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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Rental escooters are a MENACE - and i'm not old either - just been nearly mown down by one several times.

In Paris each years 90 persons are not "nearly mown down" by rental escooters but killed by cars, taxis and motorcycle. Plus thousands of people killed by toxic gases from cars, taxis and motorbikes.

> Plus thousands of people killed by toxic gases from cars, taxis and motorbikes.

Please substantiate this claim. Thank you.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

Air polution != "toxic gases from cars, taxis and motorbikes". That's only subset. Cities were dirty holes (including bad air) centuries before invention of cars.

Continuing, they didn't measure anything. They estimated.

Have a good reading :

In Paris, air pollution kills 5,400 people every year

https://www-francebleu-fr.translate.goog/infos/transports/a-...

https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/transports/a-paris-la-pollut...

Air pollution is responsible for more than 5,000 deaths each year in Paris according to a study published on Wednesday. Published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal, it calculated premature deaths linked to PM2.5 fine particle pollution and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in 1,000 European cities. The French capital appears to be one of the cities where automobile pollution kills the most.

As to the sibling: air pollution != "toxic gases from cars, taxis and motorbikes". Your linked article says "road traffic, industry, airports, ports, but also wood and coal heating".

Furthermore, the lancet paper only estimates, they didn't measure anything. The linked article presents an hypothesis as if it was proved. It was not.

How does that justify e-scooters compared to, say, decent bike lanes and better infrastructure planning?

This poses a false dichotomy where you're either riding a car, or littering the streets with rental e-scooters. In practice, this isn't the case. It's fairly well documented e-scooters aren't replacing car rides, but pedestrian traffic.

I agree, I don't know where other people live or if they go out at all in a major city, but scooters ride dangerously fast on sidewalks, in parks, even on the road alongside cars.

I completely understand it's due to the lack of alternative riding infrastructure (ideally they would ride on bicycle lanes, but not everywhere is like The Netherlands), but you wouldn't ride a bike on a sidewalk, and riding on the road is very dangerous on these scooters.

So yeah they're either a menace to pedestriands because they don't drive safely on pedestrian areas, or they're a menace to cars because they're very unstable on the roads and put themselves in danger, least of all because most people who ride them don't really know road legislation.

Way less so than cars. They're just used by the young who don't vote.

I have never had an issue despite living in a large european city. Maybe the reason is that, unlike some people, I don't blindly step into bike lanes.

lmao this guy thinks scooters only ride on bike lanes

Usual HN cycling c-j on full display.

Where there is proper infrastructure this works relatively okay. Where there is no infrastructure scooters take the pedastrian way as roads are dangerous.

Copenhagen banned rental scooters from the city centre.

For some reason, people were finishing their ride and leaving the scooter in the bike lane, across the sidewalk, across a pedestrian crossing etc.

The rental companies were intentionally blocking the sidewalk in the city centre, arranging the scooters in neat lines overnight. Presumably for visibility/advertising.

All this happens to a much lesser extent with the SV-style ebike rental companies, though it's still not unusual to see those parked badly.

It happens rarely with the manual bike rental company. I think they make you photograph the parked bike when you finish, so they are almost always in a bike rack.

> Where there is proper infrastructure this works relatively okay.

Thanks. Best joke i have heard in the last year.

I hear so often from people who were "nearly" mown down, but barely ever from someone who was actually mown down

Because they're dead?

For Isabelle Vanbrabant, any regulations are too late. The pianist at Paris’s famed opera was coming home from work last month and walking across a square near Les Halles when a rider on an electric scooter came up from behind, knocking her over and continuing on his way.

She fell on her right arm, suffering multiple fractures. She yelled for the rider to return, which he then did, and to call for help. However, her prognosis is uncertain.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/06/paris-taking-s...

I don't doubt that there are plenty of examples of people being hit by scooters, and there's definitely even more examples of people being hit by cars.

But I mean whenever people are giving their anecdotal evidence as to why they don't want scooters it's always because they were "almost" hit, I'd never read a comment from someone who was actually hit and almost is very subjective.

When considering something like this we should really be looking at the data, rather than yelling about people who were almost hit

I've certainly almost been hit by scooters on the pavement, annoying but not scary since I'm reasonably fit, a hit probably wouldn't cause me that much of an injury (with luck). But if you're old and fragile, that's a broken hip and 6-9 months immobile when you've not much time left, that could reasonably scare the crap out of you and make you scared to go outside. "Almost hit" has consequences too.

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