4 ms·

NA cities have never built high quality separated bike lane infrastructure to make it all that safe to ride a bike or scooter on the road. What happens when so

NA cities have never built high quality separated bike lane infrastructure to make it all that safe to ride a bike or scooter on the road. What happens when someone riding one of these gets killed by a driver?

fleitz 8y ago
They let their insurance policy deal with it?
godzillabrennus 8y ago
The same thing that happens in any accident. The parties involved find a settlement or go to court for a judgement. In such matters it would be naive and a breach of fiduciary duty of Bird’s Team not to have insurance to cover those matters.
protonimitate 8y ago
Same thing that happens now when bikers get killed - brief outrage, a meager attempt to 'improve biker infrastructure' and then..nothing. If Bird has already achieved a $2B valuation, it will take massive amounts of user deaths to warrant any change in that valuation.
stevenwoo 8y ago
There are rarely reprecussions for a driver hitting/killing a single cyclist, without video evidence or multiple corroborating witnesses/victims, typically law enforcement pre emptively blames the cyclist so one would expect the same thing for scooter riders. An old editorial about this attitude: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-to-kill-cyclists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
notatoad 8y ago
Odds are, the scooter rider won't be wearing a helmet. And in cyclist / motor vehicle collisions, that's usually enough to make it the cyclist's fault.
cbhl 8y ago
Bikes are in a no-mans land because of speed differences -- they're too slow to go on the road, and too fast to safely mix with pedestrians on sidewalks. I personally prefer dockless bikes over scooters, but I will admit that scooters are safer because of their lower top speed. This makes it reasonable to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided that the sidewalk is wide enough. The key to making bike/scooter-sharing work is to make the infrastructure cheap, incremental, and easy. Google ran into the same problems with GBikes blocking ADA ramps and front doors that cities are seeing with scooters. One big thing that helped was converting a few parking spaces into bike parking (literally just green paint and a few signs), and putting friendly "don't block ADA parking or ramps" signs up. If you want to prevent "deaths from drivers", the highest impact thing would be to work on self-driving cars (join the great engineers at Waymo, Cruise, or even Uber).
- kwindla 8y ago
  > This makes it reasonable to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided that the sidewalk is wide enough. Respectfully, please no no no no no. People were riding scooters on the sidewalk all over San Francisco and it definitely did not feel safe to be a pedestrian. In my opinion (no data, just individual experience), no city that I've ever visited has typical sidewalks that are wide enough to mix walking traffic with ~10mph, not very maneuverable, wheeled vehicles.
- microdrum 8y ago
  Do you know what someone running on a sidewalk at 12mph feels like? It feels fast. It feels incredibly stupid.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>What happens when someone riding one of these gets killed by a driver? Probably the same way they normally are. It depends on the circumstances. Generally speaking the rules that govern traffic flow have a bunch of redundancy and whoever violated more of them is at fault regardless of mode of transportation, liability depends on state law, human factors (how "sympathetic" is the victim is the big one), etc. Generally speaking the system works fine unless you consider the normal bickering over who's at fault to be not fine (the same bickering you get when both parties have the same mode of transportation).

fleitz 8y ago

They let their insurance policy deal with it?

godzillabrennus 8y ago

The same thing that happens in any accident. The parties involved find a settlement or go to court for a judgement. In such matters it would be naive and a breach of fiduciary duty of Bird’s Team not to have insurance to cover those matters.

protonimitate 8y ago

Same thing that happens now when bikers get killed - brief outrage, a meager attempt to 'improve biker infrastructure' and then..nothing. If Bird has already achieved a $2B valuation, it will take massive amounts of user deaths to warrant any change in that valuation.

stevenwoo 8y ago

There are rarely reprecussions for a driver hitting/killing a single cyclist, without video evidence or multiple corroborating witnesses/victims, typically law enforcement pre emptively blames the cyclist so one would expect the same thing for scooter riders. An old editorial about this attitude: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-to-kill-cyclists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...

notatoad 8y ago

Odds are, the scooter rider won't be wearing a helmet. And in cyclist / motor vehicle collisions, that's usually enough to make it the cyclist's fault.

cbhl 8y ago

Bikes are in a no-mans land because of speed differences -- they're too slow to go on the road, and too fast to safely mix with pedestrians on sidewalks. I personally prefer dockless bikes over scooters, but I will admit that scooters are safer because of their lower top speed. This makes it reasonable to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided that the sidewalk is wide enough. The key to making bike/scooter-sharing work is to make the infrastructure cheap, incremental, and easy. Google ran into the same problems with GBikes blocking ADA ramps and front doors that cities are seeing with scooters. One big thing that helped was converting a few parking spaces into bike parking (literally just green paint and a few signs), and putting friendly "don't block ADA parking or ramps" signs up. If you want to prevent "deaths from drivers", the highest impact thing would be to work on self-driving cars (join the great engineers at Waymo, Cruise, or even Uber).

kwindla 8y ago
> This makes it reasonable to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided that the sidewalk is wide enough. Respectfully, please no no no no no. People were riding scooters on the sidewalk all over San Francisco and it definitely did not feel safe to be a pedestrian. In my opinion (no data, just individual experience), no city that I've ever visited has typical sidewalks that are wide enough to mix walking traffic with ~10mph, not very maneuverable, wheeled vehicles.
microdrum 8y ago
Do you know what someone running on a sidewalk at 12mph feels like? It feels fast. It feels incredibly stupid.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

>What happens when someone riding one of these gets killed by a driver? Probably the same way they normally are. It depends on the circumstances. Generally speaking the rules that govern traffic flow have a bunch of redundancy and whoever violated more of them is at fault regardless of mode of transportation, liability depends on state law, human factors (how "sympathetic" is the victim is the big one), etc. Generally speaking the system works fine unless you consider the normal bickering over who's at fault to be not fine (the same bickering you get when both parties have the same mode of transportation).