for cars, bikes, scooters and pedestrians all of have their dedicated space. But we don’t live in that world. Few people would ride limes on the road, which wouldn’t be any safer. If you were going to make anything illegal, banning riding scooters on the footpath would be about as good as banning them al together, and capping their speed at 10kmph wouldn’t be much better. Why not just apply the same rules to scooters that are applied to vehicles? Carelessly driving a vehicle on the road is illegal, why can’t it be for a scooter on the sidewalk? The lime riders who are considerate and slow down in busy areas aren’t a danger or a problem.

Even at low speeds bikes and cars shouldn't mix. Getting hit by a car sucks, at any speed. Of course the risk and severity of injury goes up as speed increases. We have a guideline that says that up to 30km/h cars and bicycles can mix, that bicycles need their own elevated lane at 50km/h and that they need a lane that's physically separated from motorised traffic at 70km/h or over.

There are some streets where cars and bikes mix, and where cars aren't permitted to overtike bikes (at all, ever, under any circumstance). Of course, motorists ignore this and will honk at "slow" cyclists.

It's no different. Bicycles should never mix with motor traffic. This is why bike lanes are a thing.

Here in spain the police just removed all of them from the street, and told the companies that they are not allowed to just dump these on the sidewalks. So here, most people have bought their own scooters that you keep in your house, and take up to the office. For example, on my floor at the office, there are normally at least 5 or 6 of them.

How efficient...

Plague is lack of bike lanes and cars, not scooters.

Why not bill the rider extra if they don't return it to a designated parking area?

Many of these apps do exactly that.

I'm a Brisbane CBD pedestrian.

Part of the issue is that there is no designated area so they are left either perpendicular to the curb on the road side of the footpath or next to the wall on the shopfront side.

I would assume Lime got a permit so Police can't simply hand out fines for obstructing the footpath.

The speed issue is also an issue but mainly of educating riders - I was almost run over last week when I started to move sideways hearing a scooter passing from behind on one side and narrowly avoided being hit by a second scooter passing on the other side - both traveling at full speed.

You don't see cyclists riding fast on the footpath where there are pedestrians - scooter riders don't seem to follow that etiquette. I much prefer the laws in Victoria where only children are allowed to ride on the footpath.

Is it because it is a paid service that they appear to feel entitled to go fast or weave in and out of pesdestrians where a cyclist would often dismount or go on the road?

They're legally forbidden on roads and even in the bike lanes [1]. I can understand the road lanes, but I think it's a bit insane to keep them from bike lanes. Either way, both the police and Lime (via the app) specifically direct people to only ride them on the footpaths.

edit for source: [1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-23/the-rules-around-scoo...

Not allowing them to use bike lanes seems crazy but I guess that doesn't fit the idea of them being a last mile option.

It takes 10-15min to walk Central Station to Eagle St so a scooter replacing a taxi/rideshare/bus and getting there in 5min makes sense.

Bike lanes in the CBD would be a good idea - instead we have bus lanes.

I used to feel the same way until I realised the caliber of both the cyclists and drivers in the ACT meant that permitting riding on footpaths would save a considerable amount of lives.

Cyclists and cars don't mix. In fact any time you have a significant difference in the speed vehicles are travelling you will have issues, whether a bicycle, motor scooter or a car travelling well under the speed limit on an open road.

Like the sibling comment said, there is no specific location, which is what makes these different to our CityCycle programme. That increased flexibility has a place, and I think that education is the better solution. There are some areas where you're not supposed to leave them (malls, major shopping complexes), and as I understand the app will penalise you if you do so.

Limes were dropped on this city relatively quickly and with no widespread warning, so people are still figuring them out. I certainly think they have a place and are a net benefit to our public transport options.

We've had them for a few months now where I live and I see them many times per day.

I think it's because pretty much every street here has a bike path, but I have yet to see people riding them in the way of pedestrians. I've seen one or two poorly parked ones, but they are usually parked next to bike racks.

I love that they have always on headlights though, with wind, rain and bad lighting here crossing a bike path is dangerous since so many don't follow the laws and use lights.

I just wish Lime-scooters were a bit cheaper (10 sek + 3 sek/min).

We have a lot of bike paths here but almost every scooter I see is on the sidewalk. I’d say fewer than 5% use the bike paths.

I do see some cyclists using the sidewalk, which is also very annoying.

Honestly the scooters seem like a reasonable idea, but they are being left everywhere in Brisbane, and also they're way too fast. Could bump them down to 25 or 20km/h pretty easily I would have thought.

My city just banned them from walking paths.

I’m definitely in support of the scooters if they work with the city to ensure they stay out of walkways. The entire point of walkways are so that similar speed traffic is segregated together. Scooters are about 4x faster than a walking human.

TL;DR: people have not been trained in considerate scooter use, especially in pedestrian-dense environments.

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