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Comment by arijun | Hacker News Reader

I would like to provide a contrasting viewpoint. I can’t speak to the situation in Paris, but in the city I live in, scooters are amazing. They reduce car usage which is better for both pedestrians and car users. They turn a 45 minute walk/30 minute bus ride/20 minute cab into a 10-15 minute trip, which opens up much more of the city (the city I live in was not built for the number of cars it has in it so getting anywhere is a slog).

When they first came there were a bunch of scooter on pedestrian collisions, but between an aggressive ticketing campaign, adding bike lanes, and adding slow zones, these numbers have gone way down.

(I rarely use them as I tend to cycle everywhere, I’m just glad my city has them)

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The real problem with scooters is cuties unwilling to provide them with proper infrastructure. Bike lanes in most cities (out of the better European cycling cities), tend to be narrow and about 1/4 - 1/3 the size of a car lane.

If a city were to dedicate a single car lane sized lane for “micromobility” and responded quickly to damage to this lane (which wouldn’t be as frequent for the obvious reason that damage is proportional to weight, and scooters and bikes are way lighter than cars), scooters would not be a problem at all.

A city may decide it doesn’t want dockless scooters, but even that problem could be resolved by replacing 1 car parking spot on every street into a scooter/bike dock.

cuties ^_^

They get away with it because they're cute damn them

You can't add a lane for every "new" mode of transportation...

It sounds like the parent comment is talking about expanding & improving bike lanes, rather than forcing electric scooters into car lanes (where they are at risk), undersized bike lanes (where they endanger bicyclists), or banning them outright (where you’re now stuck with more demand for car traffic).

Yes, but the comment you are responding too notes, that city streets are not stretchable, so you cannot add full-sized lanes for everyone's new toy.

There's an answer to this, an answer which I see implemented in some places: cutting into the car lanes. Because you don't have to drive through the historical center.

In the cities, where nobody really lives in the historical center, it is doable. (We are not talking about driving through; we are talking about access/servicing; there are very few cities without a ring -- or several rings -- where driving through center is the fastest way from one end to another).

In the cities, where real people live there, it is not. Every part of the city needs servicing, including center. Your plumber won't lug his tools on a scooter; your furniture won't teleport itself into your house either. Every now and then, the residents themselves need to bring in or out their heavier or larger crap, so issuing permits to entry to well-connected companies is not a solution.

Yes, I do live in city center; and yes, we also have people who know nothing about living there, but they go to pub there every Saturday night, so they have strong ideas how it should be. It is not limiting them, after all.

It's never this black and white, also not needed. Usually city centers are closed _for outsiders_, while allowing the residents and local business traffic. This already curbs the traffic a lot and reduces also a lot the need for a second car lane - or such.

Edit: just for clarity: this model is already working (plumbers, movers and locals included).

In 90% of inner city streets you could just block through traffic for cars and reduce traffic to almost zero, without inconveniencing people living there.

You don't need space to have everyone's plumber visit at the same time using an 18-wheeler either. Just converting a few streets into one-way already frees up plenty of space.

So delivery vans and service vans get a permit to drive downtown. Possibly the same for residents (could go either way here, based on housing density and alternative transport options). But personal vehicles of non-residents are banned.

Car lanes are the least efficient use of road space in terms of number of passengers carried, but a lot of the wider roads in Paris only contain car lanes.

We can always reduce the amount of lanes for cars, even from 1 to 0 in very old european cities. Cars were once a novelty too, and all street lanes were engulfed by motorised modes of transportation.

Nobody is suggesting anything of the sort.

In a given area (say a full city block, including all roads and alleys within and bordering that block), you might want...

- Pedestrian lane

- Bike+scooter lane (any transport that's ~20mph and <500lbs loaded). That may or may not include gas scooters (50cc Vespa type).

- Auto lane

- parking lane (could be a mix of bike/car parking)

- possibly a transit lane (bus, light rail, etc)

And you don't need every one of these on every block/street - you can alternate. Or use one-way auto lanes on alternating streets to make room for the other modes of transport.

> If a city were to dedicate a single car lane sized lane for “micromobility”

Most cities do not have a car lane sized lane to spare.

If you look at many historic city centres in the Netherlands the solution is to changeover a fraction of those narrow streets into single way streets + cycle path. There is now enough evidence that more lanes does not improve traffic it is just met with more cars to match the increased capacity.

In my city it would be trivial in most roads, you would just have to remove parking on one side. Unfortunately the needs of 10 car owners living in the street are more important than the needs of everyone else...

Of course they are, because the people live there.

The people biking and walking and riding scooters also live there. I'm not sure why 2 out of 3 lanes should be dedicated to people parking their cars.

If you want to live downtown and own a car, you can rent a parking space in a garage.

Then ban or severely limit cars there. You can turn a 2-way street into one way one and turn the other lane into bike/e-mobility one. If not that make it 30km/h zone, allow bikes and allow other mobility devices to take the middle of the lane. Banning cars from some streets is great solution as well.

Wonderfully put, but I take objection to saying "severly limit cars" what you are actually doing is increasing the throughput so that cars can actually get anywhere. Leaving it at status quo limits cars severly by making congestion worse.

You'd be surprised!

Cars are an incredibly inefficient way of transportation. You can easily fit 10x as many bikes in the same space as a car lane. By building a viable biking / scooter infrastructure you reduce the amount of cars on the road, which more than makes up for the space required by this infrastructure.

Besides, car-heavy tend to be designed quite badly. Planners have a tendency to design for the worst-case scenario, so you end up with communities which legally require a 40-foot wide street in a quiet residential area. You simply don't need that much space!

Just a question of priorities

That depends on how many lanes they devote to cars. Most of the main roads near me have at least 2 lanes in each direction - sometimes the inner one is devoted to parking, sometimes to cars, sometimes just to busses and bikes.

Ahahahaha. In a twisted way, you are right. Such is the entitlement and the decades of car dependency that daring to remove even a single lane (driving lane or parking) from the almighty Car traffic, be it for a bus lane or a tramway or a bike lane, sparks incredibly virulent backlash.

I used the lime scotters in Paris 4 years ago, in the pre pandemic times. Oddly useful the few times I used them. Though some Vandal was drawing over the qr codes, make some of them unusable.

I see them in Cambridge where Harvard students own them and zip across the river to the athletic center.

The can go quite fast and as a biker then can be annoying when the try to go past you at 20 mph, but honestly in the bike lane is probably the best place for them

No one is contending that using scooters is bad for the user. They are saying a bunch of drunk users are using them recklessly for non-users and are getting in people's way by parking them all over the sidewalks and streets.

An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros?

> An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros?

I have proposed this before in my city, ticket the e-scoter company for improper parking not the users.

Most of these business have gps trackers on them they will quickly find a way to enforce proper parking onto users.

We need to stop externalizing problems away from companies.

>Most of these business have gps trackers on them they will quickly find a way to enforce proper parking onto users.

BINGO!

Haven't parked your scooter in the designated area? -10 Euros fee on your credit card.

Driving recklessly on the scooter? -30 Euros fee.

I’ve seen Lime have the inverse (ie non parking zones) in various US cities where you will be warned then billed (I think $50! in Venice beach) if you finish the ride.

That is a solution that could work.

I know that in Oslo they can fine the scooter companies for people parking them improperly, but you still have to have officials out looking for them and actually issuing the fines. The result here is that tourist areas have fewer problems, but they're left littering the sidewalks in residential areas.

Heck, you could probably create parking zones (with signs/paint/etc) and most people would use them. Part of the problem now is users don't know where to put the scooters.

You'd think common sense would dictate not across sidewalks, but humans prove time and again that common sense isn't very common.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure fining within EU is a solved problem and for everyone else we have border control.

Fining within the EU is not a solved problem. In 2019, millions of international fines went uncollected because the infrastructure still was buggy. So, legally it is a solved problem, but practical enforcement is not (yet).

Border control does not (currently) detect fines and prevent people from leaving to non-EU locations.

> No one is contending that using scooters is bad for the user.

I'll definitely contend they're bad for the user. Now, to your point about being drunk, it could be due to the facet that in my city they seem to be primarily used for bar hopping, but my partner works in a hospital and has seen too many horrific injuries (and deaths) of scooter riders - like way more than bicyclists or even motorcycles (which he refers to as donor-cycles).

You don't ticket the tourists directly, you ticket the scooter company. You can be sure that the scooter company will either get their money from the riders, or will develop really quick some methods to make it impossible to leave them in undesignated areas.

Take a €30 charge on the credit card when you start the rental. Refund when finished correctly.

> They reduce car usage which is better for both pedestrians and car users.

Most stats show that they don't reduce car usage, the people using them aren't people that give up cars, but people that give up on walking or taking public transport.

I've only seen one stat and it shows that, in Atlanta, following an E-efooter ban, average commute times increased 10%.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-city-of-atlanta-banned-e-sc...

About Atlanta, this is a ban on e-scooter and e-bikes in day times.

About Paris, this is a ban on rental e-scooter.

Here rental scooters are an absolute plague. Their riders routinely ignore both traffic laws and common sense and are a threat to both themselves and pedestrians. There's talk of some form of crackdown amongst the local city council members and I would be delighted to see them banned outright.

Just ban cars first. They are big, dangerous, smelly, loud, driven too fast and they actually kill thousands of people per year, not just cause dangerous situations. Any problem e-scooters have is multiple times worse with cars and they actually have 95+% of the infrastructure dedicated to them and aren't forced into narrow parts of sidewalk called bike lines.

That's about the most aggressively entitled take I've come across to date. Rental e-scooters are bullshit convenience and entertainment devices. What's your plan for hauling groceries for a family of 3, taking kids to the doctor, or hitting the car line twice a day for pickup/dropoff? Uber? Tf they gonna show up in, a rickshaw?

I think that their weight and speed and where one can park them needs to be regulated. Hungary has at least done the last bit in Budapest with rectangles marked in green on the sidewalk. City councils can also rent out this space, preventing scooter chaos. They're also overbuilt for anti vandalism, weighting over 20 kilos. If one hits a pedestrian with a rental scooter, it can cause bad injuries. High speed also puts the scooter operator in danger. Since it's a rental, nobody wears a helmet and almost everybody drives them irresponsibly. Limiting their mass and speed would limit their impact energy.

> Since it's a rental, nobody wears a helmet and almost everybody drives them irresponsibly

In Tel Aviv, all rental scooters come with helmets, and wearing a helmet is actually enforced by the police. Also they are banned from riding on sidewalks. So it seems to be just a regulation/enforcement problem, not intrinsical to scooters themselves or being rental or private.

> So it seems to be just a regulation/enforcement problem

But it is less costly for the cities to remove the problem (ban e-scooter) that to hire people to chase bad e-scooter behavior. Especially if many users of those e-scooter are tourists who will bring back home a bad souvenir of their trip if they get fined.

> But it is less costly for the cities to remove the problem

It does not remove the problem but would simply transfer it elsewhere. In result, either people become significantly less mobile, or they get more used to cars, creating huge traffic jams and polluting cities with noise and fumes.

With scooter, one can get to any point of the city in 15 minutes max and basically for free compared to taxi. It has a huge value for the city economy, and worth the regulators' time.

> tourists who will bring back home a bad souvenir of their trip if they get fined

If you are caught for the first time, you'll just get a warning. So not an issue for a tourist.

Sharing a helmet comes with its own set of hygene issues. I believe most of the EU cycling helmet laws are okay because they make it optional and the rider decides to wear one or not. If we'd adopt similar rules for e-scooters, limiting their speed to 25 km/h (like e-bikes) and their weight to 20 kg or so, it would be possible to ride them on bike lanes. That and designated parking spots for rental, just as the Budapest city council did. Rental e-scooters that are not parked in those spots are picked up and treated like lost objects. I'm quite sure that the rental companies have to pay a fine to recover them or have their license suspended otherwise (= banned from operating the service).

Also, e-scooters are banned from riding on sidewalks just about everywhere. That doesn't necessarily mean the rule is enforced or that collisions with pedestrians don't happen. I've almost been hit while riding a bike by an e-scooter operated by an underage child (in violation of the terms of service) that darted from an alley without right of way.

But I generally agree that it's a regulation issue and outright banning rental scooters is rather extreme. Paris did it with public consultation, so the city coulcil has their backs covered.

> but between an aggressive ticketing campaign

That’s how you solved it. Paris is entirely unable to perform such a campaign, because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say, and Paris is at something like 10x fewer policemen per population compared to the average of US cities, which puts Paris in the category of “self-managed” much more than other cities of the same size.

    because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say

Is it true, that Paris police target minorities unfairly?

And, it is interesting that you chose to compare Paris with a very large population, to an "the average of US cities". Would it be more reasonable to compare to the megas in the US, like NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles? Better, it would be more reasonable to compare to large European cities: Berlin, Frankfurt am Maim, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Milan, Madrid, etc.?

NYC and Chicago yes, LA would be unfair considering the city footprint.

As it's already being said, you don't ticket the individual riders. You ticket the company and let them deal with recouping the losses or creating ways of making the scooters less of an annoyance.

This line of reasoning has actually been used by Seattle activists to resist installation of traffic cameras.[1] Our city also refuses to enforce any traffic laws generally.

[1]: https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/03/01/opinion-seattles-...

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