Micromobility: The Obligatory Origin Story
micromobility.io
micromobility.io
It's not small-scale mobility; it's just mobility. More efficient mobility. Smarter mobility.
In the Netherlands there are enough cyclists that it works, but here in the US I feel like the term “cyclist” is often used as a pejorative. Making the name more inclusive of varying modes I think might help to counter this.
The cities that get it right, in my opinion, divide all vehicles into either unpowered or powered. Powered vehicles use roads and are subject to regulations; those that do not fit any regulated class (eg. being too new) are illegal by default.
In general, I suspect someone is purposely ignoring the gas-powered, 3-ton metal elephant in the room (road?).
Re cars, I don't like them and the fact that many modern cities tend to be designed around them. This is at least partially why EVs are used. But that design issue can't be solved quickly, and meanwhile conceding the remaining safe surfaces and normalizing powered transport is moving in the opposite direction of the solution.
As the general population experiences both the benefits and the drawbacks of powered transport, cities are much more responsive to creating dedicated space for vehicles of this type. Even painted bike lanes are preferable to the usual status quo of rolling the dice in a regular lane against multiple F150 drivers on cell phones on a city street. And as such infrastructure improves further, the benefits of using that infrastructure for the powered transport rider increase dramatically vs competing against people walking on a sidewalk.
The denser the city, the smaller and fewer the roads and intersections, the less resources you need to handle and prevent reckless driving, the more people choose against driving, the more viable the public transport system, the smaller the environmental footprint of the city, the less pollution from car tyres and exhaust, etc.
Declare war on the automobile in urban environments, electric or otherwise.
For another, there aren't any good niches for, e.g., (pedal) scooters to move in cities so far. This hasn't been a problem, because the ~5 non-children per city using them so far (to use a number verified by a hard statistical method I call "pulling out of thin air") are easily worked around. Electrified "pedal" scooters OTOH are becoming more pervasive, and thus don't fit into the cracks of mobility, as it were. In addition, shared E-scooters are a plague simply by blocking bike and pedestrian routes because the companies externalize their storage to the public - and their users seem to be unable to not be assholes about it, on average. And the mode of transportation they replace isn't driving cars, but walking, public transport and perhaps short bike rides - all without any increase in carrying capacity for the riders. So they actually increase the environmental footprint of mobility, one of the major drivers of electrification, for all the drawbacks they offer...
They should be ridden primarily in bike lanes… when those exist and are safe. So we need a lot more protected bike lanes!
There is a reason arbitrary unregistered contraptions are not allowed to roam city streets.
Me having or not having to spin my legs around has nothing to do with anything.
They are far more safe than cars, and hence they should remain allowed until cars are banned.
>There is a reason arbitrary unregistered contraptions are not allowed to roam city streets.
Registration does nothing with regards to safety.
Ideally, all urban street traffic should be slow enough to accommodate all other forms of traffic, so about 30 kph. Large connecting roads where you want cars to go faster than that should have a separation between car-level traffic and bike-level traffic, with bike traffic going about 15-25 kph and being narrow and preferably open, while car level traffic goes 40+ kph and is preferably enclosed.
Of course there will always be vehicles that don't quite fit one of those categories, which leaves the question to what extent traffic design should accommodate those vehicles, and to what extent those vehicles should just try to fit into the category that fits best.
I believe that a modern city should not tolerate powered vehicles not fitting any of the specific categories though. There is no limit to technical possibilities, but if we can it doesn't mean we should and meanwhile people have to live and go places without feeling constantly in danger, that's just not healthy.
Or for a longer look, this interview with Maya Levi who has MS was also really inspiring:
But as to your question about ruined pavement unfit for a mobility device moving at pedestrian speed, that describes a nontrivial portion of the sidewalks near my apartment in Philly. (And that’s if you can even navigate around all the parked cars blocking the crosswalks and curb cuts.)
A lot of people are surprised that electric kick-scooters (I think that's the correct English word for it? Standup scooters maybe?) are illegal in Amsterdam, but this is exactly why. They're motorized, but they don't meet the standards of motorized vehicles around here.
You should probably try to dig a layer deeper and try to understand the root cause of this behaviour. We can read from your paragraph that the users of these vehicles are not actually particularly happy about being on the sidewalk - understandably so, there are plenty of pedestrian in their way there.
So why would they not choose the road, then?
The answer is simple - the roads are filled with cars, riding at unsafe speeds, threatening their lives if they dare use this infrastructure.
There is a pretty simple solution to this issue: build infrastructure that is appropriate for this category of vehicles, that all travel faster than pedestrian speeds (~5 km/h) but slower than car speeds. Bicycle infrastructure happens to be an excellent fit for all these vehicles.
Observe also that cities with adequate bicycle infrastructure do not suffer from this issue - micromobility users choose the bicycle infrastructure in that case, because it's the best option available.
>The cities that get it right, in my opinion, divide all vehicles into either unpowered or powered. Powered vehicles use roads and are subject to regulations; those that do not fit any regulated class (eg. being too new) are illegal by default.
Given what we learned from the analysis above, this is quite obviously a really bad take.
If you say they are unsafe for roads, then make them illegal. If it's reckless drivers that are the problem, then that's the problem to solve; throwing more powered transport in pedestrian's way is only making it worse.
Craft your laws around the best society you can imagine, don't stop society evolving because of the crappy laws you have.