Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

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I was in Denver and the amount of these scooters littered around the city pissed me off. They where everywhere.

This is subjective. I live in a city that has at least five brands of scooters, and I work downtown where they are most densely clustered. (Not only that, it's a popular area with tourists, so it's an eternal September of scooter use.)

Some people here feel exactly the way you do; others think they're great. Some people consider them a nuisance to pedestrians; I walk on the same sidewalks and rarely experience a need to step around or over them. Some people feel terrified and menaced by them; I use the same streets and sidewalks, and for me, scooters barely register next to the danger posed by cars. Some people think they take up an inordinate amount of space; I think you could fit all the scooters in the entire downtown area into half a block's worth of street parking. You think they're toxic and don't improve society; I think they decrease the number of car trips and (in combination with Lyft/Uber) make it affordable for a lot of young people without tech jobs to live in expensive cities by making car ownership less necessary.

How do wheelchair and pram users feel about it? Elderly people navigating the sidewalk?

On the margins of downtown, where the sidewalks are narrow enough, I've seen the sidewalk blocked by a fallen scooter, because pedestrians are only allotted a tiny strip of concrete between the roads and the parking lots. But you don't see people with physical disabilities trying to navigate those neighborhoods on the sidewalk anyway. Want to make those areas more accessible? Reclaim some space from cars. Provide an array of attractive alternatives that induce more people to get around without driving, and then you can have reasonably sized sidewalks.

Downtown, where pedestrians are more than an afterthought, I see people with physical disabilities using the sidewalks every day. (There's a homeless shelter not far away.) I don't see them having problems with scooters. There's plenty of space.

Honestly, I don't see many fallen scooters at all downtown. Considering how easily they fall over from being jostled (which should improve in future models) I suspect a lot of people care enough to take a second to put a fallen scooter upright. When you think about all the ways people can be shitty with scooters, you have to factor in that people can be pretty nice, too.

Of course people aren't always considerate. In my own neighborhood, sometimes people block the sidewalk with their cars when they don't pull forward far enough forward in their driveways, forcing people in wheelchairs to go into the street. That hasn't caused the world to end, and neither will scooters.

Do cars in that city often drive on a sidewalk, like scooters?

Not often, but when they do drive onto the sidewalk and kill someone, you can count on the police department to say things like, drivers should "stick around and deal with the minor consequences," and pedestrians should "get your face out of your phone" because "you need to pay attention to what you’re doing, cause it can cost your life."

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/driver-arrested-after...

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