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Comment by justboxing | Hacker News Reader

> I doubt this will reach the same level of popularity in cities/countries with great public transit, highly walkable streets,

I hope you are right. The littering / parking isn't the biggest problem or nuisance. It's the fact that the riders of these "e-scooters" almost always ride on the sidewalks / footpaths and cause safety hazard to pedestrians. Forget the fact that it's illegal[1] in most states to ride a motorized vehicle (other than disability vehicles) on the sidewalks, almost all of these lyme, scoot, bird riders ignore it and routinely cause collisions in San Francisco.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/scooters

> A motorized scooter may be operated on a bicycle path, trail or bikeway, but not on a sidewalk.

Related: Reminder: It Is Illegal to Ride Scooters On City Sidewalks => https://sf.curbed.com/2016/6/1/11831080/scooters-sidewalks-i...

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> It's the fact that the riders of these "e-scooters" almost always ride on the sidewalks / footpaths and cause safety hazard to pedestrians.

It's more dangerous to ride them on streets, even on bike paths. Who cares if it's illegal? I'd rather ride on the sidewalk then get hit by a car trying to pass me at 45 mph.

> Who cares if it's illegal?

The pedestrians that are endangered by relatively high speed motorized vehicles riding on sidewalks care. It's totally reasonable for you to not want to ride a scooter on the street, but that doesn't entitle you to break the law and make sidewalks less safe for others.

It's the cars that kill and maim pedestrians and drive scooter riders to the sidewalks. They're your real enemy.

And what entitles drivers to make the streets very unsafe for everyone?

The democratic law of the land. I don't like it any more than you do - I'm all for increased penalties when drivers kill people, and/or banning cars from city-center streets - but society functions when people follow the democratic process to change laws they disagree with rather than just breaking them.

Breaking laws is almost always the first stage of having them fixed. People can now see there is a demand for electric scooters and they need a safe way to ride them. Without riding them on the footpath there would never be any visible demand for them and everyone would just continue driving to work.

I really haven't seen scooter riding on the sidewalk as a problem out in my area. People already ride bikes and skateboards and everything else, plus, a lot of sidewalks are under utilized with very few pedestrians as it is.

At least for bikes, it's fairly well accepted that riding on the sidewalk is less safe than riding on the road: http://bicyclesafe.com/#crosswalk

The chance of getting hit from behind likely decreases on the sidewalk, but the chance of getting hit from turning vehicles increases greatly. The chance of being hit by turning vehicles is higher in general as far as I remember, too.

  It's more dangerous to ride them on streets, even on bike paths. Who cares if it's illegal?

The same would apply to motorcycles. It's clearly safer for the motorcyclist to ride on the sidewalk than on the road, in the mix with cars.

Who cares if it's illegal? Pretty much everyone else.

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