8 ms·

I would like to provide a contrasting viewpoint. I can’t speak to the situation in Paris, but in the city I live in, scooters are amazing. They reduce car usage

by arijun 4y ago

I would like to provide a contrasting viewpoint. I can’t speak to the situation in Paris, but in the city I live in, scooters are amazing. They reduce car usage which is better for both pedestrians and car users. They turn a 45 minute walk/30 minute bus ride/20 minute cab into a 10-15 minute trip, which opens up much more of the city (the city I live in was not built for the number of cars it has in it so getting anywhere is a slog). When they first came there were a bunch of scooter on pedestrian collisions, but between an aggressive ticketing campaign, adding bike lanes, and adding slow zones, these numbers have gone way down. (I rarely use them as I tend to cycle everywhere, I’m just glad my city has them)

acomjean 4y ago
I used the lime scotters in Paris 4 years ago, in the pre pandemic times. Oddly useful the few times I used them. Though some Vandal was drawing over the qr codes, make some of them unusable. I see them in Cambridge where Harvard students own them and zip across the river to the athletic center. The can go quite fast and as a biker then can be annoying when the try to go past you at 20 mph, but honestly in the bike lane is probably the best place for them
rhaway84773 4y ago
The real problem with scooters is cuties unwilling to provide them with proper infrastructure. Bike lanes in most cities (out of the better European cycling cities), tend to be narrow and about 1/4 - 1/3 the size of a car lane. If a city were to dedicate a single car lane sized lane for “micromobility” and responded quickly to damage to this lane (which wouldn’t be as frequent for the obvious reason that damage is proportional to weight, and scooters and bikes are way lighter than cars), scooters would not be a problem at all. A city may decide it doesn’t want dockless scooters, but even that problem could be resolved by replacing 1 car parking spot on every street into a scooter/bike dock.
- meghan_rain 4y ago
  cuties ^_^
  - danmur 4y ago
    They get away with it because they're cute damn them
- ouid 4y ago
  You can't add a lane for every "new" mode of transportation...
  - klodolph 4y ago
    It sounds like the parent comment is talking about expanding & improving bike lanes, rather than forcing electric scooters into car lanes (where they are at risk), undersized bike lanes (where they endanger bicyclists), or banning them outright (where you’re now stuck with more demand for car traffic).
    - vetinari 4y ago
      Yes, but the comment you are responding too notes, that city streets are not stretchable, so you cannot add full-sized lanes for everyone's new toy.
      - soco 4y ago
        There's an answer to this, an answer which I see implemented in some places: cutting into the car lanes. Because you don't have to drive through the historical center.
        vetinari 4y ago
        In the cities, where nobody really lives in the historical center, it is doable. (We are not talking about driving through; we are talking about access/servicing; there are very few cities without a ring -- or several rings -- where driving through center is the fastest way from one end to another). In the cities, where real people live there, it is not. Every part of the city needs servicing, including center. Your plumber won't lug his tools on a scooter; your furniture won't teleport itself into your house either. Every now and then, the residents themselves need to bring in or out their heavier or larger crap, so issuing permits to entry to well-connected companies is not a solution. Yes, I do live in city center; and yes, we also have people who know nothing about living there, but they go to pub there every Saturday night, so they have strong ideas how it should be. It is not limiting them, after all.
- pif 4y ago
  > If a city were to dedicate a single car lane sized lane for “micromobility” Most cities do not have a car lane sized lane to spare.
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    If you look at many historic city centres in the Netherlands the solution is to changeover a fraction of those narrow streets into single way streets + cycle path. There is now enough evidence that more lanes does not improve traffic it is just met with more cars to match the increased capacity.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    In my city it would be trivial in most roads, you would just have to remove parking on one side. Unfortunately the needs of 10 car owners living in the street are more important than the needs of everyone else...
    - fpanzer 4y ago
      Of course they are, because the people live there.
      - newaccount74 4y ago
        The people biking and walking and riding scooters also live there. I'm not sure why 2 out of 3 lanes should be dedicated to people parking their cars. If you want to live downtown and own a car, you can rent a parking space in a garage.
  - bluecalm 4y ago
    Then ban or severely limit cars there. You can turn a 2-way street into one way one and turn the other lane into bike/e-mobility one. If not that make it 30km/h zone, allow bikes and allow other mobility devices to take the middle of the lane. Banning cars from some streets is great solution as well.
    - 4y ago
forgetfreeman 4y ago
Here rental scooters are an absolute plague. Their riders routinely ignore both traffic laws and common sense and are a threat to both themselves and pedestrians. There's talk of some form of crackdown amongst the local city council members and I would be delighted to see them banned outright.
- bluecalm 4y ago
  Just ban cars first. They are big, dangerous, smelly, loud, driven too fast and they actually kill thousands of people per year, not just cause dangerous situations. Any problem e-scooters have is multiple times worse with cars and they actually have 95+% of the infrastructure dedicated to them and aren't forced into narrow parts of sidewalk called bike lines.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    That's about the most aggressively entitled take I've come across to date. Rental e-scooters are bullshit convenience and entertainment devices. What's your plan for hauling groceries for a family of 3, taking kids to the doctor, or hitting the car line twice a day for pickup/dropoff? Uber? Tf they gonna show up in, a rickshaw?
HWR_14 4y ago
No one is contending that using scooters is bad for the user. They are saying a bunch of drunk users are using them recklessly for non-users and are getting in people's way by parking them all over the sidewalks and streets. An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros?
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  > An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros? I have proposed this before in my city, ticket the e-scoter company for improper parking not the users. Most of these business have gps trackers on them they will quickly find a way to enforce proper parking onto users. We need to stop externalizing problems away from companies.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >Most of these business have gps trackers on them they will quickly find a way to enforce proper parking onto users. BINGO! Haven't parked your scooter in the designated area? -10 Euros fee on your credit card. Driving recklessly on the scooter? -30 Euros fee.
    - mikeodds 4y ago
      I’ve seen Lime have the inverse (ie non parking zones) in various US cities where you will be warned then billed (I think $50! in Venice beach) if you finish the ride.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    That is a solution that could work.
  - tallanvor 4y ago
    I know that in Oslo they can fine the scooter companies for people parking them improperly, but you still have to have officials out looking for them and actually issuing the fines. The result here is that tourist areas have fewer problems, but they're left littering the sidewalks in residential areas.
petre 4y ago
I think that their weight and speed and where one can park them needs to be regulated. Hungary has at least done the last bit in Budapest with rectangles marked in green on the sidewalk. City councils can also rent out this space, preventing scooter chaos. They're also overbuilt for anti vandalism, weighting over 20 kilos. If one hits a pedestrian with a rental scooter, it can cause bad injuries. High speed also puts the scooter operator in danger. Since it's a rental, nobody wears a helmet and almost everybody drives them irresponsibly. Limiting their mass and speed would limit their impact energy.
- xpl 4y ago
  > Since it's a rental, nobody wears a helmet and almost everybody drives them irresponsibly In Tel Aviv, all rental scooters come with helmets, and wearing a helmet is actually enforced by the police. Also they are banned from riding on sidewalks. So it seems to be just a regulation/enforcement problem, not intrinsical to scooters themselves or being rental or private.
  - dolmen 4y ago
    > So it seems to be just a regulation/enforcement problem But it is less costly for the cities to remove the problem (ban e-scooter) that to hire people to chase bad e-scooter behavior. Especially if many users of those e-scooter are tourists who will bring back home a bad souvenir of their trip if they get fined.
    - xpl 4y ago
      > But it is less costly for the cities to remove the problem It does not remove the problem but would simply transfer it elsewhere. In result, either people become significantly less mobile, or they get more used to cars, creating huge traffic jams and polluting cities with noise and fumes. With scooter, one can get to any point of the city in 15 minutes max and basically for free compared to taxi. It has a huge value for the city economy, and worth the regulators' time. > tourists who will bring back home a bad souvenir of their trip if they get fined If you are caught for the first time, you'll just get a warning. So not an issue for a tourist.
eastbound 4y ago
> but between an aggressive ticketing campaign That’s how you solved it. Paris is entirely unable to perform such a campaign, because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say, and Paris is at something like 10x fewer policemen per population compared to the average of US cities, which puts Paris in the category of “self-managed” much more than other cities of the same size.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say Is it true, that Paris police target minorities unfairly? And, it is interesting that you chose to compare Paris with a very large population, to an "the average of US cities". Would it be more reasonable to compare to the megas in the US, like NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles? Better, it would be more reasonable to compare to large European cities: Berlin, Frankfurt am Maim, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Milan, Madrid, etc.?
  - orwin 4y ago
    NYC and Chicago yes, LA would be unfair considering the city footprint.
- mariusor 4y ago
  As it's already being said, you don't ticket the individual riders. You ticket the company and let them deal with recouping the losses or creating ways of making the scooters less of an annoyance.
- __derek__ 4y ago
  This line of reasoning has actually been used by Seattle activists to resist installation of traffic cameras.[1] Our city also refuses to enforce any traffic laws generally. [1]: https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/03/01/opinion-seattles-automated-traffic-cameras-disproportionately-target-neighborhoods-of-color/ https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/03/01/opinion-seattles-...
epolanski 4y ago
> They reduce car usage which is better for both pedestrians and car users. Most stats show that they don't reduce car usage, the people using them aren't people that give up cars, but people that give up on walking or taking public transport.
- Fricken 4y ago
  I've only seen one stat and it shows that, in Atlanta, following an E-efooter ban, average commute times increased 10%. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-city-of-atlanta-banned-e-scooters-in-2019-the-impact-was-profound https://www.sciencealert.com/the-city-of-atlanta-banned-e-sc...
  - dolmen 4y ago
    About Atlanta, this is a ban on e-scooter and e-bikes in day times. About Paris, this is a ban on rental e-scooter.

by arijun 4y ago

acomjean 4y ago

I used the lime scotters in Paris 4 years ago, in the pre pandemic times. Oddly useful the few times I used them. Though some Vandal was drawing over the qr codes, make some of them unusable. I see them in Cambridge where Harvard students own them and zip across the river to the athletic center. The can go quite fast and as a biker then can be annoying when the try to go past you at 20 mph, but honestly in the bike lane is probably the best place for them

rhaway84773 4y ago

The real problem with scooters is cuties unwilling to provide them with proper infrastructure. Bike lanes in most cities (out of the better European cycling cities), tend to be narrow and about 1/4 - 1/3 the size of a car lane. If a city were to dedicate a single car lane sized lane for “micromobility” and responded quickly to damage to this lane (which wouldn’t be as frequent for the obvious reason that damage is proportional to weight, and scooters and bikes are way lighter than cars), scooters would not be a problem at all. A city may decide it doesn’t want dockless scooters, but even that problem could be resolved by replacing 1 car parking spot on every street into a scooter/bike dock.

meghan_rain 4y ago
cuties ^_^
- danmur 4y ago
  They get away with it because they're cute damn them
ouid 4y ago
You can't add a lane for every "new" mode of transportation...
- klodolph 4y ago
  It sounds like the parent comment is talking about expanding & improving bike lanes, rather than forcing electric scooters into car lanes (where they are at risk), undersized bike lanes (where they endanger bicyclists), or banning them outright (where you’re now stuck with more demand for car traffic).
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Yes, but the comment you are responding too notes, that city streets are not stretchable, so you cannot add full-sized lanes for everyone's new toy.
    - soco 4y ago
      There's an answer to this, an answer which I see implemented in some places: cutting into the car lanes. Because you don't have to drive through the historical center.
      - vetinari 4y ago
        In the cities, where nobody really lives in the historical center, it is doable. (We are not talking about driving through; we are talking about access/servicing; there are very few cities without a ring -- or several rings -- where driving through center is the fastest way from one end to another). In the cities, where real people live there, it is not. Every part of the city needs servicing, including center. Your plumber won't lug his tools on a scooter; your furniture won't teleport itself into your house either. Every now and then, the residents themselves need to bring in or out their heavier or larger crap, so issuing permits to entry to well-connected companies is not a solution. Yes, I do live in city center; and yes, we also have people who know nothing about living there, but they go to pub there every Saturday night, so they have strong ideas how it should be. It is not limiting them, after all.
pif 4y ago
> If a city were to dedicate a single car lane sized lane for “micromobility” Most cities do not have a car lane sized lane to spare.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  If you look at many historic city centres in the Netherlands the solution is to changeover a fraction of those narrow streets into single way streets + cycle path. There is now enough evidence that more lanes does not improve traffic it is just met with more cars to match the increased capacity.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  In my city it would be trivial in most roads, you would just have to remove parking on one side. Unfortunately the needs of 10 car owners living in the street are more important than the needs of everyone else...
  - fpanzer 4y ago
    Of course they are, because the people live there.
    - newaccount74 4y ago
      The people biking and walking and riding scooters also live there. I'm not sure why 2 out of 3 lanes should be dedicated to people parking their cars. If you want to live downtown and own a car, you can rent a parking space in a garage.
- bluecalm 4y ago
  Then ban or severely limit cars there. You can turn a 2-way street into one way one and turn the other lane into bike/e-mobility one. If not that make it 30km/h zone, allow bikes and allow other mobility devices to take the middle of the lane. Banning cars from some streets is great solution as well.
  - 4y ago

forgetfreeman 4y ago

Here rental scooters are an absolute plague. Their riders routinely ignore both traffic laws and common sense and are a threat to both themselves and pedestrians. There's talk of some form of crackdown amongst the local city council members and I would be delighted to see them banned outright.

bluecalm 4y ago
Just ban cars first. They are big, dangerous, smelly, loud, driven too fast and they actually kill thousands of people per year, not just cause dangerous situations. Any problem e-scooters have is multiple times worse with cars and they actually have 95+% of the infrastructure dedicated to them and aren't forced into narrow parts of sidewalk called bike lines.
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  That's about the most aggressively entitled take I've come across to date. Rental e-scooters are bullshit convenience and entertainment devices. What's your plan for hauling groceries for a family of 3, taking kids to the doctor, or hitting the car line twice a day for pickup/dropoff? Uber? Tf they gonna show up in, a rickshaw?

HWR_14 4y ago

No one is contending that using scooters is bad for the user. They are saying a bunch of drunk users are using them recklessly for non-users and are getting in people's way by parking them all over the sidewalks and streets. An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros?

DoingIsLearning 4y ago
> An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros? I have proposed this before in my city, ticket the e-scoter company for improper parking not the users. Most of these business have gps trackers on them they will quickly find a way to enforce proper parking onto users. We need to stop externalizing problems away from companies.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Most of these business have gps trackers on them they will quickly find a way to enforce proper parking onto users. BINGO! Haven't parked your scooter in the designated area? -10 Euros fee on your credit card. Driving recklessly on the scooter? -30 Euros fee.
  - mikeodds 4y ago
    I’ve seen Lime have the inverse (ie non parking zones) in various US cities where you will be warned then billed (I think $50! in Venice beach) if you finish the ride.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  That is a solution that could work.
- tallanvor 4y ago
  I know that in Oslo they can fine the scooter companies for people parking them improperly, but you still have to have officials out looking for them and actually issuing the fines. The result here is that tourist areas have fewer problems, but they're left littering the sidewalks in residential areas.

petre 4y ago

I think that their weight and speed and where one can park them needs to be regulated. Hungary has at least done the last bit in Budapest with rectangles marked in green on the sidewalk. City councils can also rent out this space, preventing scooter chaos. They're also overbuilt for anti vandalism, weighting over 20 kilos. If one hits a pedestrian with a rental scooter, it can cause bad injuries. High speed also puts the scooter operator in danger. Since it's a rental, nobody wears a helmet and almost everybody drives them irresponsibly. Limiting their mass and speed would limit their impact energy.

xpl 4y ago
> Since it's a rental, nobody wears a helmet and almost everybody drives them irresponsibly In Tel Aviv, all rental scooters come with helmets, and wearing a helmet is actually enforced by the police. Also they are banned from riding on sidewalks. So it seems to be just a regulation/enforcement problem, not intrinsical to scooters themselves or being rental or private.
- dolmen 4y ago
  > So it seems to be just a regulation/enforcement problem But it is less costly for the cities to remove the problem (ban e-scooter) that to hire people to chase bad e-scooter behavior. Especially if many users of those e-scooter are tourists who will bring back home a bad souvenir of their trip if they get fined.
  - xpl 4y ago
    > But it is less costly for the cities to remove the problem It does not remove the problem but would simply transfer it elsewhere. In result, either people become significantly less mobile, or they get more used to cars, creating huge traffic jams and polluting cities with noise and fumes. With scooter, one can get to any point of the city in 15 minutes max and basically for free compared to taxi. It has a huge value for the city economy, and worth the regulators' time. > tourists who will bring back home a bad souvenir of their trip if they get fined If you are caught for the first time, you'll just get a warning. So not an issue for a tourist.

eastbound 4y ago

> but between an aggressive ticketing campaign That’s how you solved it. Paris is entirely unable to perform such a campaign, because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say, and Paris is at something like 10x fewer policemen per population compared to the average of US cities, which puts Paris in the category of “self-managed” much more than other cities of the same size.

throwaway2037 4y ago
because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say Is it true, that Paris police target minorities unfairly? And, it is interesting that you chose to compare Paris with a very large population, to an "the average of US cities". Would it be more reasonable to compare to the megas in the US, like NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles? Better, it would be more reasonable to compare to large European cities: Berlin, Frankfurt am Maim, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Milan, Madrid, etc.?
- orwin 4y ago
  NYC and Chicago yes, LA would be unfair considering the city footprint.
mariusor 4y ago
As it's already being said, you don't ticket the individual riders. You ticket the company and let them deal with recouping the losses or creating ways of making the scooters less of an annoyance.
__derek__ 4y ago
This line of reasoning has actually been used by Seattle activists to resist installation of traffic cameras.[1] Our city also refuses to enforce any traffic laws generally. [1]: https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/03/01/opinion-seattles-automated-traffic-cameras-disproportionately-target-neighborhoods-of-color/ https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/03/01/opinion-seattles-...

epolanski 4y ago

> They reduce car usage which is better for both pedestrians and car users. Most stats show that they don't reduce car usage, the people using them aren't people that give up cars, but people that give up on walking or taking public transport.

Fricken 4y ago
I've only seen one stat and it shows that, in Atlanta, following an E-efooter ban, average commute times increased 10%. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-city-of-atlanta-banned-e-scooters-in-2019-the-impact-was-profound https://www.sciencealert.com/the-city-of-atlanta-banned-e-sc...
- dolmen 4y ago
  About Atlanta, this is a ban on e-scooter and e-bikes in day times. About Paris, this is a ban on rental e-scooter.