8 ms·
Isn't the best solution for "last mile" for all of us is to walk it?
by Slimbo 7y ago
Isn't the best solution for "last mile" for all of us is to walk it?
- AstralStorm 7y agoOr bike it. Also healthy and infrastructure and laws are there. People with disabilities cannot use these scooters anyway, they need something different.
- Slimbo 7y agoI cycle a lot, but bikes are a pain in that you need somewhere to park them, something to secure them to prevent them getting robbed, they're horrid in the rain and you have to ride on the road or a bike path. I can see the attraction for scooters that avoid these problems, but for the length of journey they're good for, why not just walk?
- ses1984 7y agoHow do scooters solve any of these problems? Do you not have to park scooters? Do they not suck in the rain? Do they not need some surface to ride on?
- BurningFrog 7y agoThe great thing about the scooter is that it isn't mine, so I don't have to worry about it getting stolen. That's it. That's the killer feature.
- AstralStorm 7y agoAnd a rental bike does not have this feature?
- bsder 7y ago> The great thing about the scooter is that it isn't mine, so I don't have to worry about it getting stolen. Except that the scooter companies can't figure this out either and are moving to a monthly rental to put the burden back on you. > In April, it announced the launch of a more traditional rental program in San Francisco and Barcelona, in which users could pay $25 per month to rent a Xiaomi m365 from the company rather than paying per ride. The gig economy is about externalizing all the costs, ya'know.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoFor rentable escooters, the consumer doesn't really have to worry about them being stolen. And they're easier to park than bikes.
- AstralStorm 7y agoBy park you actually mean litter everywhere, as there are very few designated parking places, much fewer than for bicycles.
- Notorious_BLT 7y agoThat's a city planning problem, though. Designated small-vehicle parking that isn't explicitly for bikes seems like a good idea to have. No reason bike storage should be bike-exclusive
- beatgammit 7y agoThe scooter companies are free to fund installation. Honestly, I think scooter companies should be fined for any scooters left in a place that causes problems. It's essentially litter, so it should be treated as such. Scooter companies should be providing some means of locking them up securely and expect their users to use them.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoI doubt there were many parking lots when cars were new, too.
- ses1984 7y agoWhat makes a rentable scooter easier to park than a rentable bike?
- TulliusCicero 7y agoScooters are smaller.
- 7y ago
- verytrivial 7y agoI think it simply comes down to average speed. Have a click around https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/ https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/ and assume scooters are more-or-less the speed of cycles.
- mason55 7y ago> but for the length of journey they're good for, why not just walk? I use scooters occasionally and there is a sweet spot in the 30-60 minute walk range. A 30 minute walk turns into a ~6 minute scooter ride (assuming 3mph walking and 13mph scooter). If you're talking about roundtrip then you're saving over 45 minutes by scootering. Sure, if it's a lazy Saturday and I'm just moseying around then I'll walk. But if I'm running to the gym and back after work then it's worth it to me to save those 45 minutes.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago> People with disabilities cannot use these scooters anyway You are making broad assumptions about what people with disabilities need or want. Disabled does not always mean "wheelchair", and not every disability is visible to you, nor does it need to be. Some disabilities, or other medical conditions, make walking a few blocks (let alone miles) prohibitive. Some disabilities mean taking the elevator rather than the stairs. Some disabilities make a bicycle unusable.
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- mikestew 7y agoAlso healthy... Man, I'm just tryin' to get to work. Why does every alternative to plopping my ass in a giant wheelchair have to be "healthy"? What, "not a car" isn't good enough? infrastructure and laws are there. You might be surprised to find that electric scooters work just as well as bicycles on that infrastructure. Laws? Meh, were my municipality backward (and they are not) it wouldn't necessarily mean I'd pay much attention to their directives until they change.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoPeople with disabilities can't use stairs, should we stop building those too? It's okay to support a mode that only most of the population can use. There are still other modes, just like with stairs and elevators/ramps.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThat's explicitly not what I meant. I meant that disabled people cannot use either. The scooters solve no problems bicycles already do not, not exactly even portability yet. They create problems of litter on sidewalks, trash generation due to damage (where rental bikes are typically fixable if damaged) and issues of safety as they're much less visible and people tend to not use the bell...
- beatgammit 7y agoIf scooters create problems because they're left out, fine the scooter companies for littering. That will cut into their profits, so they'll either innovate ways to make them less of a nuisance or stop doing business. Banning them makes little sense. Cities can help by increasing availability of bike racks, and scooter companies can help by providing locks on those racks to customers.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago> That's explicitly not what I meant. I meant that disabled people cannot use either. So what was the point of bringing it up then? > The scooters solve no problems bicycles already do not Sure they do. Part of the issue with bikes is a chicken and egg problem where politicians are hesitant to invest money into bike infra, because not enough people ride. And many people don't ride because of bad bike infra. Many, perhaps most of the people riding escooters don't ride their own bike around, or wouldn't ride a rentable ebike, for whatever reason. That's why the scooters got uptake much more rapidly than rentable ebikes. So once you have more people on modes that fit bike infrastructure, because of, say, the ease of use and accessibility of electric scooters, it becomes easier to fight for that bike infrastructure.
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- Robotbeat 7y agoIt's likely that more people with disabilities can use these scooters than can use bikes. Additionally, people with disabilities pioneered personal electric transportation long before Bird or Lime. The form factor is different, but the technology is essentially the same. Electric wheelchair tech is highly enabling for people with disabilities.
- decebalus1 7y agoWalking is not disruptive.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoWalking is slow. Walking a mile takes around 20 minutes. If you walk a mile to the transit station at the beginning and walk a mile at the end, that's 40 minutes of travel time before you even factor in the bus/train trip. Of course, walking is to be encouraged where practical, but it has a very short effective range compared to a bike or scooter. Scooters and bikes drastically extend the effective reach of transit stations, with much less of a downside compared to cars (less polluting, less noisy, less danger for others, less parking space).
- pretendscholar 7y ago>Walking is slow. Walking a mile takes around 20 minutes. Maybe if you are crawling. Thats 3 miles an hour.
- my_usernam3 7y agoFactor in stop lights and other holdups, sounds like a good estimate to me. Now let us be generous and say 15min, thats still an extra 30min thus TulliusCicero's point still stands.
- nkoren 7y agoThat's indeed the average adult walking speed.
- servercobra 7y agoFiguring in traffic lights, this is pretty close, even as a fast walker.
- superturkey650 7y agoHave you ever measured how fast you walk? I walk a couple miles every morning at an okay pace with my dog and I still average about 17 minutes a mile.
- pretendscholar 7y agoIf I'm walking alone I do about a 10 minute mile but I think I walk fairly fast.
- BurningFrog 7y agoIt's probably the best solution for you. Please let other people decide what's best for them.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoIt's not just about choice, it's a safety issue. https://www.consumerreports.org/product-safety/deaths-tied-to-e-scooters/ https://www.consumerreports.org/product-safety/deaths-tied-t... > Earlier this year, a CR investigation—which tabulated injuries from 110 hospitals in 47 U.S. cities—found that at least 1,500 riders had been injured since e-scooters were introduced in late 2017, and there were four fatalities. Since then, CR has identified an additional four deaths.
- DuskStar 7y agoOkay, and? Raw death numbers, without corresponding usage numbers, are kind of useless. More people die as pedestrians, or in cars, than on scooters after all. Deaths/mile or deaths/hour would both allow some sort of real comparison.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoThese deaths are on top of the already occurring deaths, these would not have happened if the person was walking instead. > a 5-year-old boy riding with his mother died when he fell off a scooter and was hit by a vehicle.
- kragen 7y agoWhy do you think that? The evidence you described does not support this conclusion; do you have access to some other private evidence you aren't sharing?
- Steltek 7y agoNo, the safety issue is cars. Take away cars and you take away 99.9% of transportation's ~40,0000 annual fatalities.
- benj111 7y agoLast mile is kind of a badly chosen phrase. It should really be the last 10 minutes or 20 minutes. Journeys (especially commutes) are bounded by how long you're willing to travel, rather than how far. Anyway, some people may be able to walk from the station to work in 10 minutes, that radius is fairly small though. A scooter increases that radius significantly, allowing many more people to be within 10 minutes of the station.
- hadlock 7y agoIn Dallas (and other southern cities, Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix etc) your evening commute might involve 20 minutes of walking in 100F/37C which is rather unpleasant. You are drenched in sweat if you're wearing a button down shirt and slacks. I put up with this on a bicycle in my mid-20s but now in later years I would rather just call an uber than be totally miserable. In July-August-September it can be over 90F/32C in the morning commute, with 90%+ humidity. Breezing along in 100F on a scooter at top speed you might still sweat a little bit from the sun, but not much.