Electric scooter ban increased congestion by 10% in Atlanta | Hacker News Reader

Electric scooter ban increased congestion by 10% in Atlanta

nature.com

228 pointsdizzant351 comments

I wasn't at all surprised to see the ban. The way electric scooters were handled in Atlanta was an absolute nightmare. They littered every sidewalk, blocking pedestrian traffic in already crowded streets. 100% of people riding them rode them on the sidewalk and collisions were pretty common. People were getting hurt, and were very afraid of getting hit.

It's really unfortunate it went this way, because Atlanta badly needs alternative transpiration options. We would likely have been better off with heavy enforcement around proper storage and riding of scooters, but so many people absolutely hated them due to how it was handled that I'm not surprised to see a ban instead.

The poor handling of how they were rolled out did a lot of damage long term to fixing transportation. Now there will be an uphill battle against a ban passed in reaction to the mess they created. Disappointing all around.

We have a rental scheme in Bath which seems to be working pretty well. You are supposed to leave them at designated spots around the city (I think you get a discount) and on the whole people seem to be pretty good about where they leave them.

While I don't personally like the idea of using one (I prefer a bike or walking), they have been really popular.

One of the interesting effects is that along with a huge surge in ebike riders, scooters have made drivers much more alert to non-car road users. Cyclist friends have told me that cycling around town feels much safer, with drivers giving them more room, and fewer moments where it's obvious the driver just wasn't paying attention.

Your second point is huge - pedestrian fatalities go down the more pedestrians ignore "traffic rules" - partially because the pedestrians are more alert (not assuming a crosswalk will save them, because there may be none) but also because drivers are more alert.

The unexpected is always going to be dangerous just because it's unexpected.

That's not an Atlanta thing, they are a major annoyance everywhere. The people that use them just don't give a shit.

It all comes down to infrastructure. They’re not a big problem here in DC compared to cars because we have wide sidewalks and a growing number of protected bike lanes. People driving cars are responsible for 100% of the fatalities, almost all of the injuries, and almost all of the blocked sidewalks, crosswalks, etc. and that’s where the focus should be.

What I would like is basically rebranding bike lanes as low-speed mobility lanes. Take the parking and/or right lane full-width, put up bollards, and zone it for vehicles with a max speed of 20mph (bike, scooter, trike, hoverboard, electric wheelchair, who cares - if it doesn’t pollute and takes up about as much space as a person, it’s welcome). If space allows, add protected parking spots for pickup/drop off and handicapped parking and tell everyone else that they need to pay market-rate for parking.

I moved away from the DC area long before electric scooters were a thing. Does metro PD still give jaywalking tickets to pedestrians being loaded onto ambulances (this used to be a thing)?

Scooters arent a big problem in DC, but it's definitely not problem free. Bike racks are sometimes taken up by nothing but rental scooters. People sometimes leave rentals in highly inconvenient places that block the path (supposedly there's some process for telling companies & they have to move them, but I've never tried this).The scooters mostly say "don't ride on side-walks" in huge letters at their base, but tons of people do.

I wouldn't say there are big problems at all, it mostly works ok. I'm glad there are new options. But infrastructure alone isn't enough. Like the parent, I do think there are low-quality users who don't give a shit & act bad, in a way I'd never see from for example a bicycle user. How problematic is that? So far it's generally not so bad. But bad users, bad parkers, and full bike racks all take their toll. It seems unlikely a lot of these things will get better over time.

No - they basically went on soft-strike during the BLM protests. You can run a red light in front of them and unless you hit their SUV it’s unlikely they’ll react.

Just in case anyone is believing this, take my word for it, don't believe the hype.

DO NOT run a red light in front of a cop in DC. I'm just putting that out there as kindly intended advice. If you go to DC thinking it's free reign, you're likely to be disagreeably surprised. Especially if you're in the parts of the city that I'd imagine most of the people on HN would be likely to be in.

And Heaven help you if, well, other agencies watching DC misinterpret your red light running. You may be in the wrong place at the wrong time and find yourself trying to explain that to people who, as a general rule, don't believe in coincidence.

Yeah. Just don't draw that kind of attention to yourself in DC. That leads nowhere good.

Is that just SE of the Anacostia or the touristy parts too?

Make it 3D instead of taking space from cars and I agree.

Cars are dangerous and the best engineering solution is to isolate pedestrian scale speed and mass transfer from multi-ton industrial equipment. So go 3D, give cars their own isolated layer, give pedestrians and slightly faster moving exposed humans their own layer.

This is sort of what Boston tried to do with the big dig[1], where several highways were buried under the city. It ended up costing billions and took 15 years to complete. Also, while the RFK Greenway is nice it is also regularly bisected by busy surface roads and on/off ramps so it sometimes feels more like a grassy median than a real park.

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

Money well spent. We put excrement underground, might as well do the same for cars.

On a side-note, I was in Boston this summer and it's so much more of an airy and accommodating place than I remember from 10-15 years ago. Lot's of the COVID traffic calming and patios still in place. Awesome, go Boston!

Wouldn't the path of least resistance here be giving cars the surface layer?

Vehicles also include construction cranes, dump and garbage trucks, etc. Those might have unlimited height, but weight is also a factor.

I'm split between an idea like Tokyo's underground mall areas (which work really well with climate control) and just over-specing several stories above ground for a platform layer that can be level across the whole city and completely free of non-emergency moving vehicles.

The companies operating them seem to actively encourage users not to give a shit. They're dockless, you can end a ride anywhere, if the battery dies or you get bored you're just supposed to leave it wherever and let it be someone else's problem. The companies running them all seem content to just proliferate scooters all over the street with no regard for expense or the non-scooting public since they're all trying to out-compete each other.

Here in the DC area I have a particular love for Capital Bikeshare because they're extremely affordable and (mostly) use dedicated docking stations.

Here in London they’re pretty strict about parking them in designated marked spots, not leaving them littering streets randomly.

The apps will remind you repeatedly to park correctly and will fine you if you don’t, which I’m pretty sure they’re required to do as part of their licensing conditions.

Yeah, all of these problems just come down to local politics. If your city’s political class values pedestrians, they’ll make the companies liable and it’ll magically turn out that they are actually capable of enforcing where their GPS-tracked devices are parked.

Doing so would also require the city to provide parking spots for them - which is the real reason for the bans. Drivers aren't interested in losing any parking spots to scooters/bicycles/???.

It's shooting themselves in the foot (because people driving less results in less congestion and competition for car parking spots), but as this thread demonstrates, there's no shortage of counter-productive thinking around non-automotive transportation.

No, it's down to companies exploiting lack of regulations to get away with as little as possible ("free market"). Ideally they shouldn't be assholes, but failing that, local authorities should restrict them.

> They're dockless, you can end a ride anywhere

This is, for me and my wife, the entire point. We had a docked bikeshare system in Seattle and the docks were never where we needed one, particularly since Seattle's topology--a city known internationally for being incredibly flat and dry--meant that the docks on the bottom of a hill would be perpetually full and the ones at the top of the hill were always empty.

But these things are an absolute godsend for someone who can walk, but can't walk far, or who has the occasional struggle with hills. The bus or train can't go everywhere, but a scooter can get you between the spot where the bus let you off and the spot where you want to go. That's how my wife and I use them and they're amazing and, frankly, I hope they never go away.

> The companies running them all seem content to just proliferate scooters all over the street with no regard for expense or the non-scooting public

This is probably true, but I think a lot of people just don't see themselves as "the scooting public" except for the brief time they might be using one.

It's the same problem with cars, just downsized a great deal. We're incapable of building separated infrastructure, mostly due to cost, partially due to fear of loss from space given over to cars. We try these bandage workarounds, like scooters, but because we've half-assed everything except the infrastructure for cars (and because people's expectations are so high around the new idea), we wind up with a situation where everyone is frustrated because no one's needs feel met even though there are clearly uses for them.

Are the scooters powerful enough to take you up Queen Anne hill?

Much could be done to "fix" the scooter issue by working with the city rather than antagonistically against it, for example, on streets with parking (almost all of them) the first parking space on each block could be a designated "scooter pile".

Then modify the app to charge you a $10 "you're a dick" fee that is refunded when the scooter detects that it was thrown in the scooter pile, or similar. If you make it more advanced, let anyone with the app claim the fee if they return a scooter.

> Are the scooters powerful enough to take you up Queen Anne hill?

No, but the 2 or 13 are and then a scooter can go where we want if that's not close enough or if it's a particularly bad walking day.

> Much could be done to "fix" the scooter issue by working with the city rather than antagonistically against it

I completely agree! However...

> for example, on streets with parking (almost all of them) the first parking space on each block

...this is astoundingly difficult to pull off in Seattle because people who drive cars have a very high fear of loss, as a general rule, and vehemently oppose efforts to turn car storage areas over to areas for other vehicle types. It's why we've wound up with painted-off areas that get used for refuse bins instead (blocking off where the scooters should go).

> Then modify the app to charge you a $10 "you're a dick" fee

The two apps we use require that you take a picture of where you left the thing when you park it and both of us in the past few months have gotten an email, one apiece, saying "you parked wrong, next time it's $25." (They were right, we didn't leave enough space, we've gotten more diligent.)

> This is, for me and my wife, the entire point. We had a docked bikeshare system in Seattle and the docks were never where we needed one, particularly since Seattle's topology--a city known internationally for being incredibly flat and dry--meant that the docks on the bottom of a hill would be perpetually full and the ones at the top of the hill were always empty.

I can't speak to Seattle specifically, the DC area is quite hilly in some places so I've seen the same problem, exacerbated by the fact that DASH buses are free which means people will happily CaBi downhill and DASH uphill. I'm not sure how dockless fixes this though except for the fact that dockless bikes are always e-bikes which are easier to take uphill. But docked e-bikes can get you the same effect as long as there are actually docks at the tops of the hills. I find that Capital Bikeshare is really good about placing docks at bus stops and train stations and having a high enough dock density that you'll rarely need to walk more than a couple minutes from the dock to reach your destination.

> This is probably true, but I think a lot of people just don't see themselves as "the scooting public" except for the brief time they might be using one.

The scooter companies may perceive everyone as either a sometimes-scooterer or a potential convert to scooting but I don't know how true that is in reality. On top of that, people who ride transit, ride bikeshare, or ride a bike for their daily needs are typically quite happy to self-identify as such. I personally don't ride scooters but am a daily user of CaBi and one of the local bus systems (DASH).

> It's the same problem with cars, just downsized a great deal.

I can and do agitate for taking space from cars and restoring it to people. It's just frustrating that what little space is available for scalable mobility like walking and biking has even less to work with because of scooters and bikes cramming up already narrow spaces (like the 14th St. Bridge between Arlington and DC, whose pedestrian passage is already uncomfortably narrow, has several bikes and scooters abandoned there at nearly all times.)

> But docked e-bikes can get you the same effect as long as there are actually docks at the tops of the hills. I find that Capital Bikeshare is really good about placing docks at bus stops and train stations and having a high enough dock density...

This is an entirely reasonable point and that's likely where Seattle's bikeshare system failed. The operator was borderline incompetent, but also siting docks in Seattle is very difficult because of the propensity for car drivers to vocally oppose any efforts at space reallocation. It's getting very frustrating, especially now that they got a Mayor elected and a head of the Council's transportation committee who are both quite pro-car.

they're amazing and, frankly, I hope they never go away

You might want to preemptively contact your city councilmember and share your thoughts with them. Or go one step further and attend one of the meetings to speak on mic about it. Remember that they're far more likely to hear from people who complain, and it takes just a single council session to ban them.

The people that use them ride on the sidewalk because they will get maimed or killed by distracted or belligerent drivers if they scoot on the street.

It's not the scooters that are the problem, it's a city environment that encourages aggressive and careless driving.

Exactly, and the only people surprised by this are those who assume that everyone is perfectly ethical and empathetic, just like them.

I own my own escooter and I do give a shit. Don't lump us all in together. I think people who own escooters are far more conscientious than people using rentals, and I believe a better solution is to incentivize private ownership.

Most travel modes have a downside. For example, car and suv drivers routinely speed through pedestrian crossings and kill large numbers of pedestrians.

Scooters may be annoying, but at least they aren't deadly.

It may not be as deadly but it does still produce minor and major injuries that send the riders and people they run into to the ER.

Please stop whitewashing incidents and the behavior of the scooterists.

Just because you've banned scooters doesn't mean the morons operating them went away, or stopped traveling.

And I'd much rather deal with a moron on a scooter than a moron in a car. I'd daresay that statistics on both deaths and injuries caused by alternative modes of transportation are with me on this.

I mean, I get it. Scooters are a little scary and annoying and take up space. People don't like them.

All these same criticisms apply for cars, but dialed up to 11.

Damn, I wish I could upvote twice.

You could say the same thing about cars. In fact it's far more common for cars to be parked on pavements blocking access than it is for e-scooters. You just don't notice because you're used to it.

A major reason that scooters were banned in Atlanta was because cars (and a bus) kept accidentally killing people on scooters.

Largely because the people on scooters ignore traffic laws. I'm in an area of Atlanta where they are still allowed, and the riders regularly run stop signs and red lights without checking if a car is coming.

Wow, they sound almost as bad as car drivers.

A bus can never kill anyone, it's public transportation and is therefore infallible. Cars are heavy killing machines remember, but busses and trains are perfectly magical and never harm pedestrians at all.

(Sarcasm, for the uninitiated.)

> 100% of people riding them rode them on the sidewalk

A few months ago I saw a man in Seattle die while riding an electric scooter on a street going down a hill. He was going way too fast, probably trying to keep up with the cars I think, started wobbling, fell, and bounced his head off the street. Dead on impact. Two points:

1. These scooters are not stable enough to operate at road speed safely. The wheels are too small for it, the dynamics of controlling one at speed are all fucked up. They are substantially less safe than even bicycles.

2. Rental scooters don't come with rental helmets. I think a helmet would have saved his life. But the whole supposed convenience of the scooter rental scheme assumes no helmets, since virtually nobody leaves home in the morning carrying a helmet on the off chance they may want to rent a scooter.

> [Scooters] are substantially less safe than even bicycles (Emphasis mine)

Bicycles aren't unsafe in themselves, see lots of cities where cycling is a very common and safe mode of transportation. Scooters on the other hand are indeed a lot less safe due to their small wheels, short wheelbase and awkward stance of the rider. That said, it's the urban planning that makes cycling unsafe in many places, not the device itself.

A helmet has probably saved my life several times when riding my bike. In all cases, it was only me, my bike, and my idiocy involved, no third parties. All it takes is a little bit of loose gravel where you don't expect it, or a wet stone in the path that's a bit slippier than expected.

Bicycles with helmets are fairly safe. Without helmets? No way, I'm not riding without a helmet. But scooters without helmets are much worse, I wouldn't dare go much more than 10mph on a scooter without a helmet.

Hmm, What kind of bike at what kind of speed on what kind of surface?

It's entirely possible to ride a bike in a way that actually doesn't require a helmet. It's VERY boring :-P , but nevertheless practical and doable.

Don't forget wet leaves. I was riding my bike well after it had rained, and most of the path was dry, but there was a shady spot under a tree that still was wet and I basically lost all traction on it. Only time I ever "used" my helmet.

Ordinary upright/city bicycles have significant controllability problems at high (>50 km/h) speeds compared to e.g. cars. I think that's where "even bicycles" comes from, in this context.

(Why am I using >50 km/h as the benchmark? Because that's the sort of speeds you easily end up at if you try to keep up with cars downhill.)

----

Edit: it seems that people are missing critical words in my comment:

- "Ordinary upright/city bike" means "not road/touring/etc bikes". They are constructed differently and comfortably do well over 50 km/h.

- "Downhill" means significant gravity assistance for a few seconds up to a minute, and not "sustained under pedaling power alone". I'd be impressed if you regularly did 50 km/h on the flats with one of those bicycles.

> Ordinary upright/city bicycles have significant controllability problems at high (>50 km/h) speeds compared to e.g. cars. I think that's where "even bicycles" comes from, in this context.

Who on earth is using ordinary city bikes at 50km/h near cars? Even class II e-bikes are limited to 20mph/32kph.

Class III are limited to 28mph/45kph but are forbidden from bike paths.

[edit] 50kph under your own power is the average speed at the Tour de France.

>Because that's the sort of speeds you easily end up at if you try to keep up with cars downhill

Not many people will do >50kmh even downhill (even with disk brakes), and on the few occasions I've done so, I absolutely would not say there are "significant controllability problems". In fact, quite the opposite.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN6Z8UgVOuw Nb - these were shot in the days before the 'supertuck' (sitting on the crossbar) was banned.

To be fair, if you're holding a professional cycling race, you should probably close off the roads to other traffic.

Rental scooters are like if we lived in a society where everyone rode horses and then suddenly you could rent a Ford Model-T to drive without any lessons or a driver's license and no cultural standards of safety or infrastructure built for cars.

Banning e-scooters wholesale rather than figuring out how they can be part of a safe mobility culture is like banning combustion vehicles at the onset of the invention of cars.

I will agree though that safer electric PEV like e-bike or e-tricycle are likely safer, as are those with speed governors, and add in dedicated protected lanes.

> Banning e-scooters wholesale rather than figuring out how they can be part of a safe mobility culture is like banning combustion vehicles at the onset of the invention of cars.

Plenty of cities did just that, after a rash of pedestrian (and equestrian) deaths. What resulted was a multi-decade lobbying effort that redefined the "street" to mean a thoroughfare for combustion vehicles.

Plenty of cities are now walking back that effort and are once again banning combustion vehicles in their cores, or at least are not dedicating the space entirely to cars and trucks. A ho-hum example is Kaiserslautern, Germany, where you can drive in the city core, but it's just much more efficient to park in a lot outside the core and walk.

In the process of typing this comment, I discovered that I agree with your overall point, but I would suggest ditching the "protected lane" part and simply take away the dedicated space for cars.

> Rental scooters are like if we lived in a society where everyone rode horses

Speaking of.. the Amish use scooters fairly extensively, but not typical scooters. Their scooters have very large tires by scooter standards; tires meant for children's bicycles. I think these would be much safer than typical small-tired scooters.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=amish+scooter&iax=images&ia...

Yeah I actually have a 'kick-scooter' aka human powered that's got a larger wheelbase than the standard children's kickscooter and pneumatic tires as well as suspension, not nearly as large as those in your link though, it's still dangerous to ride over larger cracks in sidewalk pavement with it. It's an Oxelo Town7 EF I believe (from Decathlon). I found it to be a nice vehicle for trips in Brooklyn that would normally take 15-30 minutes to walk if I wanted to get there more quickly and it's legal to ride a kickscooter on the sidewalk in NYC unlike an e-scooter. Also much lighter than e-scooters.

I got the thing because I loved e-scooters so much but I felt like buying an e-scooter was an unacceptable action given how much it would increase my probability of lifechanging injury or death. But ultimately I found myself stopping using it. I think its still slightly too heavy and unwieldy and its still not got large enough wheels for me to entirely ignore pavement quality. If I was doing it again I'd try the lighterweight Xootr with no suspension.

1. The speed can be governed

2. Agreed. Crazy to me that people ride these without helmets. There's also foldable helmets for people annoyed by the size of regular ones. Protected bike lanes also improve this.

That said, banning scooters is a step backward.

> The speed can be governed

You sure? Applying brakes to someone rolling downhill can make them fall because their body is still in motion, and now the scooter isn't moving at the same speed, and they were not prepared for it.

Ideally the brake is applied to limit speed, not reduce it. To keep you capped at a safe speed, rather than allowing an unsafe speed to be reached then slamming on the brakes to reduce it.

They do it through the electric engine. It's a bit of a jerky motion, like allowing 1-3 km/h over and then braking down to 20 km/h. After a while you do not even notice it.

I think they meant the scooters have firmware which can limit the top speed of the rider.

1. Not downhill.

I've tested this. The fastest I could get a Voi scooter in Germany to go downhill was 27 km/h. They're limited to 20 km/h on level ground and gradually start braking if they exceed that speed downhill.

It might be possible to find a hill steep enough to overcome the braking force, or one that results in a strong enough braking force to make the scooter difficult to control, but it should be obvious to most people that attempting such a thing is dangerous.

All the ones in Sweden use the electric motor to govern the speed downhill, limited to 20 km/h.

Why not? The same brushless motors could be also used to brake the scooter could they not?

1. Regen braking

> Rental scooters don't come with rental helmets.

There is one company I'm aware of that at least operates here in Canada called Neuron, which has helmets attached to every rental scooter. You're told by the app to put it on.

That's cool. I wish this would be a thing here in Europe, but I don't think it would be workable because of hygiene.

That is, sadly, the main reason I've found people choose not to wear them. The one time I rode with that brand I didn't either, because it just looked...gross.

I'm buying my own e-scooter for when the snow clears. And a helmet.

Tier in Germany did have helmets on some of their older scooters, however it seems like they replaced them with newer ones which don't have them anymore.

I was on travel to San Francisco last week, 20 mph down the Presidio through GGSP and I would have loved a helmet but I didn’t pack one in my carry on! You are really putting your life on the line without one - both from the flimsiness and speed of the device, and city roads and traffic. The people I saw with helmets clearly owned their scooters.

The scooter forces users to go 20mph? You’re talking about the stand on scooters not the mopeds right?

10mph is more than enough to kill you if you hit a curb.

Rental scooters here (Tel Aviv) often come with helmets. They click into the front.

I saw helmets on rental scooters recently - they were green and maybe in Miami? If provided people might use them but I bet we could make a technology that would prevent the scooter from moving unless the helmet was attached properly. At that point people would "know" you have to wear them so it wouldn't be terribly uncool.

People really, really, really do not like helmets. Seattle has a bike helmet law which is considered to be one of the failures of the old public docked bikeshare system (there were free helmets offered at each station IIRC).

To be honest, I think helmets are good, but a mandate has its own issues. I think usually the culprit is extremely bad infrastructure for not-cars; few places have bike lanes which are safe and comfortable to use and in good condition. Or bike racks which might be a logical place to otherwise put scooters. Sidewalks are usually not a good substitute, and even where they exist often they may not be ADA compliant in terms of ramps or width, they are bumpy due to tree roots etc. displacing the sidewalk panels from their original position and creating unsafe bumps, etc.

I don't think the issue is that people don't like helmets (although, I'm sure some people do not like wearing them, similar to some people that don't wear seatbelts). The issue is that it hasn't been made convenient or hygienic enough to wear them.

Two issues:

You have to bring your own, which is a relatively large thing you have to remember to bring and store. Either people forget them, or can't be bothered... because the whole point of the scooters is ad hoc transportation if needed when it isn't expected.

You get one provided (on the larger ones that include them), but now you have a singular helmet which may have just been used by a sweaty gross human. And it just got put away into a sealed box.

The only thing I can think of to alleviate both of those fears (and still allow Scooter sized things to exist..) would be some sort of helmet vending machine with a 'used helmet' return box. It'd require way more helmets and some sort of cleaning mechanism, but at least that would solve or alleviate the two main concerns. It does immediately mean you now need scooters in close proximity to vending machines though...

One other option would be a decent collapsible helmet, which would remove the bulk issue.

For people to actually carry one, it would probably need to pack up to the size of a tote umbrella.

They are blue, and yes - in Miami. The company is called HelBiz - and they're the only game in town right now.

However, there are a few issues with helmets, one of which is that a lot of people think it's gross if they have to use a helmet someone else just used, especially in a city where you're bound to sweat profusely when outside no matter what time of the year it is. Imagine putting on a helmet that's covered with the sweat of 2 or 3 people that have also rode the scooter in the last 2 or 3 hours? Yuck!

Requiring helmets is a great idea - but a crux of the issue is that people will ignore requirements as much as they possibly can and will try to spoof the requirement every chance they get. There's a moped company in town called Revel that operates a bunch of moped rentals similar to scooters. They require all riders to wear the provided helmet, and even financially incentivize other users to report people riding without helmets. That hasn't solved anything, and I see people riding those things without helmets on multiple times every single day.

Personally I would rather walk than share a helmet with N other scooter riders, especially in a climate like Miami's

1. How would you get a helmet that fits safely?

2. How is cleanliness handled? Maybe I’m an outlier for sweat, but I don’t think many people would be ok with wearing my used helmet.

I'd be grossed out wearing a helmet someone else wore that wasn't cleaned.

I might do it anyway to save my life, but it would definitely be a deterrent.

Also heads come in sizes, so a single helmet would not really work - you'd need "helmet stands" where you could get one that fits, and that give them a disinfectant spray between customers (likes shoes in a bowling alley).

Maybe Amazon style lockers?

You could get “helmet adapter caps”, similar to the rubber ones you wear in swimming pools. It would be much more compact than a helmet, and could solve both the hygiene (by virtue of being hermetic around the head) and size (by “padding” the head to some standard dimension so the helmet fits well. Then the helmet could tighten.

(Disclaimer: Just an idea.not sure how practical it would be)

Where I live people who want a helmet but not something on their head use an inflatable that triggers on falling. I presume they can be used with scooters.

A scarf style thing is hopefully not as gross to share as a helmet.

https://hovding.com/

There are plenty of people who suck at them, just as there are people who suck driving at cars and motorcycles. I might be OK to having a permitting system, but as well all know people still crash. Having an outright ban on scooters I think is stupid. Making all of society behave like the lowest common denominator is not a great policy.

Sounds like you need segregated cycle lanes for then to ride on.

We’ve started to get some in Atlanta, but only in the center of town. I live out in the suburbs. I haven’t been able to try them out yet because the every time I’ve ridden into town the lane was filled with half a dozen delivery vans.

> The way electric scooters were handled in Atlanta was an absolute nightmare

Is there an example of a city who has handled them correctly? Your description describes every implementation I've seen thus far.

Zurich and to some extent Paris. The key is to have bike lanes and designated areas where the scooters can be dropped.

Chicago has both of these, but it doesn't stop people from still riding them on the sidewalk and acting terrible.

They don't seem to be an issue in Chicago at least from my perspective. It wasn't a free for all though, they had two pilot programs and they are banned from the downtown/Loop area which is the highest density area of the city. Scooters must be attached to a fixed object like a light pole/street sign/etc. Also it helps that Divvy (Lyft) retrofitted their bicycle docks to allow scooter docking as well.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/05/10/electric-scooters-ar...

Seems basically fine in Liverpool. I've not used them, but they don't seem to block pavements and I've only ever seen a few driven by loons. Certainly never felt at risk as a pedestrian or cyclist by one.

Their popularity has killed off a previous bike hire scheme, which is a bit of a pity, but they are a lot handier...

Paris and rome are great examples from my perspective.

> Paris

With 2000 escooter accidents and 20+ deaths idk if we can call it a great example

Now do car deaths. If 20 is the threshold for failure then get all those cars off the roads immediately.

Well, yes go ahead I won't argue against that

edit:

I checked the numbers, ~6000 accidents, ~40 deaths

Knowing that it includes escooters as they're motorised vehicles, and given the number of cars vs escooters I'd say you're muuuuch more likely to get wrecked on a escooter than anything else you could use on the road. Bicycles have the same deaths stats as escooters but in Paris we have

450k+ cars 500k+ bikes 15k escooters

Over what period of time? In a year, those numbers don't strike me as terrible and would need to be compared against the alternatives to draw a directionally valid conclusion.

Same thing happened in Miami - it was a great idea to have them because it really did help relieve congestion amongst the downtown and financial districts.

Then they got banned because people are idiots and rode them idiotically and left them everywhere.

The city then brought them back, put caps on their speed, forced them to be rode only on streets and financially incentivized people to leave them in predetermined drop-off areas. It lasted about 2 weeks before that was shown to not work, because, again, people didn't really pay attention to the rules (and some of the rules, such as banning them from sidewalks, are outright dumb due to the fact that dangerous wild driving on main roads is celebrated in Miami).

It really is unfortunate just like you said - because they were a real asset to public mobility.

What I don't understand is why its so hard to have designated drop off points every block or so. The scooter vendors should be responsible for putting them in appropriate places (which might mean renting the space if needed).

Then use some geofencing to fine people who fail to park/etc them properly.

Sure, allowing people to drop them off in the middle of a congested sidewalk is easy on the asshole doing it, and the companies might have a bit less revenue because its inconvenient to park them properly, but so what. They might be able to make some percentage of the fine back if people still refuse to comply.

The sidewalk is public space, they have _LESS_ rights as a corp to be there trying to profit off it than the citizens walking the sidewalk IMHO.

The ire towards Marta in Atlanta would be significantly less if there were cutouts for buses (Ubers or delivery vehicles) at all.

From a visitors perspective, I flew down for two days at the state capital, and used a scooter liberally riding around downtown, and the campus of Georgia state university. I did not see the littering of sidewalks at all. I saw people riding scooters in the street, and on the sidewalks, but even with a lot of people I didn’t see anything of what you’re speaking of.

Scooters are great, they are low-cost easy way to get around. I think anger in Atlanta towards the scooters, is similar to why Marta will never go up 75.

To be fair, the issue is probably not going to be as evident downtown. Go over to the east side in old fourth ward or inman park and I think you'd have come to a different conclusion.

The minimum outcome (after deaths) should have been that Crescent and N Highland bar districts closed to through traffic weekend nights after 9 (and after sporting events), and all public transit buses get 360 degree cameras.

Instead, we have bars (RiRa and Hand In Hand were unable to afford leases pre pandemic) shutting down, street drifters, crime, and significant amounts of drunk driving.

Ive always wondered how electric scooters would fare if they were speed limited. Something like 6-9MPH (~15km/hr) . It's still much much faster than walking, but still about 1/2 the top speed currently observed.

This seems like a good general solution. Cars should be capped to similar speeds in dense areas! Especially given their large mass.

That was the case when scooters were brought back in Miami after initially being banned.

It was a terrible idea, because the city had 2 mandates to allow them to come back - 1. Speed caps (10mph), and 2. mandating that all scooters were banned from sidewalks.

If you know anything about how terrible Miami drivers are, you'll quickly realize that those mandates were designed to make the scooter idea fail. Forcing someone to go 10mph on a busy multi-lane road known for bad drivers is a death wish.

This is pretty much the case all across Europe, where they're limited to 20-25km/h.

There’s very little pedestrian traffic in Atlanta so the sidewalk riding didn’t bother me.

This is also a city where the police have done nothing to stop people riding go carts and stuff on the streets disrupting traffic and hurting people. Or tent clusters on sidewalks and off ramps.

So it was weird they banned scooters and allow things with no benefit to the city.

There’s also an angle that the city is really big on pushing their boondoggle public transport streetcar project and didn’t like cheaper and more environmentally friendly options available for the public.

I think Atlanta banned the scooters because the companies didn’t pay off the right locals. They could have tried to fix the issues and work with the scooter companies.

> pushing their boondoggle public transport streetcar project and didn’t like cheaper and more environmentally friendly options available for the public.

Yeah I wish more people would recognize this. Many "transit activists" are basically just lobbyists for the regional MTA/MTDs and want to minimize competition.

people are still throwing them wherever they die.. I feel awful for the workers that go by at night to find/recharge them when I see them strewn in the most inexplicably-off-sidewalk locations in piedmont park, etc.

Why do you feel awful for the workers, particularly? I assume they are hired to do exactly that? As jobs go it doesn't sound too terrible.

The son of my best friend face planted and had to have facial reconstructive surgery after a crash.

The year before the pandemic I spent each day on my walk to/from work arguing with scooter drivers about them being on the sidewalk and how dangerous it was. A child was hit by one in my area and seriously hurt.

You can say each of those things about cars and it is equally true. You're just acclimated to it.

  Parked on sidewalks: yes
  Blocking crowded streets: yes
  Collisions common: yes
  People getting hurt: yes

Cars/trucks do an extra special addition though: park in a lane because you're delivering something, or, ya know, doing something outside of the vehicle.

I've reported hundreds of cars parking in the bicycle lane this year alone..

Has anything happened from it?

Some news articles from me and other activists doing stuff has led to it becoming a higher priority in the department. So twice as many ticketed for it this year than earlier years in my city.

Still, the problem is that it's possible. Paint isn't infrastructure.

Do cars collide with people on sidewalks that frequently?

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/08/03/two-pedestrians-are-k...

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/09/18/slaughter-of-the-inno...

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2013/11/11/three-killed-by-curb-...

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2013/11/04/charles-hynes-brings-...

Now show your work. Give me all the fatal electric scooter crash stories.

I was questioning the claim that cars hit people as frequently as scooters do on sidewalks. It seemed unlikely to me, but I don't live in a major city. I appreciate you taking the time to share links. I read each and they're sad stories, particularly the one involving a child that was hit by a vehicle pulling into a driveway. I think it's pretty undeniable that car accidents will be more fatal than electric scooters, but that was never really a question.

Bought an electric scooter for my father (didn't work out at all for him, too old), so I've inherited it. For about town (I live in a small town in the UK) it has meant I barely use the car now. I can get to a supermarket and back again in the time it would take me to walk there, I can get to my parents house and back to do some errand in the time it would take me to drive and park.

But it is illegal. Each time I take it out I run the risk of getting a fine - but for now I'll take the risk as the benefit is too great for me. I'd love to buy a 'legal' one and would happily pay whatever registration or insurance was required.

Why not use a bicycle or a regular (non-electric) scooter? Honest question, I'm not being snark.

Non-electric scooters are a terrible mode of transport. Pretty obvious if you've ever used one (or a skateboard) but as soon as you hit any kind of gentle uphill slope they're more effort than just walking.

A bicycle is fine but you have to put in effort which is not always appealing and you can't take it into buildings (though on the other hand it's more reasonable to leave it locked up outside).

There's definitely a unique space that e-scooters occupy where they're better than every other option.

In the dotcom era I rode a Xootr kick scooter all over San Francisco. It was excellent, even on minor uphills. A lot lighter than an electric for carrying on BART. It was pretty great in that environment. (I still have it, but the place I live now is more conducive to bicycling.)

I used to LOVE my Razer scooter back in the 00's - rode it all over London, and you are quite right, even lighter. I used to skateboard 'commute' a lot in Australia too when I lived there - was a great way of getting around on the flats/down hill and easy/light to carry up hill. Too old to skate now (or too fearful of getting hurt again rather) and I really should try my son's scooter out more, but ease, smoothness and just 'go' of the electric scooter just has too much of a pull for me!

I also had an old 'lead acid batter electric scooter I used to ride in London a lot in 2004ish - was great fun and could carry me and my wife together to the pub and back on the canal paths - they weren't an issue back then as then the police only used to care about the petrol 'goped' scooters that we illegal - though you would see a few of them around London, in parks and on the roads. Many I love alternative transport (while almost always owning a car too). I had a cyclemotor/autocycle - a road legal mountianbike with 35cc petrol engine - got stopped a couple of times by the police on that, but they were just interested in what it was as they'd never seen one before. Had something called a 'Daylight MOT' far simpler to pass but can only ride dawn to dusk.

Man you have me wanting to dig some of these out of the sheds and garages that they are buried in!

Op here. I am a cyclist too, but cycling means I have to get the bike out the shed, cycle there (which admittedly is fast) then lock it up somewhere (not always available outside the shop) , then cycle home with my shopping bag.

On the scooter I go the supermarket with the scooter, do my shop and it is so much easier to scoot home with a bag over the handlebar than it is on a bike.

I love cycling and I cycle a lot for pleasure, but for errands the scooter is just perfect, no effort, easy to take in the house or pub, or train, or shopping. After a day of work I often just want easy.

Before I had the scooter I did likely cycle more, but I also used the car much more.

Bicycles are significantly larger and harder to maneuver - and a non-electric scooter is about as useful as a wagon would be.

At least for me. I have a very short walk to the store, and I'd consider a scooter but using the bike is just too much of a hassle most of the time.

As a datapoint, I got an adult kick scooter in NYC years ago to use for transportation. It worked as an alternative to walking around the neighborhood for distances up to a couple miles and the kids loved riding with me on it. But it didn't work for commuting, and anyone who considers skateboards and scooters in the same category as their electric counterparts has probably not attempted to commute with them.

As a worst-case example, take crossing the Queensboro Bridge which took about ~30 mins by foot, ~20 mins by kick scooter, and less than ~10 minutes by bike or electric scooter. On the surface that seems like a kick scooter fills a valid niche. However, on a sustained uphill a kick scooter is more tiring than walking and not substantially faster, so it's often simpler to just carry it. It is faster on the way down, but also stressful as you have to sit on the brakes the whole time to keep from going too fast on 200mm rubber wheels over cracked concrete. Saving ten minutes of walking just wasn't worth the extra stress and weight.

You can get kick scooters with inflatable tires and suspension but they're so low volume that it's not much more expensive to get a mass-produced electric scooter.

Get one of these mother-heckers ;; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcSqyIO7Ym8

I have a $7,000 e-bike and this guy is like $4,500 but can go sixty and they also can accept a trailer with an 80? mile range...

I am currently trying to figure out a trailer solution for my bike, which only pushes me to 20 MPH (Class I) (class II have a throttle thumb lever - Class III push to 28 MPH) (But cost ~$15K)

Electric scooters are illegal in UK?

It's ridiculous, in London you can hire one and ride that around, but you can't ride your own. You also need a driving license.

Completely unfounded but I think there is a lot of pressure being applied by the taxi groups to try and discourage them.

I don't think it's that ridiculous that when you first introduce something so potentially dangerous and disruptive that you require a driving licence demonstrating at least a little about the rules of the road, as well as experience in traffic and also that you only permit scooters that have been built to a known standard and that are actively maintained and easier to ensure that they meet the rules on legal max speeds etc.

What is the alternative? Tonnes of youngsters weaving in and out of traffic on their £5 knock-off import?

None of this seems to be an issue with hire ebikes.

Also the license requirement isn't about competency on the roads, it can be a provisional license without a single driving lesson.

Not legal on public roads or pavements.

UK is almost as bad as the US when it comes to car-centricism, or it was historically.

https://www.halfords.com/cycling/advice/are-electric-scooter...

"Pavements" means "sidewalks"?

Yeah.

On various level, yes

“ Currently, there isn't a specific law for e-scooters so they are recognised as "powered transporters" - falling under the same laws and regulations as motor vehicles, and subject to all the same legal requirements - MOT, tax, licensing and specific construction. However, because e-scooters don't always have visible rear red lights, number plates or signalling ability, they can't be used legally on roads. Private e-scooters can only be used on private land and not on public roads, cycle lanes or pavements. The only e-scooters that can be used on public roads are those that are rented as part of government-backed trials. E-scooter trial in London, June 2021 IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES Do I need a driving licence? Yes. To use an e-scooter from an official trial, you need to have category Q entitlement on your driving licence.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48106617

A lot of places have this problem. Pavements are for pedestrians. Roads are for roadworthy vehicles. It’s maybe legal to go on bike paths. But the network of those might go from nowhere to nowhere.

As a cyclist, I'd happily take e-scooters in the bike lane if it meant a protected network of lanes that spanned my area (like Amsterdam and similar).

The current mix of bikes and scooters in the road, on the sidewalk, in the bike lanes (usually not protected) is a nightmare in busier areas.

Agreed. Bikes and e-scooters move at around the same speed, if we had a useful network of protected lanes where I am then both would be attractive options.

I remember living in NYC pre-Uber. If you were trying to hail a cab in a spot with other people also trying to get one, you had to resort to aggressively yelling "Back the F@#$ off, that's my cab!"

Then Uber came and that largely went away b/c why fight over a cab when you could call and Uber?

Then CitiBike came along. It was amazing that you could just get a bike and ride somewhere. That is, until you were riding it to a commuter bus or train station at evening rush hour. Suddenly, you have 5 mins to catch your train and you see one open slot in the bike return. Another person also sees that spot and you race towards it until you ave to say "Back the F@#$ off, that's my spot!"

In other words, if cities want to have these options then should address directional supply and demand issues otherwise people are just going to say "Not worth the hassle"

The entire value of Uber was the app hailing (in my opinion) - the cab companies could have leaped on that but didn't.

Same with the bike rental things like CitiBike - there should be roving vans throughout the city moving and balancing the slots based on usage. They have the data, use it. They could even offer to "fix" problems (e.g., arrive at the train station and there's not a slot available? CitiBike will send a vehicle to get you to your destination within reason).

In addition to the balancing vans, Citi Bike in NYC has a reward system[1] that incentivizes users to take from full stations and dock at empty stations. With enough effort you can earn enough points to more than offset your monthly subscription and more which I did occasionally when I was cross training.

[1] https://citibikenyc.com/bike-angels

This is the kind of thing that should be encouraged - uhaul used to offer super low rates if you’d return the vehicle to where they wanted it to be.

> there should be roving vans throughout the city moving and balancing the slots based on usage

There are, and the system does rely in part on this rebalancing act to be functional. (Also to bring the E-bikes in for charging — sadly the stations won't be able to charge those for some time yet.)

To be fair, there are also occasionally staff at the busiest drop off locations who manually accept bikes and then just pile them off to the side.

Its like cities had zero controls on parking then just banned cars instead of building effective parking enforcement laws.

Simple solution:

1) Cities establish guidelines on legal parking / riding. 2) Impose large fines for violations. 3) Scooter companies pass on those fines to the rider who parked illegally.

But instead we have a bunch of blue cities banning the most affordable, equity enhancing, zero emissions, last mile transportation solution.

Agreed however just because you parked well doesn’t stop a clown from knocking them into the sidewalk later. At one point they were being thrown in the river.

This, in Atlanta, people who were mentally unstable (intersecting with people who don't like scooters) were throwing parked ones into streets.

a few of the providers required a photo of the scooter when you ended your ride. seems to address that issue.

Protects an honest user but doesn't prevent it from happening unfortunately.

Atlanta native; I haven't dug into the design of the study, but I am supremely skeptical of these results. There is a huge influx of new residents right now (and likely for the foreseeable future). That in concert with a renewed push for working from the office likely accounts for any increase in congestion seen any time recently. The city yearns for more public transport, but it is hard to imagine that 10% of all the insane traffic is directly related to a ban on this relatively new mode of transport.

From the paper:

The micromobility ban was implemented in the city of Atlanta on 9 August 2019. We use high-resolution data from 25 June 2019 to 22 September 2019 from Uber Movement to measure changes in evening travel times between 7:00 p.m. and midnight

The data was very specific to evenings in certain areas.

It isn't difficult math - selfish flow of traffic produces extremely un-optimal results, and congestion is simply a function of how much traffic chooses a certain path. I highly recommend Tim Roughgarten's work if you want an academic analysis: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262182430/selfish-routing-and-t...

It's a comparative study of several insanely small datasets over an exceptionally small period of time with no experimental controls, just retrospective analysis. 12000 MARTA trips, 120 Mercedez Benz trips and 34000 scooter trips... in a metropolitan area with 2.6 million homes.

I don't believe this report is proving anything it claims.

I'm sure a study of this calibre considered these very apparent collinear factors.

Just came back from Austin (way smaller than Dallas) and it was during a large event weekend (F1 weekend). We used the electric scooters pretty much the entire weekend to get around the city, it was really good, much faster and efficient than taking an Uber/Lyft or driving. Most of the larger streets had a bike only lane and we never felt unsafe (my 70yo dad was riding with me on another scooter). Overall, I think that when combined with a good planning strategy from the city these types of micro transport could be something really good. I still think that good public transportation should be the goal here, but that requires way more infrastructure investment, and electric scooters or bikes could be the next best trade off.

I was there that weekend myself and had a sukkah experience. I could imagine a certain type of person complaining about them - eg they are uttering sidewalks, left lying about here and there - but fundamentally it was great. The scooters are everywhere, with dedicated lanes, being ridden by everyone (locals and tourists) and the streets are wide and well marked. I lived in SF for ten years and it always felt like I was taking my life into my own hands on one there - but it felt like a “supported” mobility option in Austin. My friend and I looked at our credit cards and we each took 19 (!!) scooter rides in the ~72 hours we were there.

I should add though - they are dangerous, even when we’ll done, and riders shouldn’t be cavalier. I fell once (I’m coordinated and competent - but a crack in a sidewalk, in broad daylight, got me) and feel extremely lucky to have gotten away with nothing more than a skinned knee and palm.

Is it legal to ride on them on the sidewalk? Where I live it is not. It is, in fact, dangerous for walking humans to coexist with scooters on the sidewalk. I personally had many close calls and a few bumps. The close calls would have been serious, possibly fatal, had I not jumped out of the way.

I wonder just how spiky your clothes could be before you'd get cited for incitement to danger. Is it illegal to walk around looking like a discount dime-store Sauron?

I mean it is illegal to drive them on the sidewalk.

The press release that went along with the study is here: https://iac.gatech.edu/electric-scooters-car-use-atlanta?utm...

The real solution to congestion is to shift cities away from having so much car infrastructure. If you build a car oriented city with gigantic box stores surrounded by lakes of parking lots as the only option then people will drive cars. Electric scooters are a terrible solution to a problem that really needs to be addressed.

Why is it always framed this way? This is NOT the solution.

The solution is to build better public transportation options. That will necessarily include removing a decent amount of the car infrastructure, but you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.

The way you frame it, it sounds like (and it often is the case with people framing it this way) that you think that if we remove car infrastructure, people will be forced to use other means of transportation to get around. And while technically true, all it will actually do is piss people off and make it so much harder to get around.

It's framed this way because car infrastructure is so massive and sprawling that it by necessity crowds out public transit in cities.

It's also a vicious cycle: making public transit marginally worse increases the number of people who drive to get places, which makes the government build more roads, which makes cities sprawl more, and eventually you end up with a city like Atlanta that spans 50 miles and is barely navigable without a car.

Yes, it will piss people off - it will make cities MUCH less convenient for suburban drivers. That's not a bad thing unless you happen to be a suburban driver.

It will make homes, 25 miles from the city center, nearly worthless. People will want to live into the denser, walkable neighborhoods. They limit the amount of mixed use, medium density housing because it would crash the market for new car dependent suburbs which provide the funding for road maintenance and construction.

I live in Manhattan and I find a bicycle to be a better choice for the majority of my trips than public transit (it's faster, too). I only use public transit for long trips or when I'm traveling with suitcases.

Bikes are simply better at point-to-point transportation (the same advantage that cars have), except that they don't take up a lot of space so it's actually a scalable solution to have everyone using them to get around even in a dense city; see Amsterdam as an example.

Excuse my language but I think it's worth it here: Dear fucking lord, if biking in Manhatten is your idea of bikes shining, then you are way out in left field.

In my week in Manhatten last month I saw several crashes (including a near miss with a sit-down scooter riding in the bike lane who had to bail and slide before nearly crashing into a crowd of pedestrians), pedestrians jumping out of the way of bikes who don't stop at red lights, and bikes swerving around car traffic barely getting by without taking out car mirrors or getting run over.

Biking in Manhatten is not for the faint of heart and not for anyone who isn't decently athletic.

You could have lauded the subway system, but you chose bikes?

I think, if you take their argument with a bit of generosity, that they are arguing for more balance in our approach to cities. Right now the balance is so far in favor of cars, that it makes walking and cycling into an extreme sport. The result is loud, dangerous, expensive, and dirty cities that are built almost exclusively for cars.

The humungous parking lots, the 50-foot wide roads, the high speeds, the increasingly larger vehicles, the demolished housing for more freeways, parking minimums, extensive R1 zoning... They all contribute to a city exclusively for cars. Even if we don't get rid of ALL of it, we can certainly cut it back significantly.

Maybe ban cars in places where we don't need them anyways like Valencia street in San Francisco or the Spanish super blocks. Decrease speed limits and design streets to enforce them properly. Add walking and cycling paths to the grocery stores. Add raised crosswalks. When you don't have people using their cars to travel 5 miles everyday it leaves them open to the people who REALLY need to use them. Allow walkable neighborhoods in city planning initiatives.

People WANT to live in places like these, but we refuse to build them for some reason. It's why walkable neighborhoods, built when they were still legal, cost an arm and a leg now. Heck, we even build theme parks to give people a vague feeling of being someplace like that. People go on vacation to countries with places like that.

To me, this discussion is very similar to the discussion around "defund the police": should we lead with the unpopular thing that people will have to accept or should we lead with the goal?

My sense of why this framing is popular is that we've had ~30+ years of passing "public transit" initiatives that are doomed to fail because we would not disrupt car infrastructure. This becomes a double-whammy because we spend money to get very mediocre results, and people reasonably blame the transit system.

Instead, if you're clear from the start that you are going to remove an entire lane in the city for your BRT system - you face more opposition, but you have a much better chance of implementing an actual BRT system!

I think reasonable people can disagree on this, but it's not a mystery how we got here.

As you say it is technically the solution.

It is also not like car infrastructure would turn into non-existance. It most cases all that happens is reuse. Playing fields. Pedestrian areas. Bike lanes. Bus lanes. Bike areas.

The only common thing is they all cist car infrastructure space. This is the common ground. The reallocation of that infrastructure and space is a different story.

I have yet to see a case where it didn't pass people off no matter what the future use was. So even if technically the other framing should be different I have not seen a case where it makes a difference. All while seeing that even pure car infrastructure blockage makes a difference.

> As you say it is technically the solution.

No, I said technically people will adapt and take the shitty and overrun public transportation because there's no other option. It's not a solution because it often drastically increases travel time, put people in danger because public transportation without proper security is much more dangerous, and overall it will rightfully piss people off.

The solution is improving public transportation. This isn't something that people are advocating for. They just want the cars out.

Often the car infrastructure itself is what makes getting around without a car infeasible even for short trips - and short trips are a very large portion of trips taken. There are many, many destinations near me that are within easy biking distance, but doing so involves crossing highway ramps and mixing with fast-moving cars.

We do not need to allow cars to take every possible route. Alternative modes of transport are more useful if they're prioritized on the most direct routes. Cars are fast, a diversion won't impact them as much as it does someone on a bike or scooter.

> Why is it always framed this way? This is NOT the solution.

Because it's the actual solution.

> you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.

You don't have to hope. They will adapt.

If you remove car infrastructure in SF, for example, there are massive amounts of the city that will die because they lack adequate public transit options.

You remove mobility, and you remove any hope for underserved communities to survive, let alone improve.

Instead, you could advocate for MORE mobility via better public transportation. But you don't for some reason that I may never understand.

No they wouldn't. They would take to the polls and vote in a city council that would reverse whatever sort of plans you think would be implemented. A lot of people seem to think that they will just be able to force a majority of people to join them in bike heaven on the other side of sweeping infrastructure changes but there are far too many people who aren't interested in it and won't let it happen. Car driving and the things it enables are valued much higher by a much bigger proportion of the population that many people seem to want to believe.

Ah yes the progressive strategy: make lives miserable for people to force them to adopt your worldview. The only thing it seems to do successfully is lose them elections.

Exactly this reminds me of the Market Street closure in San Francisco, that has the intention and result of inconveniencing citywide traffic while making zero improvements to the tardiness, reach and infrequency of public transit

Ironically, the closure also made Market St more unpleasant (an already unpleasant experience before) to walk after dark.

If you want the real answer it's pretty easy to figure out. There's a group of people that want a particular form of society and that necessitates the absolute removal of the personal car, usually without actually fixing the problems that the car is supposedly causing.

People will adapt to many things, but that doesn't mean it is good - you could stop food deliveries to major cities and they'd empty in days; cars included; but that wouldn't be good.

Yeah, it should be obvious that automobile infrastructure can only support a finite amount of density. Once you cross that threshold you either need to halt growth and aggressively downzone OR build infrastructure for alternative modes of transit to absorb the excess.

Obviously this would be the optimal solution, but we have to operate in the realm of reality. There is no political will to eliminate car centric infrastructure.

There's some will. DC metro is seeing changes. More robust bike lane networks downtown. More bike lanes in the suburbs. More mixed use development near transit hubs (with underground parking or limited parking).

In select northern cities sure, not in Atlanta.

Eliminate, no, but car infrastructure ensures tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of life-altering injuries every year, bakes in climate change (even EVs are considerably worse than every other option), and it costs more than the alternatives – enough so that many cities and almost all suburbs struggle with maintenance and cuts to other services. The combination of those factors make me more optimistic than I’ve been in the past that we’ll see a shift away from the 20th century “one person, one car, every trip” mentality. We don’t need to eliminate cars, simply not subsidizing them at the expense of everything else would yield huge health, pollution, and quality of life improvements.

In the 1970s the Netherlands looked much like any slice of America you could randomly choose - that political will might be impossible in America, I'm genuinely uncertain if the hole has been dug too deep at this point, but in a more healthy political environment it certainly can be done... but it isn't easy.

No; these things have been a plague everywhere, even in cities organized with good public transportation and non car-centric centers.

Have been, but not anymore. At least here.

Now you have to take a photograph when you end a ride to prove that you did it responsible. There are many areas that are marked as slow-speed and many areas that are marked as no-park. The most central parts are entirely no-park with exceptions for dedicated bicycle-parkings.

Scooters that are misparked can be confiscated and the company needs to pay a fine to get it back.

It took a little while but now it seems to be respected by the vast majority and it has become a decent addition to other public transportation.

And I say this as someone who did despise them in the beginning.

Lots of other areas to discuss though, such as whether they last long enough to make environmental sense etc.

This is absolutely not true; look at any cities around Europe, or at Japanese cities, neither of those are "car oriented city with gigantic box stores surrounded by lakes of parking lots".

In the case of Japan, life develops around the train stations indeed, where all the shops and entertainment is, and between those stations are the residential areas, so scooters are perfect here.

In European cities (smaller) it's normally organized in rings, where most things you'd want to do are within the city center, or around large neighborhoods but also in circles (larger). So you can take a train/bus/cycle/scooter to the center, then going to the different places either walking or with the scooter.

They were talking scooters, they are a huge pain in the ass with people leaving it in the middle of sidewalk, riding like maniacs, often drunk (especially tourists).

No, the real solution is spread stuff around, so that not everyone wants to go to the exact same place at the same time.

Residential and business districts should not be a thing. Offices should be located right next to houses. (With the exception of "roudy" or loud places like music halls and bars.)

Shifting a large city away from having a lot of car infrastructure sounds extraordinarily complex, expensive, and time consuming. I would potentially support it, but surely scooters are cheaper and quicker to implement.

> extraordinarily complex, expensive, and time consuming

Remove all zoning laws and it takes care of itself over time. Zoning is always "keep [thing people want] away from [place where people want it]".

All that accomplishes is putting services that people want further away from them.

the first step, repainting lines on roads to add (ideally protected) bike/scooter lanes, is a large but imminently manageable project that can get done quickly. while that's happening, you direct various agencies to favor bike/scooter parking over cars, perhaps introducing necessary legislation to that effect. the harder and longer changes are removing/reducing over-zealous zoning, deceptive environmental lawsuits, and overly-specified building codes. it won't happen in a few months, but a lot can happen in a few years for a motivated electorate.

>ideally protected

Very much the ideal. Unprotected bike lanes end up as parking for gig workers way too often.

Sure but one is a step in the right direction while the other adds a pile of shit on top of the existing pile of shit

It's like hotfixing a completely broken pile of spaghetti code in prod, it'll save your sunday evening but you're in for 6 months of rewrite anyways

Every single change to a city of any reasonable size is exactly that hot fix, even if it takes months or years to implement (see: Big Dig). Desiring grand unified "fix everything" projects rarely works wonders, whereas small-scope projects over time can improve things. In many suburbs just building sidewalks and bike paths would improve things tremendously.

I can see that. One need only look at traffic when raining and people revert to drier methods of transport.

In cambridge MA those electric scooters are quite everywhere. And they don't know where they should go (they tend to go in the bike lane, which I think is correct, even though they annoy us bikers a bit, I think its the moving fast, but not working at it..). But non electrified scooters are back too, along with the occasional one wheel.

Bikes and scotters move you more quickly though certain routes than cars, as you tend to get through each light in just one clycle.

MA cyclist here, I'm not annoyed by scooters and I'm happy to share the bike lane if it means fewer cars on the road. The only caveat is that with the advent of small electric vehicles we need to start thinking about what an appropriate speed limit is for bike lanes; I'm actually thinking less about scooters than I am about e-bikes, since those can easily reach highway speeds if they're not limited.

...if they're not limited...

The 3-class system is pretty good for defining e-bikes. But, it's useless for actually enforcing anything.

1 - pedal assist only, 20mph max assist 2 - pedal or throttle, 20mph max 3 - pedal only, 28mph max And anything faster is just an electric motorbike/scooter (and should have tags and a license, etc).

I'm fine with sharing bike infrastructure and multi-use paths with class 1&2 e-bikes, e-scooter with similar speed limits, and anything else in the e-mobility space (e-hand-cycles, etc).

I'm in the DC suburbs and we get a lot of e-bikes, but so far, they're mostly a mix of expensive Trek/Specialized stuff that older or less-able adults ride for fitness. Or, cheap (Amazon, etc) e-bikes used for transport. And bike lane traffic is light enough that there's no conflict.

But, I definitely see the potential problem. A friend just texted me a for-sale listing for a lightweight e-dirt-bike that does 70mph, but from 10' away you'd never know it wasn't a pedal bike at all (looks like a regular downhill race bike).

>Bikes and scotters move you more quickly though certain routes than cars, as you tend to get through each light in just one clycle.

These small micromobility devices will come to dominate urban city streets over the next decade. These devices typically cost less than $1,500 (a tiny fraction of an automobile), and are significantly faster than driving in city centres. A lot of people will still choose cars for comfort, but the travel time and cost savings of e-mobility are tough to compete against.

> One need only look at traffic when raining and people revert to drier methods of transport.

I understand the point you're trying to make but this is a pretty insane way to support it. :D Looking at traffic when raining and concluding that the reason it's worse is because there are more cars, ignoring the fact that people drive more cautiously and have more accidents in the rain, is kind of a leap.

We need a lane for cars / trucks, a lane for electric micromobility, and a lane for human-powered vehicle transit (bikes, mostly).

Eh, at this point we could probably do without the lane for cars in anything even vaguely approaching urban density - delivery trucks are fine though.

Agree 100%. In a city that's laid out in something close to a grid (DC comes to mind), close every other road to cars. Make them pedestrian and bike/e-bike/mobility only (with distinct lane for walking and lane for bikes/etc). Use any leftover space for trees, plants, park, benches, etc.

Amazes me how closely these forms of transportation are policed when the average hood height of pickup trucks I see everywhere equals or surpasses the height of most women I know. If you had to design a machine to optimally kill pedestrians I don't know how you could do better, beyond appending a thresher to the front. The engineers who designed these should be ashamed of themselves. Living in Atlanta generally has really accelerated my deep dislike of car-centered urban design. It will take a lot more than unbanning electric scooters to change things, but at least it's a step.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy how desensitized we collectively are to cars constantly killing people.

Yes scooters blocking sidewalks is a problem, but cars straight up killing people is clearly like 1000x worse.

Not desensitized just different stats and impacting how they are seen as tangible. For example, the auto stats translate into me, a mid-40s adult living in a very car dependent part of the US, having only known of a few people to die my entire life (first hand, actual people I knew - was in high school when I had a much larger social network, so was statistically more likely to encounter this back then.) I don't know many people that have been severely injured either. Yet, those scooters began and instant and constant nuisance that many people across various social groups share. I'm not arguing against your point, just saying how perceptions get skewed based on how frequently you encounter them. It's easy for people to think driving is kind of safe when you and everyone you know drives daily without much consequence. The real statistics and magnitude (death vs annoyance) don't really mean much.

https://imgur.com/gallery/pR30ey1

> Yeah, it's pretty crazy how desensitized we collectively are to cars constantly killing people.

A bit hyperbolic, don't you think? The average is 1 for every 100,000,000 miles driven. And more like 1 in 600,000,000 if you are talking about people killed by cars who were not themselves in said car.

Cars are the #2 cause of death for kids, edged out only by guns: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761

We can see by comparing the US to peer nations that most of these deaths are preventable -- Sweden, where Vision Zero originated, has like 80% fewer traffic fatalities. We just don't have the political will to do it.

The very fact that you think this is hyperbolic is what I'm talking about. 40,000 dead in the US each year and the response is a collective shrug.

> The very fact that you think this is hyperbolic is what I'm talking about. 40,000 dead in the US each year and the response is a collective shrug.

Nobody is saying we should not try to improve the statistic. About 1 in 100 deaths are because of a car accident. But it becomes hyperbole when people suggest we should implement draconian measures on what is probably the single most useful appliance in the history of mankind. You perceive as a shrug the fact that most people understand perspective.

It's 43k deaths per year in the US.

One time, in 2021, a notable per-capita jump.

Indeed, if self-driving cars killed 1,000 people a year they would immediately be banned, but 30x that in human-caused fatalities and nobody bats an eye. We have created a culture that idolizes the personal freedom of the automobile while ignoring every externalized cost it dumps onto the general population.

> 30x that

That is total deaths. Most people killed in a car-related accident are in the car. Pedestrian deaths are around 17% of the total. [0]

[0] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

It mostly puts the risk and consequences on the elderly, disabled, and impoverished. Which is evil, but socially acceptable and with many other strong precedents in the US.

> It mostly puts the risk and consequences on the elderly, disabled, and impoverished.

Citation please?

I looked for 10 minutes, but couldn't find anything that backed your assertion. I did find:

* "People over the age of 65 made up 19 percent of all pedestrian fatalities in 2015." compared with 15% of population over 65.

* twice as many males die as females

* "In 34 percent of these accidents, the pedestrian registered a blood alcohol concentration of at least 0.08"

https://pennygeeks.com/legal-resources/statistics/pedestrian...

I originally found this out from the bibliography of a book I no longer have access to so can't link the specific studies I was thinking of.

But I also googled this for mere seconds and came across just dozens of similar ones so I do kind of question your intent or at least motivation here.

Anyway just for example all off the first page of google results for "pedestrian injuries by income":

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13619... https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta... https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/updates/all/-/asset_publisher/... https://johnston-lawfirm.com/new-study-shows-lower-income-ne... https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/resources/research/poo...

Similar results when looking for disability too. Age I'm not following up on right now for time reasons but since the elderly are more likely than average to be either disabled or impoverished it almost doesn't matter.

What's your goal on bringing attention to the BAC of the pedestrians? People are allowed to drink, even be drunk. Is "drinking and walking" to be a crime too? Road safety needs to account for all conditions and decisions likely to be encountered by drivers, including drunk pedestrians just as much as children and wheelchair users.

Thank you - that is interesting.

I could only access the one article you linked https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta... which mentions: “With miles of broken or missing sidewalks, inadequate outdoor lighting, distracted drivers and wide streets that facilitate speeding, Gulfton could also be Exhibit A in what has become an alarming nationwide increase in pedestrian fatalities in recent years, disproportionately concentrated in the neighborhoods of people of color with low incomes.”

On reflection, I wonder whether there is any component of cause and effect because black people could be harder to see at night: “Pedestrian fatalities occur mostly in urban areas, at night in dark lighting conditions”, “In 2015, 74 percent of pedestrian crashes happened in the dark”.

I also assume survivability is strongly affected by age and disability.

> I do kind of question your intent or at least motivation here.

In this case I simply used poor search terms. You are violating the site guideline to “Assume good faith” when you write that. I had thought that my examples supported your paraphrased point of discriminatory death. For anti-discrimination, sometimes men and drunk people (as you rightfully reiterate) are not seen as targets.

I am generally curious about causes and effects. It is difficult to tease out the underlying reasons why we measure some clearly unfair and biased outcomes.

I heartily agree we should aim for streets to be safe for all pedestrians, whether: drunk, impoverished, man or woman, PoC, children, etcetera.

For folks who fantasize about driving long-haul diesel trucks, I suspect.

> the average hood height of pickup trucks

Is about 55 inches for a current HD pickup, or 9 inches shorter than the average female human. The hood height is a bit lower for the more common half-ton pickups.

I tried to google scooter accidents in Atlanta. I didn’t find anything about the scooter rider hitting pedestrians, instead I found examples of people on scooters being run over by cars.

Of course, you bring this up and people will start talking about all the times they were "buzzed" by someone on a scooter, an event which might have led to some bruises or, at worst, a broken wrist. Never mind being buzzed by a car when on a bicycle - a ubiquitous event which can easily end with you losing your balance, falling under the rear wheels, and getting turned into strawberry jam.

For my fellow french hackers: "scooter" is a trap word, it is actually a "trotinette", not a motorbike

Native English speaker here that doesn't know any French and that's a great word! The word reminds me of a horse trot which is a bit faster than walking, so feels like a good description. Scooter isn't the only word to have multiple meanings, "bike" can mean motorbike or bicycle which is another one in the endless source of confusion that is English!

IMO the hardest part about rolling out other forms of public transportation like scooters is creating a public ecosystem that will properly support multiple modes.

The public part is important because an ecosystem is not one individual entity like Bird/Lime/etc where everything for particular mode of travel has to funnel through.

The escooter experiment has basically shown lacking an ecosystem causes problems. And the same thing would happen if “escooter” is replaced with “ebikes” or “eskateboards” or “emopeds”. They would still be scattered everywhere, get in people’s way, etc.

So far the only real ecosystem for transportation we have comes down to cars once again (unless you live in NYC with the subway). There’s not enough momentum to holistically address multi-mode transportation meshed in public life and not just think in terms of “cars and car alternatives”.

Adding my own anecdote: Minneapolis has tons of electric scooters and has done a nice job of providing infrastructure (dedicated parking, expanded bike lanes, etc), especially downtown. There’s also plenty of signage reminding people that they aren’t allowed on sidewalks. Despite all of that, there are tons of people riding recklessly through crosswalks, on sidewalks, etc, on top of the usual problem of scooters being scattered all over the sidewalk and blocking pedestrian traffic. The problem isn’t with scooters, or even necessarily with the reckless operators - it’s the complete lack of enforcement of the rules. People are going to do what’s most convenient, even if it’s dangerous, even if it’s technically prohibited, unless there are consequences.

I've never seen a complaint about scooters that doesn't just boil down to "they aren't obeying the rules". The rules shouldn't be that way! Riding scooters or bikes on the sidewalk is miles safer than riding it on an unprotected roadway, and should be allowed everywhere. You can look up the statistics anywhere for pedestrian fatalities from collisions with cars vs. pedestrian fatalities from collisions with bikes or scooters. They differ by more than a few orders of magnitude. Sidewalks are pitifully small in most places and this is the problem that should be solved (optionally segregating the enlarged sidewalk), not pushing scooters and cyclists out into traffic.

I do not want scooters and pedestrians to share the same space - that doesn’t mean they have to be sharing space with cars. Bike lanes are ideally suited for scooters, and the onus for protecting operators in those lanes is on area planners. Sidewalks are for pedestrians, and if the proper infrastructure doesn’t exist to support bikes and scooters, they shouldn’t be operating in that area. I was speaking specifically to Minneapolis, which does have a good amount of the proper infrastructure, but scooter riders (and to a lesser extent, cyclists) often ignore it.

Only issue i have is that they need to reduce the top speeds on the app based scooters. Way too many people flying around corners on the sidewalk and i have to peak around corners now in busy areas.

We need speed governors on cars even more badly. They go way too fast and kill by far the largest share of people by any transportation method.

> kill by far the largest share of people by any transportation method.

That's only because cars are by far the largest share of transportation period.

When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work", then the best numbers I could cobble together (which are not great) from a few sources are:

Deaths per 100 million miles:

    Car:        ~1
    Bicycle:    ~9
    Walking:   ~16
    Motocycle: ~40

It's very hard to get good numbers here because most car fatality numbers also include fatalities from pedestrians and cyclists who were hit by cars.

Really, there are two different questions to ask:

1. What is the safest way for me to get to work?

2. What is the safest way for all of us to get to work?

You might assume those have the same answer, but they don't. The safest way for all of us to get to work is probably to have everyone walk and/or bike. But if you unilaterally decide to start biking or walking to work in a heavily car-dominated area, you are increasing your own personal risk unless you can find a route that separates you from the cars well.

Transportation safety is fiendishly complex and no one sentence comment on HN will capture it well.

Your statistic is how many people are killed while using the method of transportation, not how many people the method of transportation kills.

Approximately 100% of the walking and cycling deaths and a good portion of the motorcycle deaths are caused by cars. Approximately 0 deaths are caused by walking or cycling.

> When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work"[...]

This is a strange metric to use though, because you're unlikely to walk (say) 20 miles to work, while you might drive that distance. Unilaterally choosing to walk or bike to work rather than drive in such a situation also typically means moving closer to work.

I think a more useful metric to use when talking about safety for an individual would be a per-trip metric. I might have a 40 minute walk to the office where someone else would have a 40 minute drive to theirs, but they are functionally the same trip.

People can't even handle speed cameras without freaking out.

It's true that cars are extraordinarily deadly, and it's also true that most drivers don't want anything done about it if it might inconvenience them.

I used to believe that speed-cameras were "unsportsmanlike" until I a) grew up a little, and b) visited a country where they were in extensive use and driving felt safer.

Speed cameras massively decrease the need for traffic-stops, which is a huge win for both safety and potential profiling/discrimination. Lowering speeds can decrease the consequences of a crash and more-uniform low-cost enforcement can allow law-enforcement to focus limited human resources on responding to calls that actually require a human.

I'm a big fan of speed cameras now, especially those that measure average speed by photographing cars at the ends of a long road segment.

It would help if there wasn't blatant corruption in the installation and maintenance of those cameras. At least locally, multiple municipal officers have been arrested for taking bribes. It doesn't have anything to do with convenience.

My biggest issue with speed cameras is that one in my city also enforces the school zone limit even if it's not currently in effect. It's on a main arterial road that people usually go 40 on but brake check to slow down to 20 for a few blocks which inevitably causes traffic + crashes around the school.

Usually when someone's habitual activities cause routine death and misery to others we don't factor in their desires too heavily when we change it.

90 mph on the highway is probably much, much safer than 40 mph in a residential area.

Yes, the speed governors would be GPS-based, like they are for e-scooters. You'd be limited to going the speed limit of whatever road you're currently on.

Given how excellent my Model 3 wasn't at determining the speed limit of the freeway near me, let's not. If you want people to slow down, there are effective ways to design roads that work better than arbitrary speed limits.

Design roads to the speed. Too many of our roads (US) are wide, open, and "trick" drivers into going faster than necessary.

Things that can help reduce speeds: - narrower lanes - less shoulder/median space - trees, bushes - traffic circles instead of red/yellow/green signals - various curbing arrangements

I would have guessed motorcycles are more deadly.

Motorcycles are more deadly for the rider.

Cars cause more danger for everyone else.

Only to their own riders, not to others. Plus motorcycles are a tiny share of overall motor vehicles on the road.

Yes but people also aren’t expected to walk on roads with cars except at certain outlined points

15 mph should be plenty for everyone right?

Because education has failed. No?

Space should be re-allocated from roads to properly protected scooter/bike lanes. The real problem is non-pedestrian traffic being forced onto sidewalks.

I completely agree but also don’t think i will see that fixed in the US in my lifetime. Maybe you are more optimistic

If you ride a scooter and crash into a pedestrian, you yourself will get hurt as much as the pedestrian. This isn't a car or even a motorcycle.

So this is a problem that will quickly solve itself.

I doubt it. The rate at which you get new riders and old riders forgetting their painful lesson will naturally become equal to the number of people learning a painful lesson, and the number of reckless scooter riders will tend towards a stable equilibrium. I'd say we're already not far away from that equilibrium.

These scooters are not intended to be used on sidewalks.

Yes, though I can hardly blame people for doing it. They should be used in bike infrastructure instead, but at least in the states there's almost no safe bike infrastructure except in a handful of cities.

Choosing between the sidewalk with pedestrians and the road with cars, I mean it's obvious right?

There is a long list of things that would optimize for individuals’ outcomes that contravene the laws society has passed.

And some of the scooter companies have developed technology to detect when people ride them on sidewalks. Mandating its use or fining the rental companies for rider behavior would help with this problem.

https://electrek.co/2020/01/30/limes-electric-scooters-can-n...

Yes but i see about 90% of people using them on sidewalks unfortunately

I stay on the bike lane on the road 95% of the time

Forgot that I take having bike lanes in my town for granted

This type of reaction is completely what I expected by the haphazard and almost comical rollout of scooters a few years ago.

I had the opportunity to work with one of the scooter companies (which was underwritten by a large auto manufacturer) a couple of years ago and their organization was a mess and almost intentionally mismanaged.

I could only infer that the large auto company wanted these guys to flail about until local governments would ban this threat to automotive dominance.

This seems like a stretch--they are taking data collected from the effect of the evening scooter ban (after 9PM) and applying it to commute patterns. But people ride scooters in the evening to get to and from large events like Atlanta United games or concerts--it's a very different context than commuting.

I'm fine with a 100% self-driven/auto-piloted scooter/bike .. I'm sorry, but there are far too many uncoordinated fools out there without the slightest concept of newton's 2nd who are perpetually coming right up on my back for me to be cool with anything else (in an urban area at least).

Your comment works equally well for cars. Why not ban them until drivers follow the laws and stop driving drunk, parking illegally on sidewalks, hit pedestrians etc.?

At least scooters do a lot less damage when they hit anything!

One could hypothesize that if bikes/scooters were given more time and focus, ie, riding to things like school and local errands, then more people would develop skills around riding them.

We need self driving scooters. You can summon them and they return to doc on their own when done.

I think many cities will be caught off guard by how much cheap lithium-ion batteries are going to revolutionize transport in the next decade

This reminds me of when Cal Trans kicked the Priuses out of the carpool lane on I-880, and a UC study showed that it decreased the speed in all lanes, especially the carpool lane.

The outcome? Instead of widening the roads or eliminating the carpool lanes, they kicked even more cars out, converted additional lanes to carpool / express lanes, and further snarled traffic.

There's a state-wide mandate to reduce commute miles, and most cities have interpreted it to mean "increase congestion", not "improve public transit".

If you make driving more frustrating and less convenient, it can make the other options relatively better in comparison and people may take them. It can also generate demand/political will for other transit modes that may not exist if driving everywhere just works fine for most people.

I'm not saying that's their plan, but on the scale of like 2-3 decades it's not preposterous that making driving worse now helps eventually. Certainly it's not worse than widening roads, something that at this point is well understood to not actually help.

They have been at it for two decades already. It mostly just propped up house prices near jobs.

(And, no, they are not allowing houses to be built at anywhere near the rate needed to meet demand.)

Floridian here, what do you mean they kicked Priuses out of the carpool lane?

In my experience, High Occupancy Vehicle lanes restrict usage based on the highness of the occupancy of the vehicle... What does brand have to do with this?

Not a Californian, but I believe there used to be a deal where in some places a more efficient vehicle would be allowed in the carpool lane regardless of the number of occupants.

My guess is that previously a Prius (or similar hybrid) qualified for the HOV lane regardless of how many passengers. The intuition is that because they are so fuel efficient, it's similar to carpooling.

California let Priuses in to the carpool lanes for awhile with a "Carpool OK" sticker I think due to their reduced emissions. BEVs later got the same stickers but they were either limited in number and/or eventually were phased out.

For me, I'd always just risk the fine for the 6-7 years I was down in the Bay Area. It never happened and I got hours or possibly whole days of my life back.

Some places incentivize low emissions vehicles by giving them access to high occupancy lanes.

Former new yorker here, but ev-hybrids were (maybe still are?) allowed in carpool lanes even if they were only carrying the driver. When I lived there priuses were by far the biggest population of hybrids or evs

Virginia was similar... when hybrids first arrived, they were allowed special tags to use HOV lanes without the occupants. As they became common-place, that exemption was removed.

To boost adoption, hybrids and EVs were allowed into the HOV lanes (without high-occupancy passengers).

What about adult Heelys, can we normalize those rather than try this rent-and-litter startup scheme again?

These ppl are always looking for problems in their solutions.

I love e-scooters. They're fun to ride around on and, when there are enough of them in an urban area, you can just rely on them being there for transit. I've been so disappointed by the public's reaction to scooters, though. They don't see how cars are significantly worse, in terms of the personal cost, public safety and destruction of urban spaces.

Like, just to put this in perspective, I did a bit of digging behind the Atlanta ban. It happened right after (and as a direct result of) these events:

- A 34 year old woman on an e-scooter was murdered* by a driver of a car, in a hit-and-run. [1]

- A 20 year old man on an e-scooter was killed by a negligent driver of an SUV who was charged with 2nd degree homicide. [2]

- A 37 year old man was killed by the driver of a bus who did not see him. Passengers on the bus say he was banging on the bus to alert the driver as he was crushed to death. I'm not able to find out if the bus driver was ever charged for this death. [3]

- A homeless man (of unknown age?) on an e-scooter was killed by a truck. In this case, it does look like the e-scooter ran a red light and the driver was not at fault. [4]

So in 2 out of 4 cases, clearly the car was at fault. The city reached first for not limiting cars in any way, but rather limiting scooters. I mean, I get it. There was no structure for doing anything to cars or the system that causes people to drive everywhere. And to be fair to Atlanta, the ban on scooters was only at night.

We know there are ways to structure cities and traffic laws to make safer spaces for pedestrians and cyclists. Bad saldy, here in America, we are so reluctant to reach for those options. We have so many parking lots, so many stroads, so few walkable spaces. Whenever there's conflict between cars and people, we blame people. And then build extra lanes and extra parking lots and it just gets worse.

By the way, this problem with cars happens here in San Francisco too: My friends and I have all seen an explosion of bad behavior by drivers, including a friend of mine who struck last year in a hit-and-run, breaking his femur. This is not just anecdote: Pedestrian deaths are on the rise here, while citations plummet. [5]

1. * I am not sure if "murder" is legally applicable in this case, but to me, if you strike and kill someone in your car and then run, you're a murderer. https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/scooter-rider-hit-k...

2. https://www.bikelaw.com/2019/06/driver-charged-in-death-of-e...

3. https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/scooter-rider-hit-k...

4. https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/south-fulton-county/man-on-...

5. https://sfbayca.com/2022/07/05/traffic-deaths-in-san-francis...

…says a single study.

But how do you deal with the increased risk of chemical fires?

It was a thing when I was picking careers that they barely hired firefighters because the changes in building codes meant... much fewer fires.

Out in the townships, some went volunteer, and at the ones where it was paid a lot of them cross trained as EMTs or whatever.

I don't think it registered over the years -- I never "just got a job" because everyone in the system -- from the Harvard doctor doing the surgery to the dad from cub scouts, who have known me since birth -- they wouldn't lift a finger to help me if I didn't show them the right card.

And they're going to misunderstand me, on purpose, for the rest of my life, if I try to change that?

I really don't like violence, but I have been bullied all my life, and some days I don't feel like stripping out the emo bullshit and leaving the LinkedIn friendly HN post and I hate these scooter companies that put very real risks out there when many people still don't even have a bank account let alone a smartphone to order up one of these... things.

If anyone has a suggestion on a good scooter model to permanently purchase and pair with a helmet, I think maybe someone should do a startup that rents out helmets instead of chemical fire factories to be thrown into the woods next to the cloud factory.

PS: Do not let Michael Chabon take you to a secondary location, even if it's Halloween.

I can't wait until the city wakes up, bans them, and starts handing out tickets to people riding them in the park, on sidewalks, and on the beltline.

What about the people who find scooters helpful for getting around? And why is it a problem in the parks? Do you have a better solution for reducing car traffic? Or the last mile problem?

That's a really lazy and self-centered solution to something that helps a lot of people get around. Would you like us to take this position about cars?

Oh, point acknowledged here, but I don't care. The city seems pretty uninterested in keeping them off off the sidewalk and private property. I am not interested in being diplomatic now since the city can't decide on anything and we have had to clean them off our property and sidewalk time after time. I also have property in other cities and this is not an issue in the metropolitan resident rich areas. Atlanta leaders seem particularly helpless, careless, or just inept to do the needful here.

I am tired of the litter on our property and sidewalks in our part of town where people pay a premium to not have to deal with this sort of thing. If you don't live in Midtown, you don't have a right to complain. If you rent, you don't have grounds to complain. I do, so I can complain and I will.

As someone that lives in Atlanta, this is one of those things that is so obviously not true that it's not worth spending the time to point out the flaws in the study.

By the power of hidden anecdote, I dispel your 'study' and 'data'!

It's not an anecdote. It's a basic understanding of traffic in Atlanta, the geographic limits of the ban, and all the Covid related fall out happening at the same time. It's the equivalent of arguing that days are 10% longer due to the scooter ban. It doesn't need critical examination to know it's wrong.

You should try reading the article (and other comments), the data collected was pre-covid.

> We report an effect each day beginning the day after the policy implementation, 10 August 2019 through 22 September 2019.

If that's the ban they studied than it's even more ridiculous because it only applied after 9pm.

The following March the scooters were effectively banned before returning later that Summer under a new permitting process.

And you live in all of Atlanta I take it? Would you even be able to notice a 10% increase?

Atlanta is huge. It can take two hours at highway speeds to get through it. Most routes do not allow for scooters. I think it's obvious that banning scooters cannot have had impact on most commute routes. This conclusion needs to be more specific about commute routes impacted to help folks learn from the data.

I think they also need to discuss other projects which impacted commute times at the time. For example, major work on the GA400/I285 intersection began at that time. Changes to I75 and its dedicated pay lanes was underway. Those two routes are used by huge numbers of commuters every day and the impact was huge.

Atlanta has inadequate infrastructure that causes "rush hour traffic" on a tuesday drive on the highway at 2:00 pm. The city is not 21st century compatible if "value for time" is important.

I supported two offices in Smyrna and Buckhead for a few years and lived in Gwinnett initially and relocated to buckhead after. I-285 sucked both ways in Gwinnett, but in buckhead, i was going against traffic, which made a friday commute in the rain a 15 minute drive home in buckhead. The logistics are much worse now.

I did happen to be in SoCal when the pandemic started and got to enjoy their highways with little to no traffic. I think I was only in like 3 or 4 traffic jams the whole time, when Atlanta is a traffic jam mon-fri from 7am to 6pm'ish.

When visiting Portland, the commute south mon-fri was always backed up during rush hour times (just like the good ole days), going towards Salem. Inadequate infrastructure from the 20th century makes some cities worse I guess.

I would never trust myself to evaluate such a claim for my city with my experience and memory.

Wouldn't it be worthwhile to share out the flaws for people that don't live in Atlanta or really even cities with Scooters?

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