Thoughts on my first electric scooter purchase
maxmautner.com
maxmautner.com
I much prefer it to driving; you get to experience the open air; it's exciting, there's no traffic and it's often faster than driving. If I look at the money I've saved in gas & parking, my scooter has paid for itself almost 3x so it's cost-efficient too.
I heartily recommend that anyone with a commute of 30km or less per day try one out. Especially if you live in an area with good cycle-lane coverage. It really hits that sweetspot of efficient, enjoyable and cheap transportation.
- No insurance required - No registration - Can use both bike lanes and sidewalls where I live - Park anywhere I can lock it to something - Nearly maintenance free (tires and bearings only) - Saves unnecessary wear on my vehicles; could replace them entirely if I wasn't a motorhead
I have absolutely no regrets about my dual motor scooter
I don't know about where you live but where I'm at, no adult wears a helmet on a <20mph escooter.
I said wear a helmet and eye pro because at 25-35mph and above the wind is so strong you can't keep your eyes open and clear without it, hahaha
A bike, electric or acoustic, can go just as fast and be less particular about road quality. A Walmart pedal bike can get you a long way for rather cheap
Yes I understand there are folding bikes, and provisions to allow bikes to be stored inside buildings too. But neither are perfectly implemented.
Leaving a halfway decent bike outside, locked or not, is just begging it to be stolen sooner or later.
E-scooters are not very easy to carry, either (15+ kgs is not light, and they're relatively long), but they're practical enough to use consistently.
If it weren't for the heavy snowfall we get I would be able to get rid of one car; for now it just sits unused for 1/3rd of the year.
Patagonia makes great rain jackets that have hoods that can adjust to fit over a helmet.
https://www.ternbicycles.com/us/accessories/473/storm-shield
We all wear helmets, we almost exclusively use bike/walk infrastructure, and we take it slow.
The biggest risk in my mind is interacting in any way with cars. And so I avoid cars on our routes as much as possible. And I regularly “break the law” by riding on sidewalks because paint on the road is not bike infrastructure and my life is more valuable to me than some ticket for a ridiculous law.
I've found that for a decent lightweight commuter scooter with a suspension to make it somewhat comfortable to ride, getting closer to $1000 is a more reasonable budget. The model in the blog post is more of a kids toy.
Besides size and cost, why e-scooter instead of e-bicycle?
Asking as I am thinking of getting an e-something, but my travel need is around 29km/18mi.
(edit: swap units)
My city trips are from 5 minutes to around 45. For short trips, where one doesn't use public transport (for me, the threshold is around 15 minutes), bikes are definitely more practical, but when public transport comes into play, bikes are too bulky to comfortably carry.
[0] https://www.kostkafootbike.com/twenty/899-foldable-footbike-...
These are great
Any other recommendations for entry level scooters?
- the very first issue is weather. Sometimes it rain, sometimes snow, sometimes it's too hot and so on, open-air travel under this very common weather condition is far from being nice, so they can be used only a subset of the year, but to be usable you need to be in a dense area for all the year, meaning you'll have another mean of transport witch tend to be underutilized and does not offer comfy condition as well because of city density, meaning when it rain the traffic skyrocket;
- they encourage producing more waste, yes, you read it correctly: you use something not suited to have anything but yourself, so you'll probably eat ready made packed food and than drop the package, you can't buy large quantities so again more package. Actual narrative sell the city as green, but it's only dollar-green, not spring grass green.
Yes, on icy compact snow you can ride a bike issueless. Definitively not on partially molten snow, yes you can ride a bike when it rain, no special issues, except you reach your destination very wet. You can do the same in hot summers, reaching your destination equally wet, and smelling.
It's not a people issue, it's a desperate propaganda issue to being able to sell the modern city, the perfect way to enslave people pushing all back to the classic proletariat.
They know cities are absurd. They say they are efficient, of course, it's efficient build big buildings using some just to sleep and some just to work, occupied 50% of the time, keeping commuting between them "but hey, at a 15' range!", they know the city is made to consume, producing a far bigger slice of rubbish than spread living, because you just ride a scooter and so you buy small things, you eat ready made food and so on, a gazillion of packages to the bin, and in your own free time you go outside just to consume services. There is nothing else in a city. With this model you can push people to the zero ownership, rent anything, and to rent you need to work, as the owner of the city, who do not live there, offer. A social score in the middle.
Just take a look at https://youtu.be/NXyzpMDtpSE this is the future western city, where people need to be happy, smiling, the Canon model: https://petapixel.com/2021/06/17/canon-uses-ai-cameras-that-...
The people problem is that many accept such model. They like the idea "hey, renting anything meaning far less to take care and think of", "hey, no need to have money for capex" and so on.