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

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.