12 ms·

A proactive approach to e-scooter safety

59 points by deegles 7y ago

isuckatcoding 7y ago
What do you guys think about e-bikes? I feel like they are a good compromise between bikes and these escooters
- mikestew 7y ago
  I own two scooters (cheap Xiamoi, pricey Boosted Rev). Between the two of us, we have two mid-upper range e-bikes. I've ridden both extensively to work and elsewhere. My conclusion is that e-bikes are the future. Scooters are easy to ride, but hard to ride competently. If you know how to ride a bike, you're unlikely to fall off unless you hit something. Not so on a scooter. I hit a manhole cover on the way to work one morning, and ended up standing next to my scooter with a broken helmet in my hand, while not being 100% sure how to get to work (I'm fine now). I fall of bicycles only when I a patch of black ice, or something solid. I can load my bicycle up with front and rear panniers, a trunk, and carry enough to do some shopping. Scooter: whatever fits in the backpack. Scooter: hands on the handlebars at all times. If you get good, you can carefully choose the smooth spots in the road to take a quick second and scratch your nose. Bicycle: go ahead, take another sip of that coffee from your handlebar coffee cup holder while you cruise down the trail. Hell, take both hands off the bars to zip the jacket up. I love my Boosted Rev, it's well made and a hoot to ride. But it's a recreational vehicle. It's the impractical Lotus Elise that has room for two people and a messenger bag, but what fun to drive. For real transportation work, the bike comes out.
  - dopeboy 7y ago
    I own an ebike (Ancheer) and a escooter (Xiaomi) as well; cool to see your analysis here. You're dead right about ability to handle bumps. With my scooter, I will watch the road in front of me very carefully to scan for rough areas; there's a fair bit more of cognitive load. And this is even with air tires. I might disagree with on what's the future; there's two things that make them so amazing: - Their ability to coexist with pedestrians. I'm very easily to weave in and out of traffic on sidewalks and maintain my safety and that of those around me. It's a lighter foot print with much lower clearance. - Portability. I can fold it up, take in an uber, take it in a train (without doing the excuse me dance in and out). Bikes, electronic ones especially, aren't there yet.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Better in every way, obviously, except for weight and stowability, which is what matters most for a last-mile vehicle. You can't really pick up a 50 lb ebike and carry it onto a train, or stash it under the desk at your office, or carry it up the stairs to your apartment. Ebikes are a car replacement for the suburbs, e-scooters are a walking replacement for the city. They go about the same speed and use the same right of way, but their utility is pretty different.
jandrese 7y ago
No matter what the evidence says people will be decrying how dangers those are because they are perceived as a nuisance. Ultimately they move too fast for sidewalks, and too slow for streets making them a problem in either location. Bike lanes would seem to be the best place for them, but that comes with all of the issues with bike lanes in the city.
- danielbln 7y ago
  What are those issues? Shouldn't every city strive to create as many bike lanes as possible to improve non-car transport?
  - mattbk1 7y ago
    Perhaps the comment was lamenting the lack of bike lanes. As a person who rides a bike as much as I can, I'd be much happier sharing a bike lane with a bunch of scooters than a street with cars.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Delivery vehicles parked in the bike lanes. Cars cutting off the bike lanes at every intersection. No traffic light sensors in the bike lanes. Bike lanes that are poorly connected because they're being retrofitted into the city peacemeal and don't cover the major thoroughfares. These have been discussed to death in other articles, I didn't want to sidetrack this conversation with another digression.
    - MereInterest 7y ago
      At the risk of following the explicitly marked sidetrack/digression, those all sound like issues based on the assumption that only car traffic matters, rather than any issue inherent to bike lanes.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        Until the police enforce other rules the reality is only car traffic matters. Bike lanes and the like are a cheap distraction to shut up a few noisy voters and look green.
olliej 7y ago
I don’t think they’re particularly dangerous, the problem I have is them littering footpaths and thoroughfares (they frequently block most of the plaza in front of the BART station I use. Then there are idiot riders going on and off the footpath essentially playing chicken with pedestrians - I had one this morning going the wrong way on the road scoot onto the footpath immediately in front of me while I was crossing the road, pushing me back into traffic. So it’s a combo of the companies littering the l scooters everywhere, and the riders being idiots and having no consequences for said idiocy.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Just curious, what is your opinion on street parking? Since you're so mad that a public scooter for rent takes up 3 square feet of public space, you must be absolutely furious that a private car can take up 300 square feet.
gameswithgo 7y ago
We have a ton of these in Austin. If they just dropped the allowed max speed by ~25% it would be a lot less horrifying to have them flying around.
- danielbln 7y ago
  Here in Germany all scooters have to be capped at 12.4mph. What's it in Austin?
  - TrueDuality 7y ago
    They used to be able to hit 30mph when they were first deployed. They've reduced the max speed a couple of times and I think its now limited to about 15mph.
    - hannasanarion 7y ago
      Lol what delusional bullshit is this? There aren't any electric scooter models that go above 15 and there never have been. Maybe the $2000 ones can get up to 20, but that's it. The Xaomi m365 that most rental companies have been using since their inception can go up to 15, and they all add a limiter that keeps it below 12.
mech1234 7y ago
I was really hoping to see statistics regarding fatal accident per mile in comparison to other forms of transport, guess I'll have to dig deeper for it. Makes sense that scooters would be roughly similar to bicycles though.
alasarmas 7y ago
In my opinion, the reason why small-wheel (wheel diameter ~6 in / 15 cm) e-scooters are dangerous, is their small wheels. The front wheel can suddenly stop on a a pothole, crack, storm drain, curb, etc, and the rider's momentum will fling them headfirst into the ground. I do recall reading some reports that if the front brake locks up, the same can happen, but I don't know if the risk of that is greater than on a bicycle. (edit: bad metric conversion)
- abawany 7y ago
  Saw it happen once in Austin: one moment person was sailing along a bike lane and next moment it was pivot over the handlebars due to a pothole. They had to call an ambulance and I believe he experienced considerable damage on the face and front teeth.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  As well, the pivot point on the front wheel of a scooter is much further from your center of mass than on a bike, so you're going to go over much easier. The same can absolutely happen on a bike, but in my experience you need to be going much faster (or be much heavier) than on a scooter for the reason I mentioned above.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  It's worse than just small wheels, too. Most e-scooters have rigid wheels rather than air-filled ones, so the issue is compounded since the wheel can't deform enough to deal with bumps. This is one of the reasons I've stopped riding e-scooters in favor of bikes - after the third time having to dump the scooter and almost falling on my face because it hit a half-inch lip or pothole, I decided there are better methods of getting around.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    Since when do most e-scooters have solid tires? Many of them have solid tires available as replacements, but they ship with pneumatic tires.
TrueDuality 7y ago
Washington, DC doesn't seem like a great sample city from my experience. I don't have any empirical data but travel quite a bit and the density of scooter deployment in DC is significantly less than in cities such as Austin, TX. This is based exclusively on my ability to find / use these scooters and the density I've seen on the maps they provide. I suspect there will also be cultural elements to each region they're deployed in that will have a significant impact on injuries (New Jersey drivers/scootees are wildly more aggressive than Minnesotan drivers/scootees). Once again this is all anecdotal but trying to infer anything from one city is likely going to be just as flawed for any meaningful conclusion.
- jmull 7y ago
  > Once again this is all anecdotal but trying to infer anything from one city is likely going to be just as flawed for any meaningful conclusion. Well, DC-based data is quite relevant to DC. You're providing reasons to do similar work in other areas, not reasons to dismiss this work.
  - TrueDuality 7y ago
    The article is attempting to infer general safety data from a single intersection in Washingtion, DC. In that context I hold by my statement. Even for Washington, DC in general it likely isn't representative.
- _jal 7y ago
  I think this is true, also based on my own (different) experience. I both live and work in SOMA, SF, which as far as I can tell was one of the worst ground-zeros when they started shoveling these things on the sidewalks. The situation is far better than it was at first, but my experience as a pedestrian around them is still pretty negative. Some of the Moscone Center (which I walk past daily) conference-goers seem to treat them as a sort of entertainment thing and can be entitled pricks (it is always men) to deal with - I must admit I've become a bit of a grumpy local at the worst of them. I personally really don't care if ever choose to come back to my city - if you're too incompetent, drunk or whatever your problem is to avoid running in to stationary pedestrians, get off the damn thing. But I realize the problem is not nearly so bad elsewhere.
dijit 7y ago
FWIW there is a law in Sweden that prevents any assisted motor transport going over 20KM/h, which is pretty normal cruising speed for a cyclist. There is definitely a different perception here regards to safety because of it I think. However, people are absolutely awful at parking these things. They're almost more dangerous stationary; because people just leave them in the middle of the walkway or cycle path sometimes.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  20km/h is a lot for newbies. I've seen a few users who couldn't drive their scooter safely. Curves taken too late and too wide. Also they use the roads freely and it's even worse than motorbikes.
  - dijit 7y ago
    20KM/h is a lot for newbies? really? I don't think that's true, how do they handle bicycles (which easily exceed that).
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      apple and orange, a bicycle is nothing like an e-scooter and people are still learning them. I swear you see people running into you even though the corner was 5m large.. they just mishandled the inertia and it wasn't an emergency turn. They had plenty of time they were just confused about the physics of it. Contrary to a bike, it's a tad harder to lean into the curve
- rjbwork 7y ago
  That's really slow. I can do that on a bike unassisted easily, and would make my class 3 e-bike less than useless. It's great for doing hills fast and hitting 25+ MPH (40+ KM/h) in the city and makes it a great commuting option. I can top out at about 35 MPH (~55KM/h) on flat land if I really push it and this keeps me moving with street traffic instead of being an impediment to it and a target of rage.
- nl 7y ago
btrettel 7y ago
Interesting that they found cyclists are more likely to run red lights than scooter riders. Here's what a near collision between a cyclist and a scooter rider (who ran a red) looks like from the perspective of a cyclist (me): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN_DGR7isB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN_DGR7isB4 Over the years I've been amazed by the arguments other cyclists have used to justify running red lights. The "physics" argument mentioned in the article isn't convincing to me, because a cyclist's kinetic energy is lost relatively quickly to drag and friction anyway. Stop pedaling. How long will you coast? Probably not very long (i.e., over 100 meters) unless you're going downhill. Seems to me that cycling requires constant energy input and stop lights and signs aren't likely to contribute much to energy expenditures. (Maybe I should do the math...) Edit: I did the math here and the energy from stopping was higher than I expected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257938 I think the time saved from running reds is much lower than most red light running cyclists believe, because anecdotally I observed that red light running cyclists tend to go fairly slow. I can recall keeping up with or catching cyclists who run red lights despite never running them myself. I think cyclists as a whole need to stop running red lights. Yes, there's a double standard here, as most drivers seem okay with speeding if they're doing it, but can't tolerate rule-breaking from cyclists. But we shouldn't give drivers excuses.
- bdamm 7y ago
  There’s been some pack of the napkin research on this, and the conclusion is that a cyclist stopping at every intersection and then speeding up to 20mph vs a cyclist that doesn’t stop and just cruises at 20mph burn 500W vs 100W. Unfortunately I can’t find a link right now but based on my own experience I’d say that is spot on. Stopping and resuming at every stop sign or stop light is far more taxing, so much so that many people wouldn’t even be able to do it and maintain a better than walking reasonable pace through a city.
  - scrumbledober 7y ago
    I think the reasonable alternative then is to walk, not to dangerously run through intersections when it's not your turn. Edit: I will admit that I rarely come to a complete stop at a stop sign. It definitely is a considerable inconvenience to get back up to speed, but a lot of safety precautions are inconvenient.
chrisstanchak 7y ago
I lived directly in the scooter epicenter. Mission Beach, CA. They are dangerous if not throttled down and geofenced from walkway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQv6YP5UGV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQv6YP5UGV8
burlesona 7y ago
It’s pretty easy to observe escooters are roughly equivalent to bikes in terms of speed and visibility, and generally in terms of behavior as well. The biggest variable seems to be whether they ride on the sidewalk: I rarely see bikes on the sidewalk anywhere, but scooters seem to use it in many cities. Just as with bikes the main problem is cars. Road networks designed as car sewers make life miserable for any non-car in close proximity. The single most important way to fix that is to lower the speed of the cars. Practically speaking you can only do that if you have a network of both streets (low speed shared use) and roads (high speed exclusive use), such that cars can get to a road and then go fast, rather than going slow everywhere. But in North America what we have is worse, we’ve designed everything to be a “stroad,” where houses, shops, schools, everything, are directly attached to high speed car sewers and nothing else. That’s the most dangerous configuration you can make. The cars need and want to go fast, but they never know when someone is going to pop out of a driveway or into a crosswalk or there will be a bike in the road etc. The number of scooters isn’t really creating anything new, it’s just highlighting the problems of Stroads by putting a lot more people into the life experience of a cyclist.
carapace 7y ago
> I am now convinced that the more appropriate question may be “Are our streets safe?” Ya think? It's insane to mix car traffic and people. It was deliberately normalized by a systematic campaign of propaganda. (This is true, it really happened: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM ) We went from "speed demons" to "jay walkers". Fast-forward several decades and more Americans have died from cars than from wars. (The rest of the world also has horrific death rates from cars but more time of war.) > These clips make the civil engineer in me cringe. As well they should. We're looking at a system that is, inadvertently but fundamentally, designed to kill people. > One potential solution is to add a bike box to increase visibility of cyclists and scooterists. And that's the Stockholm Syndrome, if you will, causing cognitive dissonance leading to blatantly illogical statements from otherwise sane and intelligent people. Anthropologists point out that every society succeeds at getting it's children to act like it's adults. Part of this is the normalization of whatever weird stuff your society/culture has going on. I'm reminded of what the New Guinea man said the missionary, "If God didn't want us to eat people He wouldn't have made them out of meat." Putting car and non-car traffic on the same road is our cannibalism. "Once you see it..."
- llukas 7y ago
  > It's insane to mix car traffic and people. It is not. Non-car traffic just needs to be prioritized properly, that is being more important than car traffic. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf
  - carapace 7y ago
    Okay those look pretty decent, especially if they are designed with bollards and doglegs and such, so you can't get up to a dangerous velocity around people. It's still a little insane, you're still going to get e.g. kids on bikes getting crushed by multi-ton metal horseless wagons, but it's not as insane as e.g. the clips in the article.
    - 7y ago
mark-r 7y ago
It's a mistake to only consider fatal accidents. I fell while roller skating last year and hit my head. I had to be rushed to the hospital for brain surgery, and spent over a month there recovering. It took over 6 months to get back to work. Obviously this experience has nothing to do with E-scooters, but it does point out how easy it is for a minor accident to mess up your life.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  I'm glad you were able to recover, eventually. I hope it wasn't with too much change to your life :( This is why I drive. All arguments aside about how cities "should" be, I don't live in one where I can magically waive a wand and make things exactly like I want them. And a permanent brain injury (or a major hand/arm injury!) would be really bad for my career. So I also don't actively practice contact-martial-arts anymore.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    Thanks for the well wishes. I think the health care professionals genuinely expected me to have more long-term issues than I ended up having. Early on they told me the key is to be serious about the therapy, and I was.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I wonder if those stats should be normalized for velocity. Bikes can go 20MPH, scooters less, pedestrians 1-3. Velocity means less time in the intersection. But it also means less time to observe their approach, less time to react and less likelihood to even know you are going to have to react.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  It doesn't mean less time in the intersection if the cyclist is starting from standing. Bicycles are slow to get up to speed, motor vehicles, cars and e-scooters, will always get through the intersection before a cyclist will. That's why they run red lights so often: cold starts take more effort and time and can be less safe than running it.
EugeneOZ 7y ago
I have a bicycle and e-scooter, so I can share how it "feels" (I strictly follow rules and never cross the road on a red light): * Scooter is more safe than a bicycle (for a rider). In case of collision it's trivial to step off from the scooter - moving your body from the bicycle takes much more time. * Bicycle is more maneuverable - bigger front wheel gives much more control. * You need less of your attention to drive a scooter, so you have more "CPU time" to monitor the road situation. * Making stops is significantly easier on scooter, so you have less temptation to quickly cross the road in a second before the red light. * Speed should be limited on scooters and it should be "sealed" somehow to prevent "jailbreaking" - after a few days you'll stop "feeling" max speed on e-scooter and you'll want it to go faster, even if you are already faster than any bicycle. It's really dangerous for pedestrians. * By the previous reason, e-scooters should be restricted to bike lanes only. * You have higher chances to sweat when walking, than when riding e-scooter. For some travelers it's important :) Overall, e-scooter is a great tool to deliver you from A to B, but bicycle gives much more satisfaction from the process of riding itself.
- notJim 7y ago
  > Scooter is more safe than a bicycle (for a rider). Weird, I feel the opposite. You can't really just step off a scooter when its at any decent speed (I accidentally tried when the brakes failed on one… would not recommend.) Scooters feel way less stable, and have really weak braking compared to bicycles.
  - EugeneOZ 7y ago
    Yeah, stepping off on a high speed is painful, but on a bicycle it's just impossible. Brakes on my scooter are pretty decent, I can quickly stop even when riding fast (tried it a lot of times). Some scooters have 2 breaks - for the front and back wheel. Mine have just back wheel breaks.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    I guess it depends on what a "decent" speed is. all the rentals where I live top out just under 15mph. it's awkward to dismount at that speed, but it's not a big deal; you just end up running for a few steps.
notJim 7y ago
Portland's Bureau of Transit did a 120-day study of scooters here which has some interest bits of information. The PDF is here: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/709719 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/709719 Findings include that injuries did rise, but most didn't warrant a hospital visit. There were no deaths during the study period. Another interesting finding is that scooters strongly prefer riding on cycling infrastructure, especially neighborhood greenways and protected bike lanes, and are unlikely to ride on the sidewalk when those are present. As the degree of protection increases, however, more people ride on the sidewalk.
huebomont 7y ago
Of course they're not, and anyone concern-trolling about e-scooters while accepting cars as a normal and irreplaceable part of our streetscapes isn't really concerned about safety.
jerome-jh 7y ago
No mention that e-scooters lack braking power to be safe. Many only have a rear brake, which is much less efficient than a front brake for stopping, for any vehicle. But having a front brake on a scooter would be very unsafe as well, because it would be too easy to flip over the front wheel. E-scooters cannot be made safe beyond 10mph/15kph. Ever wondered why bicycles have large wheels?

59 points by deegles 7y ago

isuckatcoding 7y ago

What do you guys think about e-bikes? I feel like they are a good compromise between bikes and these escooters

mikestew 7y ago
I own two scooters (cheap Xiamoi, pricey Boosted Rev). Between the two of us, we have two mid-upper range e-bikes. I've ridden both extensively to work and elsewhere. My conclusion is that e-bikes are the future. Scooters are easy to ride, but hard to ride competently. If you know how to ride a bike, you're unlikely to fall off unless you hit something. Not so on a scooter. I hit a manhole cover on the way to work one morning, and ended up standing next to my scooter with a broken helmet in my hand, while not being 100% sure how to get to work (I'm fine now). I fall of bicycles only when I a patch of black ice, or something solid. I can load my bicycle up with front and rear panniers, a trunk, and carry enough to do some shopping. Scooter: whatever fits in the backpack. Scooter: hands on the handlebars at all times. If you get good, you can carefully choose the smooth spots in the road to take a quick second and scratch your nose. Bicycle: go ahead, take another sip of that coffee from your handlebar coffee cup holder while you cruise down the trail. Hell, take both hands off the bars to zip the jacket up. I love my Boosted Rev, it's well made and a hoot to ride. But it's a recreational vehicle. It's the impractical Lotus Elise that has room for two people and a messenger bag, but what fun to drive. For real transportation work, the bike comes out.
- dopeboy 7y ago
  I own an ebike (Ancheer) and a escooter (Xiaomi) as well; cool to see your analysis here. You're dead right about ability to handle bumps. With my scooter, I will watch the road in front of me very carefully to scan for rough areas; there's a fair bit more of cognitive load. And this is even with air tires. I might disagree with on what's the future; there's two things that make them so amazing: - Their ability to coexist with pedestrians. I'm very easily to weave in and out of traffic on sidewalks and maintain my safety and that of those around me. It's a lighter foot print with much lower clearance. - Portability. I can fold it up, take in an uber, take it in a train (without doing the excuse me dance in and out). Bikes, electronic ones especially, aren't there yet.
hannasanarion 7y ago
Better in every way, obviously, except for weight and stowability, which is what matters most for a last-mile vehicle. You can't really pick up a 50 lb ebike and carry it onto a train, or stash it under the desk at your office, or carry it up the stairs to your apartment. Ebikes are a car replacement for the suburbs, e-scooters are a walking replacement for the city. They go about the same speed and use the same right of way, but their utility is pretty different.

jandrese 7y ago

No matter what the evidence says people will be decrying how dangers those are because they are perceived as a nuisance. Ultimately they move too fast for sidewalks, and too slow for streets making them a problem in either location. Bike lanes would seem to be the best place for them, but that comes with all of the issues with bike lanes in the city.

danielbln 7y ago
What are those issues? Shouldn't every city strive to create as many bike lanes as possible to improve non-car transport?
- mattbk1 7y ago
  Perhaps the comment was lamenting the lack of bike lanes. As a person who rides a bike as much as I can, I'd be much happier sharing a bike lane with a bunch of scooters than a street with cars.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Delivery vehicles parked in the bike lanes. Cars cutting off the bike lanes at every intersection. No traffic light sensors in the bike lanes. Bike lanes that are poorly connected because they're being retrofitted into the city peacemeal and don't cover the major thoroughfares. These have been discussed to death in other articles, I didn't want to sidetrack this conversation with another digression.
  - MereInterest 7y ago
    At the risk of following the explicitly marked sidetrack/digression, those all sound like issues based on the assumption that only car traffic matters, rather than any issue inherent to bike lanes.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Until the police enforce other rules the reality is only car traffic matters. Bike lanes and the like are a cheap distraction to shut up a few noisy voters and look green.

olliej 7y ago

I don’t think they’re particularly dangerous, the problem I have is them littering footpaths and thoroughfares (they frequently block most of the plaza in front of the BART station I use. Then there are idiot riders going on and off the footpath essentially playing chicken with pedestrians - I had one this morning going the wrong way on the road scoot onto the footpath immediately in front of me while I was crossing the road, pushing me back into traffic. So it’s a combo of the companies littering the l scooters everywhere, and the riders being idiots and having no consequences for said idiocy.

hannasanarion 7y ago
Just curious, what is your opinion on street parking? Since you're so mad that a public scooter for rent takes up 3 square feet of public space, you must be absolutely furious that a private car can take up 300 square feet.

gameswithgo 7y ago

We have a ton of these in Austin. If they just dropped the allowed max speed by ~25% it would be a lot less horrifying to have them flying around.

danielbln 7y ago
Here in Germany all scooters have to be capped at 12.4mph. What's it in Austin?
- TrueDuality 7y ago
  They used to be able to hit 30mph when they were first deployed. They've reduced the max speed a couple of times and I think its now limited to about 15mph.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    Lol what delusional bullshit is this? There aren't any electric scooter models that go above 15 and there never have been. Maybe the $2000 ones can get up to 20, but that's it. The Xaomi m365 that most rental companies have been using since their inception can go up to 15, and they all add a limiter that keeps it below 12.

mech1234 7y ago

I was really hoping to see statistics regarding fatal accident per mile in comparison to other forms of transport, guess I'll have to dig deeper for it. Makes sense that scooters would be roughly similar to bicycles though.

alasarmas 7y ago

In my opinion, the reason why small-wheel (wheel diameter ~6 in / 15 cm) e-scooters are dangerous, is their small wheels. The front wheel can suddenly stop on a a pothole, crack, storm drain, curb, etc, and the rider's momentum will fling them headfirst into the ground. I do recall reading some reports that if the front brake locks up, the same can happen, but I don't know if the risk of that is greater than on a bicycle. (edit: bad metric conversion)

abawany 7y ago
Saw it happen once in Austin: one moment person was sailing along a bike lane and next moment it was pivot over the handlebars due to a pothole. They had to call an ambulance and I believe he experienced considerable damage on the face and front teeth.
nkrisc 7y ago
As well, the pivot point on the front wheel of a scooter is much further from your center of mass than on a bike, so you're going to go over much easier. The same can absolutely happen on a bike, but in my experience you need to be going much faster (or be much heavier) than on a scooter for the reason I mentioned above.
mdorazio 7y ago
It's worse than just small wheels, too. Most e-scooters have rigid wheels rather than air-filled ones, so the issue is compounded since the wheel can't deform enough to deal with bumps. This is one of the reasons I've stopped riding e-scooters in favor of bikes - after the third time having to dump the scooter and almost falling on my face because it hit a half-inch lip or pothole, I decided there are better methods of getting around.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Since when do most e-scooters have solid tires? Many of them have solid tires available as replacements, but they ship with pneumatic tires.

TrueDuality 7y ago

Washington, DC doesn't seem like a great sample city from my experience. I don't have any empirical data but travel quite a bit and the density of scooter deployment in DC is significantly less than in cities such as Austin, TX. This is based exclusively on my ability to find / use these scooters and the density I've seen on the maps they provide. I suspect there will also be cultural elements to each region they're deployed in that will have a significant impact on injuries (New Jersey drivers/scootees are wildly more aggressive than Minnesotan drivers/scootees). Once again this is all anecdotal but trying to infer anything from one city is likely going to be just as flawed for any meaningful conclusion.

jmull 7y ago
> Once again this is all anecdotal but trying to infer anything from one city is likely going to be just as flawed for any meaningful conclusion. Well, DC-based data is quite relevant to DC. You're providing reasons to do similar work in other areas, not reasons to dismiss this work.
- TrueDuality 7y ago
  The article is attempting to infer general safety data from a single intersection in Washingtion, DC. In that context I hold by my statement. Even for Washington, DC in general it likely isn't representative.
_jal 7y ago
I think this is true, also based on my own (different) experience. I both live and work in SOMA, SF, which as far as I can tell was one of the worst ground-zeros when they started shoveling these things on the sidewalks. The situation is far better than it was at first, but my experience as a pedestrian around them is still pretty negative. Some of the Moscone Center (which I walk past daily) conference-goers seem to treat them as a sort of entertainment thing and can be entitled pricks (it is always men) to deal with - I must admit I've become a bit of a grumpy local at the worst of them. I personally really don't care if ever choose to come back to my city - if you're too incompetent, drunk or whatever your problem is to avoid running in to stationary pedestrians, get off the damn thing. But I realize the problem is not nearly so bad elsewhere.

dijit 7y ago

FWIW there is a law in Sweden that prevents any assisted motor transport going over 20KM/h, which is pretty normal cruising speed for a cyclist. There is definitely a different perception here regards to safety because of it I think. However, people are absolutely awful at parking these things. They're almost more dangerous stationary; because people just leave them in the middle of the walkway or cycle path sometimes.

agumonkey 7y ago
20km/h is a lot for newbies. I've seen a few users who couldn't drive their scooter safely. Curves taken too late and too wide. Also they use the roads freely and it's even worse than motorbikes.
- dijit 7y ago
  20KM/h is a lot for newbies? really? I don't think that's true, how do they handle bicycles (which easily exceed that).
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    apple and orange, a bicycle is nothing like an e-scooter and people are still learning them. I swear you see people running into you even though the corner was 5m large.. they just mishandled the inertia and it wasn't an emergency turn. They had plenty of time they were just confused about the physics of it. Contrary to a bike, it's a tad harder to lean into the curve
rjbwork 7y ago
That's really slow. I can do that on a bike unassisted easily, and would make my class 3 e-bike less than useless. It's great for doing hills fast and hitting 25+ MPH (40+ KM/h) in the city and makes it a great commuting option. I can top out at about 35 MPH (~55KM/h) on flat land if I really push it and this keeps me moving with street traffic instead of being an impediment to it and a target of rage.
nl 7y ago

btrettel 7y ago

Interesting that they found cyclists are more likely to run red lights than scooter riders. Here's what a near collision between a cyclist and a scooter rider (who ran a red) looks like from the perspective of a cyclist (me): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN_DGR7isB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN_DGR7isB4 Over the years I've been amazed by the arguments other cyclists have used to justify running red lights. The "physics" argument mentioned in the article isn't convincing to me, because a cyclist's kinetic energy is lost relatively quickly to drag and friction anyway. Stop pedaling. How long will you coast? Probably not very long (i.e., over 100 meters) unless you're going downhill. Seems to me that cycling requires constant energy input and stop lights and signs aren't likely to contribute much to energy expenditures. (Maybe I should do the math...) Edit: I did the math here and the energy from stopping was higher than I expected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257938 I think the time saved from running reds is much lower than most red light running cyclists believe, because anecdotally I observed that red light running cyclists tend to go fairly slow. I can recall keeping up with or catching cyclists who run red lights despite never running them myself. I think cyclists as a whole need to stop running red lights. Yes, there's a double standard here, as most drivers seem okay with speeding if they're doing it, but can't tolerate rule-breaking from cyclists. But we shouldn't give drivers excuses.

bdamm 7y ago
There’s been some pack of the napkin research on this, and the conclusion is that a cyclist stopping at every intersection and then speeding up to 20mph vs a cyclist that doesn’t stop and just cruises at 20mph burn 500W vs 100W. Unfortunately I can’t find a link right now but based on my own experience I’d say that is spot on. Stopping and resuming at every stop sign or stop light is far more taxing, so much so that many people wouldn’t even be able to do it and maintain a better than walking reasonable pace through a city.
- scrumbledober 7y ago
  I think the reasonable alternative then is to walk, not to dangerously run through intersections when it's not your turn. Edit: I will admit that I rarely come to a complete stop at a stop sign. It definitely is a considerable inconvenience to get back up to speed, but a lot of safety precautions are inconvenient.

chrisstanchak 7y ago

I lived directly in the scooter epicenter. Mission Beach, CA. They are dangerous if not throttled down and geofenced from walkway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQv6YP5UGV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQv6YP5UGV8

burlesona 7y ago

It’s pretty easy to observe escooters are roughly equivalent to bikes in terms of speed and visibility, and generally in terms of behavior as well. The biggest variable seems to be whether they ride on the sidewalk: I rarely see bikes on the sidewalk anywhere, but scooters seem to use it in many cities. Just as with bikes the main problem is cars. Road networks designed as car sewers make life miserable for any non-car in close proximity. The single most important way to fix that is to lower the speed of the cars. Practically speaking you can only do that if you have a network of both streets (low speed shared use) and roads (high speed exclusive use), such that cars can get to a road and then go fast, rather than going slow everywhere. But in North America what we have is worse, we’ve designed everything to be a “stroad,” where houses, shops, schools, everything, are directly attached to high speed car sewers and nothing else. That’s the most dangerous configuration you can make. The cars need and want to go fast, but they never know when someone is going to pop out of a driveway or into a crosswalk or there will be a bike in the road etc. The number of scooters isn’t really creating anything new, it’s just highlighting the problems of Stroads by putting a lot more people into the life experience of a cyclist.

carapace 7y ago

> I am now convinced that the more appropriate question may be “Are our streets safe?” Ya think? It's insane to mix car traffic and people. It was deliberately normalized by a systematic campaign of propaganda. (This is true, it really happened: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM ) We went from "speed demons" to "jay walkers". Fast-forward several decades and more Americans have died from cars than from wars. (The rest of the world also has horrific death rates from cars but more time of war.) > These clips make the civil engineer in me cringe. As well they should. We're looking at a system that is, inadvertently but fundamentally, designed to kill people. > One potential solution is to add a bike box to increase visibility of cyclists and scooterists. And that's the Stockholm Syndrome, if you will, causing cognitive dissonance leading to blatantly illogical statements from otherwise sane and intelligent people. Anthropologists point out that every society succeeds at getting it's children to act like it's adults. Part of this is the normalization of whatever weird stuff your society/culture has going on. I'm reminded of what the New Guinea man said the missionary, "If God didn't want us to eat people He wouldn't have made them out of meat." Putting car and non-car traffic on the same road is our cannibalism. "Once you see it..."

llukas 7y ago
> It's insane to mix car traffic and people. It is not. Non-car traffic just needs to be prioritized properly, that is being more important than car traffic. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf
- carapace 7y ago
  Okay those look pretty decent, especially if they are designed with bollards and doglegs and such, so you can't get up to a dangerous velocity around people. It's still a little insane, you're still going to get e.g. kids on bikes getting crushed by multi-ton metal horseless wagons, but it's not as insane as e.g. the clips in the article.
  - 7y ago

mark-r 7y ago

It's a mistake to only consider fatal accidents. I fell while roller skating last year and hit my head. I had to be rushed to the hospital for brain surgery, and spent over a month there recovering. It took over 6 months to get back to work. Obviously this experience has nothing to do with E-scooters, but it does point out how easy it is for a minor accident to mess up your life.

moron4hire 7y ago
I'm glad you were able to recover, eventually. I hope it wasn't with too much change to your life :( This is why I drive. All arguments aside about how cities "should" be, I don't live in one where I can magically waive a wand and make things exactly like I want them. And a permanent brain injury (or a major hand/arm injury!) would be really bad for my career. So I also don't actively practice contact-martial-arts anymore.
- mark-r 7y ago
  Thanks for the well wishes. I think the health care professionals genuinely expected me to have more long-term issues than I ended up having. Early on they told me the key is to be serious about the therapy, and I was.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

I wonder if those stats should be normalized for velocity. Bikes can go 20MPH, scooters less, pedestrians 1-3. Velocity means less time in the intersection. But it also means less time to observe their approach, less time to react and less likelihood to even know you are going to have to react.

hannasanarion 7y ago
It doesn't mean less time in the intersection if the cyclist is starting from standing. Bicycles are slow to get up to speed, motor vehicles, cars and e-scooters, will always get through the intersection before a cyclist will. That's why they run red lights so often: cold starts take more effort and time and can be less safe than running it.

EugeneOZ 7y ago

I have a bicycle and e-scooter, so I can share how it "feels" (I strictly follow rules and never cross the road on a red light): * Scooter is more safe than a bicycle (for a rider). In case of collision it's trivial to step off from the scooter - moving your body from the bicycle takes much more time. * Bicycle is more maneuverable - bigger front wheel gives much more control. * You need less of your attention to drive a scooter, so you have more "CPU time" to monitor the road situation. * Making stops is significantly easier on scooter, so you have less temptation to quickly cross the road in a second before the red light. * Speed should be limited on scooters and it should be "sealed" somehow to prevent "jailbreaking" - after a few days you'll stop "feeling" max speed on e-scooter and you'll want it to go faster, even if you are already faster than any bicycle. It's really dangerous for pedestrians. * By the previous reason, e-scooters should be restricted to bike lanes only. * You have higher chances to sweat when walking, than when riding e-scooter. For some travelers it's important :) Overall, e-scooter is a great tool to deliver you from A to B, but bicycle gives much more satisfaction from the process of riding itself.

notJim 7y ago
> Scooter is more safe than a bicycle (for a rider). Weird, I feel the opposite. You can't really just step off a scooter when its at any decent speed (I accidentally tried when the brakes failed on one… would not recommend.) Scooters feel way less stable, and have really weak braking compared to bicycles.
- EugeneOZ 7y ago
  Yeah, stepping off on a high speed is painful, but on a bicycle it's just impossible. Brakes on my scooter are pretty decent, I can quickly stop even when riding fast (tried it a lot of times). Some scooters have 2 breaks - for the front and back wheel. Mine have just back wheel breaks.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  I guess it depends on what a "decent" speed is. all the rentals where I live top out just under 15mph. it's awkward to dismount at that speed, but it's not a big deal; you just end up running for a few steps.

notJim 7y ago

Portland's Bureau of Transit did a 120-day study of scooters here which has some interest bits of information. The PDF is here: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/709719 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/709719 Findings include that injuries did rise, but most didn't warrant a hospital visit. There were no deaths during the study period. Another interesting finding is that scooters strongly prefer riding on cycling infrastructure, especially neighborhood greenways and protected bike lanes, and are unlikely to ride on the sidewalk when those are present. As the degree of protection increases, however, more people ride on the sidewalk.

huebomont 7y ago

Of course they're not, and anyone concern-trolling about e-scooters while accepting cars as a normal and irreplaceable part of our streetscapes isn't really concerned about safety.

jerome-jh 7y ago

No mention that e-scooters lack braking power to be safe. Many only have a rear brake, which is much less efficient than a front brake for stopping, for any vehicle. But having a front brake on a scooter would be very unsafe as well, because it would be too easy to flip over the front wheel. E-scooters cannot be made safe beyond 10mph/15kph. Ever wondered why bicycles have large wheels?