Head injuries, broken bones plague e-scooter users as more data rolls in | Hacker News Reader

Head injuries, broken bones plague e-scooter users as more data rolls in

arstechnica.com

17 pointskurthr20 comments

Some of the data they’re citing is clearly going to be misleading.

I was clipped, buzzed, and hit by numerous escooters while living in central LA last year. In each of those situations, I didn’t report it because they have no discernible license plate for identification, and the rider typically just zooms off at a high rate of speed.

The one time I reported rider(s) to the company was when a hoard of underaged kids decided it would be funny to throw elbows at a guy (me) carrying groceries home while they blew past.

Last summer, I was training my puppy to walk on leash. She’s an off the charts brave and confident dog, but she’s no match for the scooters. After getting nearly hit half a dozen times, if she sees a scooter coming towards us, she drafts in behind me out of fear and concern.

I get why we want these scooters, but I think the statistics undervalue / don’t account for the general nuisance level behavior they can create for regular pedestrians, which don’t reach the threshold of injury or death.

Honestly, that all sounds rather exaggerated.

bad behavior isn't a function of mode of transportation. i live in central LA, but never been hit by a scooter yet have been hit by a car. i recently had to yell at some teens who were being bad while on foot. so why single out scooters?

> so why single out scooters?

Because I've lived in major cities (Boston & LA) for the past nine years, and have never had any concerns about my safety on sidewalks until scooters came around (and to a lesser extent dockless bike riders). Seems like the root cause to me.

Basically if something can go faster than running speed, it should not be allowed on sidewalks. Go use the goddamn road.

If something goes faster than a bicycle. It needs a license plate.

Meanwhile, death plagues motor vehicle users (and pedestrians) as more data rolls in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

I read a funny tweet, "at this point i don't think i've heard a single critique of e-scooters that couldn't be more accurately applied to cars." https://twitter.com/drooliet/status/1123618317464416257

What's next?

Cars kill people so it's ok to sell military grade weapons to civilians?

Heroin should be legal because alcohol is legal?

Cars and roads would be designed way differently if they had to be legalized today. Lucky us we don't have to deal with 100+ years of lobbying and history with e-scooters so we can act quickly.

Accepting something bad because something equally bad already exists doesn't seem like a very defensible position.

It seems perfectly logical if A replaces use of B in a way the net effect is <= the alternative. Your random examples give little in the way of realistically having that outcome as scooters do cars.

I doubt the demographics of car users and bike/scooter sharing users intersects a lot. I've seen it in Berlin and Paris, it's mostly tourists and young people, they don't have cars in the first place.

It's not A replace B, it A + 90% of B. Just like car sharing doesn't replace that many cars, it just allows people who couldn't afford to own one full time to use one from time to time.

That analysis almost goes far enough to support "car sharing is bad" because enabling more usage of cars (such as tourists and others that don't have cars) causes more car impacts such as traffic and pollution.

>> a single critique of e-scooters that couldn't be more accurately applied to cars

Operating at high speed on narrow sidewalks. I have been clipped while walking in physically confined sidewalk areas, by a scooter moving at a dangerously high speed (amazingly, he yelled at me for being in his way). It would have been hard to do this even with a bicycle because the handlebars are wider. This could easily have ended in serious injury.

I don't object to the existance of e-scooters, but I think the ease with which they allow riders to operate at wreckless speeds in confined pedestrian lanes is novel, and probably needs to be addressed somehow.

"whataboutism" [1] is rarely a valid response to a criticism of something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

It's like every week there is a new company with their escooters here is Zürich, Switzerland.

Biggest irony is that two of the companies are from Berlin (Flash and Tier) yet in Germany these scooters are currently against the law and they cannot operate in their country.

Lime seems to have disappeared after there was a serious accident because of some firmware issue that would engage the park brake at full speed.

Is it actually profitable if you can only operate half the year?

These were like a rash in PDX last summer but did not appear to last the winter. I haven't seen one in months. I declare this fad dead.

Look again, they are back. City did a trial for 3 or 4 companies and gave a permit to 2 this time around. So they’re back for a while.

They are only "dead" because they are literally not here. It was only a 4 month trial run during the summer.

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