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Comment by publicmenace | Hacker News Reader

E-Scooters are a public menace. They're way to fast for the sidewalk, dangerous on the road, litter the sidewalks and cause people to trip, and are almost always ridden unsafely, with no safety equipment at all. Get these death traps off the streets.

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I think cars are a lot worse, if we just took those off the street there's be no problem with people scooting on the streets

So that's a whole other debate (and I disagree), but even if you're right, getting rid of cars would be a gradual, multi-decade project. It's just not possible to get around modern American cities without cars. You can't just abandon the city. These cities represent trillions of dollars of investment.

Otoh, you could ban e-scooters tomorrow and after dramatically improving various urban areas, the biggest effect would be a few scooter companies going bankrupt.

> It's just not possible to get around modern American cities without cars.

Well but it is. Restricting/Eliminating cars in city centers especially would do wonders to promote them as places that people want to live in.

Too many American city centers aren’t really set up for non-car usage, so even if cars went away, people would need to walk pretty big distances to get to where they’re going. Modern American cities need to be fundamentally redesigned to support a car free or reduced system.

I realize you're talking about the current feasability of non-car transportation, which it sounds like we all agree leaves something to be desired.

Banning new modes of transportation is really just going to reinforce the existing car-centric design of cities though.

> dramatically improving various urban areas

That’s just in your opinion though. Scooters are super convenient if you’re not just an old fuddy dud afraid of new things.

It's so convenient having to lift them up and throw them out of the way all the time! /s

And while everybody must pay for parking or public soil occupation… apparently these companies are exempt and can completely fill a sidewalk for free (of course people then have to walk on the bike lane).

I don't actually want to get rid of cars, I was just pointing out how ridiculous your argument sounds.

I want people to have options, and for large cities to promote less environmentally destructive modes of transportation that are also more accessible and take up less space. Yeah, maybe you see people leaving scooters on the sidewalks; I see shared use of public infrastructure that doesn't have to have large amounts of space dedicated for 'parking'

> Otoh, you could ban e-scooters tomorrow and after dramatically improving various urban areas, the biggest effect would be a few scooter companies going bankrupt.

There are probably already people who depend on them to get to work - and those people are probably far more marginalised and vulnerable than car drivers.

At the prices these scooter sharing companies are asking these days, I'd hardly call the people dependent on them "marginalised"...

Compared to the price of a used car these days?

Where I live, it's more expensive than ride sharing (taxi or otherwise)

Trouble is, the e-scooters are a pretty good replacement for private cars. Allowing them would facilitate a reduction in cars.

I used to not care but the rental scooters really are a nuisance. Apparently deploying their kickstands is literally the hardest thing in life. The ones in motion don't bother me, and most of the people in Berkeley that ride e-scooters own theirs so they buy the lighter ones and carry them indoors, but the rental ones are much larger and heavier and their stands simply don't work.

I think the issue is that people walking by knock them over, moreso than the kickstands not working.

If you live in Berkeley (and many other cities), there's an added backdrop of anger at "big tech" that many non-tech workers have, so many people will kick or knock them over (I've seen this). I've also heard of people taking these (and bikeshare bikes) and throwing them in the ocean/lake/etc.

> E-Scooters are a public menace.

So are cars. They kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. They are incompatible with spaces that are occupied/moved through by humans, dangerous on the road, and consume half the city's livable space through business and residential parking lots. They poison our air, and they damage our hearing.

They also cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to buy and operate, and require untold billions of dollars to be spent on building and maintaining an endless sprawl of road infrastructure.

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... Maybe if we consider the benefits, as opposed to only the drawbacks, scooters might look a bit better than you paint them to be?

In my experience, they are perfectly fine in bike lanes. If your city doesn't have those, that's the problem. Not the scooters.

They should be ridden on the roads imo. They are as fast as an average bike rider, if it's not safe, then the roads need to be adjusted to make it safe.

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