Isn't the best solution for "last mile" for all of us is to walk it?
Of course, walking is to be encouraged where practical, but it has a very short effective range compared to a bike or scooter. Scooters and bikes drastically extend the effective reach of transit stations, with much less of a downside compared to cars (less polluting, less noisy, less danger for others, less parking space).
Maybe if you are crawling. Thats 3 miles an hour.
I'm a fast walker, but I definitely wouldn't consider taking the bus if it meant walking everyday.
I love to get out and walk in my neighborhood whenever possible, but walking even half a mile in the summer heat in Atlanta in work appropriate clothing is going to wreck your appearance.
In July-August-September it can be over 90F/32C in the morning commute, with 90%+ humidity.
Breezing along in 100F on a scooter at top speed you might still sweat a little bit from the sun, but not much.
Journeys (especially commutes) are bounded by how long you're willing to travel, rather than how far.
Anyway, some people may be able to walk from the station to work in 10 minutes, that radius is fairly small though. A scooter increases that radius significantly, allowing many more people to be within 10 minutes of the station.
Please let other people decide what's best for them.
https://www.consumerreports.org/product-safety/deaths-tied-t...
> Earlier this year, a CR investigation—which tabulated injuries from 110 hospitals in 47 U.S. cities—found that at least 1,500 riders had been injured since e-scooters were introduced in late 2017, and there were four fatalities. Since then, CR has identified an additional four deaths.
> a 5-year-old boy riding with his mother died when he fell off a scooter and was hit by a vehicle.
I refuse to talk about cracking pavement or helmet laws before we talk about why drivers feel entitled to go double the speed limit, text and drive, or be "just a little" drunk. How many people have coworkers that take work calls on their way into work? I know a lot of people who brag about their callous disregard for other people's safety. It's a sick disease.
Assuming of course you are not increasing people's travel times with your new device.
If your plan is actually "make everything slow and take forever", then sure you can get rid of fatalities.
People with disabilities cannot use these scooters anyway, they need something different.
That's it. That's the killer feature.
With the scooters, you just have to find a different scooter and continue about your business.
Except that the scooter companies can't figure this out either and are moving to a monthly rental to put the burden back on you.
> In April, it announced the launch of a more traditional rental program in San Francisco and Barcelona, in which users could pay $25 per month to rent a Xiaomi m365 from the company rather than paying per ride.
The gig economy is about externalizing all the costs, ya'know.
Honestly, I think scooter companies should be fined for any scooters left in a place that causes problems. It's essentially litter, so it should be treated as such. Scooter companies should be providing some means of locking them up securely and expect their users to use them.
Edit: Not voicing approval for this practice but that’s how it seems to work in my city at least.
I use scooters occasionally and there is a sweet spot in the 30-60 minute walk range. A 30 minute walk turns into a ~6 minute scooter ride (assuming 3mph walking and 13mph scooter). If you're talking about roundtrip then you're saving over 45 minutes by scootering.
Sure, if it's a lazy Saturday and I'm just moseying around then I'll walk. But if I'm running to the gym and back after work then it's worth it to me to save those 45 minutes.
Man, I'm just tryin' to get to work. Why does every alternative to plopping my ass in a giant wheelchair have to be "healthy"? What, "not a car" isn't good enough?
infrastructure and laws are there.
You might be surprised to find that electric scooters work just as well as bicycles on that infrastructure. Laws? Meh, were my municipality backward (and they are not) it wouldn't necessarily mean I'd pay much attention to their directives until they change.
It's okay to support a mode that only most of the population can use. There are still other modes, just like with stairs and elevators/ramps.
The scooters solve no problems bicycles already do not, not exactly even portability yet.
They create problems of litter on sidewalks, trash generation due to damage (where rental bikes are typically fixable if damaged) and issues of safety as they're much less visible and people tend to not use the bell...
So what was the point of bringing it up then?
> The scooters solve no problems bicycles already do not
Sure they do. Part of the issue with bikes is a chicken and egg problem where politicians are hesitant to invest money into bike infra, because not enough people ride. And many people don't ride because of bad bike infra.
Many, perhaps most of the people riding escooters don't ride their own bike around, or wouldn't ride a rentable ebike, for whatever reason. That's why the scooters got uptake much more rapidly than rentable ebikes.
So once you have more people on modes that fit bike infrastructure, because of, say, the ease of use and accessibility of electric scooters, it becomes easier to fight for that bike infrastructure.
It's funny, Handicap parking spots are sacred. What kind of a deplorable, revolting human being would ever park in a handicap spot if they weren't handicapped? Pictures and videos of horrible, wretched human beings parked in handicapped spots are posted online so they can be called out and shamed.
Yet there are so many disabled people who cannot work a regular job and/or cannot qualify for a licence. Everything about cars makes their lives more difficult. Often they just stay at home, because getting anywhere is such a costly and/or harrowing chore. Handicap spots are just more parking lot they have to cross to get where they're trying to go.
Additionally, people with disabilities pioneered personal electric transportation long before Bird or Lime. The form factor is different, but the technology is essentially the same. Electric wheelchair tech is highly enabling for people with disabilities.
You are making broad assumptions about what people with disabilities need or want. Disabled does not always mean "wheelchair", and not every disability is visible to you, nor does it need to be.
Some disabilities, or other medical conditions, make walking a few blocks (let alone miles) prohibitive. Some disabilities mean taking the elevator rather than the stairs. Some disabilities make a bicycle unusable.