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Comment by rhaway84773 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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!

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.

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.

Just a question of priorities

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