Hacker News Reader

Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

I have reached the same conclusion by walking around.

On the one hand, our species has invented and built e-scooters which have GPS and an internet connection, a digital screen and 50km of range, which is an impressive energy and technology density for what used to be a children's toy.

On the other hand, the insight that parking them on the bicycle lane is dangerous has evaded most of our species so far.

View on HN

It hasn't evaded anyone. People just don't care. Parking e-scooters on bike lanes is dangerous for you, but convenient for me.

The general lack of regulations and the total of $0 spent on enforcing them, leads to e-scooters drivers acting simultaneously like car, bikes, and pedestrian depending on what's most convenient.

I completely agree, seeing bad behavior happening frequently on the streets, I just realized that governments just chose to ignore those and not enforce law. There are some extreme, like SF of course. But I feel like this is a tendency among many places around Europe. And this saddens me, when did society decide that laws are not to be applied?

And the companies renting them out as a business claims it's a green movement while they are replacing the whole fleet every two months because they break down.

I'm pretty sure the lifetime of the scooters has increased significantly since those reports. Low lifetime was an artifact of rapid VC fueld expansions where the companies threw whatever hardware they could get on the streets. Subsequent iterations on the design improved durability.

They look like tanks nowadays. It's pretty interesting to see how the design has improved to reduce repair time. The battery is no longer locked underneath the scooter, now you can just lift it out if you have the right tools. Which makes sense, the scooters probably got more expensive and to compensate they need to focus on ease of repairability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com