I wasn't at all surprised to see the ban. The way electric scooters were handled in Atlanta was an absolute nightmare. They littered every sidewalk, blocking pedestrian traffic in already crowded streets. 100% of people riding them rode them on the sidewalk and collisions were pretty common. People were getting hurt, and were very afraid of getting hit.
It's really unfortunate it went this way, because Atlanta badly needs alternative transpiration options. We would likely have been better off with heavy enforcement around proper storage and riding of scooters, but so many people absolutely hated them due to how it was handled that I'm not surprised to see a ban instead.
The poor handling of how they were rolled out did a lot of damage long term to fixing transportation. Now there will be an uphill battle against a ban passed in reaction to the mess they created. Disappointing all around.
We have a rental scheme in Bath which seems to be working pretty well. You are supposed to leave them at designated spots around the city (I think you get a discount) and on the whole people seem to be pretty good about where they leave them.
While I don't personally like the idea of using one (I prefer a bike or walking), they have been really popular.
One of the interesting effects is that along with a huge surge in ebike riders, scooters have made drivers much more alert to non-car road users. Cyclist friends have told me that cycling around town feels much safer, with drivers giving them more room, and fewer moments where it's obvious the driver just wasn't paying attention.
Your second point is huge - pedestrian fatalities go down the more pedestrians ignore "traffic rules" - partially because the pedestrians are more alert (not assuming a crosswalk will save them, because there may be none) but also because drivers are more alert.
The unexpected is always going to be dangerous just because it's unexpected.
It all comes down to infrastructure. They’re not a big problem here in DC compared to cars because we have wide sidewalks and a growing number of protected bike lanes. People driving cars are responsible for 100% of the fatalities, almost all of the injuries, and almost all of the blocked sidewalks, crosswalks, etc. and that’s where the focus should be.
What I would like is basically rebranding bike lanes as low-speed mobility lanes. Take the parking and/or right lane full-width, put up bollards, and zone it for vehicles with a max speed of 20mph (bike, scooter, trike, hoverboard, electric wheelchair, who cares - if it doesn’t pollute and takes up about as much space as a person, it’s welcome). If space allows, add protected parking spots for pickup/drop off and handicapped parking and tell everyone else that they need to pay market-rate for parking.
The companies operating them seem to actively encourage users not to give a shit. They're dockless, you can end a ride anywhere, if the battery dies or you get bored you're just supposed to leave it wherever and let it be someone else's problem. The companies running them all seem content to just proliferate scooters all over the street with no regard for expense or the non-scooting public since they're all trying to out-compete each other.
Here in the DC area I have a particular love for Capital Bikeshare because they're extremely affordable and (mostly) use dedicated docking stations.
I own my own escooter and I do give a shit. Don't lump us all in together. I think people who own escooters are far more conscientious than people using rentals, and I believe a better solution is to incentivize private ownership.
Most travel modes have a downside. For example, car and suv drivers routinely speed through pedestrian crossings and kill large numbers of pedestrians.
Scooters may be annoying, but at least they aren't deadly.
You could say the same thing about cars. In fact it's far more common for cars to be parked on pavements blocking access than it is for e-scooters. You just don't notice because you're used to it.
> 100% of people riding them rode them on the sidewalk
A few months ago I saw a man in Seattle die while riding an electric scooter on a street going down a hill. He was going way too fast, probably trying to keep up with the cars I think, started wobbling, fell, and bounced his head off the street. Dead on impact. Two points:
1. These scooters are not stable enough to operate at road speed safely. The wheels are too small for it, the dynamics of controlling one at speed are all fucked up. They are substantially less safe than even bicycles.
2. Rental scooters don't come with rental helmets. I think a helmet would have saved his life. But the whole supposed convenience of the scooter rental scheme assumes no helmets, since virtually nobody leaves home in the morning carrying a helmet on the off chance they may want to rent a scooter.
> [Scooters] are substantially less safe than even bicycles (Emphasis mine)
Bicycles aren't unsafe in themselves, see lots of cities where cycling is a very common and safe mode of transportation. Scooters on the other hand are indeed a lot less safe due to their small wheels, short wheelbase and awkward stance of the rider. That said, it's the urban planning that makes cycling unsafe in many places, not the device itself.
Rental scooters are like if we lived in a society where everyone rode horses and then suddenly you could rent a Ford Model-T to drive without any lessons or a driver's license and no cultural standards of safety or infrastructure built for cars.
Banning e-scooters wholesale rather than figuring out how they can be part of a safe mobility culture is like banning combustion vehicles at the onset of the invention of cars.
I will agree though that safer electric PEV like e-bike or e-tricycle are likely safer, as are those with speed governors, and add in dedicated protected lanes.
2. Agreed. Crazy to me that people ride these without helmets. There's also foldable helmets for people annoyed by the size of regular ones. Protected bike lanes also improve this.
There is one company I'm aware of that at least operates here in Canada called Neuron, which has helmets attached to every rental scooter. You're told by the app to put it on.
I was on travel to San Francisco last week, 20 mph down the Presidio through GGSP and I would have loved a helmet but I didn’t pack one in my carry on! You are really putting your life on the line without one - both from the flimsiness and speed of the device, and city roads and traffic. The people I saw with helmets clearly owned their scooters.
I saw helmets on rental scooters recently - they were green and maybe in Miami? If provided people might use them but I bet we could make a technology that would prevent the scooter from moving unless the helmet was attached properly. At that point people would "know" you have to wear them so it wouldn't be terribly uncool.
There are plenty of people who suck at them, just as there are people who suck driving at cars and motorcycles. I might be OK to having a permitting system, but as well all know people still crash. Having an outright ban on scooters I think is stupid. Making all of society behave like the lowest common denominator is not a great policy.
We’ve started to get some in Atlanta, but only in the center of town. I live out in the suburbs. I haven’t been able to try them out yet because the every time I’ve ridden into town the lane was filled with half a dozen delivery vans.
They don't seem to be an issue in Chicago at least from my perspective. It wasn't a free for all though, they had two pilot programs and they are banned from the downtown/Loop area which is the highest density area of the city. Scooters must be attached to a fixed object like a light pole/street sign/etc. Also it helps that Divvy (Lyft) retrofitted their bicycle docks to allow scooter docking as well.
Seems basically fine in Liverpool. I've not used them, but they don't seem to block pavements and I've only ever seen a few driven by loons. Certainly never felt at risk as a pedestrian or cyclist by one.
Their popularity has killed off a previous bike hire scheme, which is a bit of a pity, but they are a lot handier...
Same thing happened in Miami - it was a great idea to have them because it really did help relieve congestion amongst the downtown and financial districts.
Then they got banned because people are idiots and rode them idiotically and left them everywhere.
The city then brought them back, put caps on their speed, forced them to be rode only on streets and financially incentivized people to leave them in predetermined drop-off areas. It lasted about 2 weeks before that was shown to not work, because, again, people didn't really pay attention to the rules (and some of the rules, such as banning them from sidewalks, are outright dumb due to the fact that dangerous wild driving on main roads is celebrated in Miami).
It really is unfortunate just like you said - because they were a real asset to public mobility.
What I don't understand is why its so hard to have designated drop off points every block or so. The scooter vendors should be responsible for putting them in appropriate places (which might mean renting the space if needed).
Then use some geofencing to fine people who fail to park/etc them properly.
Sure, allowing people to drop them off in the middle of a congested sidewalk is easy on the asshole doing it, and the companies might have a bit less revenue because its inconvenient to park them properly, but so what. They might be able to make some percentage of the fine back if people still refuse to comply.
The sidewalk is public space, they have _LESS_ rights as a corp to be there trying to profit off it than the citizens walking the sidewalk IMHO.
From a visitors perspective, I flew down for two days at the state capital, and used a scooter liberally riding around downtown, and the campus of Georgia state university. I did not see the littering of sidewalks at all. I saw people riding scooters in the street, and on the sidewalks, but even with a lot of people I didn’t see anything of what you’re speaking of.
Scooters are great, they are low-cost easy way to get around. I think anger in Atlanta towards the scooters, is similar to why Marta will never go up 75.
To be fair, the issue is probably not going to be as evident downtown. Go over to the east side in old fourth ward or inman park and I think you'd have come to a different conclusion.
The minimum outcome (after deaths) should have been that Crescent and N Highland bar districts closed to through traffic weekend nights after 9 (and after sporting events), and all public transit buses get 360 degree cameras.
Instead, we have bars (RiRa and Hand In Hand were unable to afford leases pre pandemic) shutting down, street drifters, crime, and significant amounts of drunk driving.
Ive always wondered how electric scooters would fare if they were speed limited. Something like 6-9MPH (~15km/hr) . It's still much much faster than walking, but still about 1/2 the top speed currently observed.
There’s very little pedestrian traffic in Atlanta so the sidewalk riding didn’t bother me.
This is also a city where the police have done nothing to stop people riding go carts and stuff on the streets disrupting traffic and hurting people. Or tent clusters on sidewalks and off ramps.
So it was weird they banned scooters and allow things with no benefit to the city.
There’s also an angle that the city is really big on pushing their boondoggle public transport streetcar project and didn’t like cheaper and more environmentally friendly options available for the public.
I think Atlanta banned the scooters because the companies didn’t pay off the right locals. They could have tried to fix the issues and work with the scooter companies.
> pushing their boondoggle public transport streetcar project and didn’t like cheaper and more environmentally friendly options available for the public.
Yeah I wish more people would recognize this. Many "transit activists" are basically just lobbyists for the regional MTA/MTDs and want to minimize competition.
people are still throwing them wherever they die.. I feel awful for the workers that go by at night to find/recharge them when I see them strewn in the most inexplicably-off-sidewalk locations in piedmont park, etc.
The son of my best friend face planted and had to have facial reconstructive surgery after a crash.
The year before the pandemic I spent each day on my walk to/from work arguing with scooter drivers about them being on the sidewalk and how dangerous it was. A child was hit by one in my area and seriously hurt.
Cars/trucks do an extra special addition though: park in a lane because you're delivering something, or, ya know, doing something outside of the vehicle.
Bought an electric scooter for my father (didn't work out at all for him, too old), so I've inherited it. For about town (I live in a small town in the UK) it has meant I barely use the car now. I can get to a supermarket and back again in the time it would take me to walk there, I can get to my parents house and back to do some errand in the time it would take me to drive and park.
But it is illegal. Each time I take it out I run the risk of getting a fine - but for now I'll take the risk as the benefit is too great for me. I'd love to buy a 'legal' one and would happily pay whatever registration or insurance was required.
Non-electric scooters are a terrible mode of transport. Pretty obvious if you've ever used one (or a skateboard) but as soon as you hit any kind of gentle uphill slope they're more effort than just walking.
A bicycle is fine but you have to put in effort which is not always appealing and you can't take it into buildings (though on the other hand it's more reasonable to leave it locked up outside).
There's definitely a unique space that e-scooters occupy where they're better than every other option.
Op here. I am a cyclist too, but cycling means I have to get the bike out the shed, cycle there (which admittedly is fast) then lock it up somewhere (not always available outside the shop) , then cycle home with my shopping bag.
On the scooter I go the supermarket with the scooter, do my shop and it is so much easier to scoot home with a bag over the handlebar than it is on a bike.
I love cycling and I cycle a lot for pleasure, but for errands the scooter is just perfect, no effort, easy to take in the house or pub, or train, or shopping. After a day of work I often just want easy.
Before I had the scooter I did likely cycle more, but I also used the car much more.
As a datapoint, I got an adult kick scooter in NYC years ago to use for transportation. It worked as an alternative to walking around the neighborhood for distances up to a couple miles and the kids loved riding with me on it. But it didn't work for commuting, and anyone who considers skateboards and scooters in the same category as their electric counterparts has probably not attempted to commute with them.
As a worst-case example, take crossing the Queensboro Bridge which took about ~30 mins by foot, ~20 mins by kick scooter, and less than ~10 minutes by bike or electric scooter. On the surface that seems like a kick scooter fills a valid niche. However, on a sustained uphill a kick scooter is more tiring than walking and not substantially faster, so it's often simpler to just carry it. It is faster on the way down, but also stressful as you have to sit on the brakes the whole time to keep from going too fast on 200mm rubber wheels over cracked concrete. Saving ten minutes of walking just wasn't worth the extra stress and weight.
You can get kick scooters with inflatable tires and suspension but they're so low volume that it's not much more expensive to get a mass-produced electric scooter.
I have a $7,000 e-bike and this guy is like $4,500 but can go sixty and they also can accept a trailer with an 80? mile range...
I am currently trying to figure out a trailer solution for my bike, which only pushes me to 20 MPH (Class I) (class II have a throttle thumb lever - Class III push to 28 MPH) (But cost ~$15K)
“ Currently, there isn't a specific law for e-scooters so they are recognised as "powered transporters" - falling under the same laws and regulations as motor vehicles, and subject to all the same legal requirements - MOT, tax, licensing and specific construction.
However, because e-scooters don't always have visible rear red lights, number plates or signalling ability, they can't be used legally on roads.
Private e-scooters can only be used on private land and not on public roads, cycle lanes or pavements.
The only e-scooters that can be used on public roads are those that are rented as part of government-backed trials.
E-scooter trial in London, June 2021
IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES
Do I need a driving licence?
Yes. To use an e-scooter from an official trial, you need to have category Q entitlement on your driving licence.”
A lot of places have this problem. Pavements are for pedestrians. Roads are for roadworthy vehicles. It’s maybe legal to go on bike paths. But the network of those might go from nowhere to nowhere.
I remember living in NYC pre-Uber. If you were trying to hail a cab in a spot with other people also trying to get one, you had to resort to aggressively yelling "Back the F@#$ off, that's my cab!"
Then Uber came and that largely went away b/c why fight over a cab when you could call and Uber?
Then CitiBike came along. It was amazing that you could just get a bike and ride somewhere. That is, until you were riding it to a commuter bus or train station at evening rush hour. Suddenly, you have 5 mins to catch your train and you see one open slot in the bike return. Another person also sees that spot and you race towards it until you ave to say "Back the F@#$ off, that's my spot!"
In other words, if cities want to have these options then should address directional supply and demand issues otherwise people are just going to say "Not worth the hassle"
The entire value of Uber was the app hailing (in my opinion) - the cab companies could have leaped on that but didn't.
Same with the bike rental things like CitiBike - there should be roving vans throughout the city moving and balancing the slots based on usage. They have the data, use it. They could even offer to "fix" problems (e.g., arrive at the train station and there's not a slot available? CitiBike will send a vehicle to get you to your destination within reason).
In addition to the balancing vans, Citi Bike in NYC has a reward system[1] that incentivizes users to take from full stations and dock at empty stations. With enough effort you can earn enough points to more than offset your monthly subscription and more which I did occasionally when I was cross training.
> there should be roving vans throughout the city moving and balancing the slots based on usage
There are, and the system does rely in part on this rebalancing act to be functional. (Also to bring the E-bikes in for charging — sadly the stations won't be able to charge those for some time yet.)
Its like cities had zero controls on parking then just banned cars instead of building effective parking enforcement laws.
Simple solution:
1) Cities establish guidelines on legal parking / riding.
2) Impose large fines for violations.
3) Scooter companies pass on those fines to the rider who parked illegally.
But instead we have a bunch of blue cities banning the most affordable, equity enhancing, zero emissions, last mile transportation solution.
Agreed however just because you parked well doesn’t stop a clown from knocking them into the sidewalk later. At one point they were being thrown in the river.
Atlanta native; I haven't dug into the design of the study, but I am supremely skeptical of these results. There is a huge influx of new residents right now (and likely for the foreseeable future). That in concert with a renewed push for working from the office likely accounts for any increase in congestion seen any time recently. The city yearns for more public transport, but it is hard to imagine that 10% of all the insane traffic is directly related to a ban on this relatively new mode of transport.
The micromobility ban was implemented in the city of Atlanta on 9 August 2019. We use high-resolution data from 25 June 2019 to 22 September 2019 from Uber Movement to measure changes in evening travel times between 7:00 p.m. and midnight
The data was very specific to evenings in certain areas.
It isn't difficult math - selfish flow of traffic produces extremely un-optimal results, and congestion is simply a function of how much traffic chooses a certain path. I highly recommend Tim Roughgarten's work if you want an academic analysis: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262182430/selfish-routing-and-t...
It's a comparative study of several insanely small datasets over an exceptionally small period of time with no experimental controls, just retrospective analysis. 12000 MARTA trips, 120 Mercedez Benz trips and 34000 scooter trips... in a metropolitan area with 2.6 million homes.
I don't believe this report is proving anything it claims.
Just came back from Austin (way smaller than Dallas) and it was during a large event weekend (F1 weekend). We used the electric scooters pretty much the entire weekend to get around the city, it was really good, much faster and efficient than taking an Uber/Lyft or driving. Most of the larger streets had a bike only lane and we never felt unsafe (my 70yo dad was riding with me on another scooter). Overall, I think that when combined with a good planning strategy from the city these types of micro transport could be something really good. I still think that good public transportation should be the goal here, but that requires way more infrastructure investment, and electric scooters or bikes could be the next best trade off.
I was there that weekend myself and had a sukkah experience. I could imagine a certain type of person complaining about them - eg they are uttering sidewalks, left lying about here and there - but fundamentally it was great. The scooters are everywhere, with dedicated lanes, being ridden by everyone (locals and tourists) and the streets are wide and well marked. I lived in SF for ten years and it always felt like I was taking my life into my own hands on one there - but it felt like a “supported” mobility option in Austin. My friend and I looked at our credit cards and we each took 19 (!!) scooter rides in the ~72 hours we were there.
I should add though - they are dangerous, even when we’ll done, and riders shouldn’t be cavalier. I fell once (I’m coordinated and competent - but a crack in a sidewalk, in broad daylight, got me) and feel extremely lucky to have gotten away with nothing more than a skinned knee and palm.
Is it legal to ride on them on the sidewalk? Where I live it is not. It is, in fact, dangerous for walking humans to coexist with scooters on the sidewalk. I personally had many close calls and a few bumps. The close calls would have been serious, possibly fatal, had I not jumped out of the way.
The real solution to congestion is to shift cities away from having so much car infrastructure. If you build a car oriented city with gigantic box stores surrounded by lakes of parking lots as the only option then people will drive cars. Electric scooters are a terrible solution to a problem that really needs to be addressed.
Why is it always framed this way? This is NOT the solution.
The solution is to build better public transportation options. That will necessarily include removing a decent amount of the car infrastructure, but you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.
The way you frame it, it sounds like (and it often is the case with people framing it this way) that you think that if we remove car infrastructure, people will be forced to use other means of transportation to get around. And while technically true, all it will actually do is piss people off and make it so much harder to get around.
It's framed this way because car infrastructure is so massive and sprawling that it by necessity crowds out public transit in cities.
It's also a vicious cycle: making public transit marginally worse increases the number of people who drive to get places, which makes the government build more roads, which makes cities sprawl more, and eventually you end up with a city like Atlanta that spans 50 miles and is barely navigable without a car.
Yes, it will piss people off - it will make cities MUCH less convenient for suburban drivers. That's not a bad thing unless you happen to be a suburban driver.
I live in Manhattan and I find a bicycle to be a better choice for the majority of my trips than public transit (it's faster, too). I only use public transit for long trips or when I'm traveling with suitcases.
Bikes are simply better at point-to-point transportation (the same advantage that cars have), except that they don't take up a lot of space so it's actually a scalable solution to have everyone using them to get around even in a dense city; see Amsterdam as an example.
I think, if you take their argument with a bit of generosity, that they are arguing for more balance in our approach to cities. Right now the balance is so far in favor of cars, that it makes walking and cycling into an extreme sport. The result is loud, dangerous, expensive, and dirty cities that are built almost exclusively for cars.
The humungous parking lots, the 50-foot wide roads, the high speeds, the increasingly larger vehicles, the demolished housing for more freeways, parking minimums, extensive R1 zoning... They all contribute to a city exclusively for cars. Even if we don't get rid of ALL of it, we can certainly cut it back significantly.
Maybe ban cars in places where we don't need them anyways like Valencia street in San Francisco or the Spanish super blocks. Decrease speed limits and design streets to enforce them properly. Add walking and cycling paths to the grocery stores. Add raised crosswalks. When you don't have people using their cars to travel 5 miles everyday it leaves them open to the people who REALLY need to use them. Allow walkable neighborhoods in city planning initiatives.
People WANT to live in places like these, but we refuse to build them for some reason. It's why walkable neighborhoods, built when they were still legal, cost an arm and a leg now. Heck, we even build theme parks to give people a vague feeling of being someplace like that. People go on vacation to countries with places like that.
To me, this discussion is very similar to the discussion around "defund the police": should we lead with the unpopular thing that people will have to accept or should we lead with the goal?
My sense of why this framing is popular is that we've had ~30+ years of passing "public transit" initiatives that are doomed to fail because we would not disrupt car infrastructure. This becomes a double-whammy because we spend money to get very mediocre results, and people reasonably blame the transit system.
Instead, if you're clear from the start that you are going to remove an entire lane in the city for your BRT system - you face more opposition, but you have a much better chance of implementing an actual BRT system!
I think reasonable people can disagree on this, but it's not a mystery how we got here.
It is also not like car infrastructure would turn into non-existance. It most cases all that happens is reuse. Playing fields. Pedestrian areas. Bike lanes. Bus lanes. Bike areas.
The only common thing is they all cist car infrastructure space. This is the common ground. The reallocation of that infrastructure and space is a different story.
I have yet to see a case where it didn't pass people off no matter what the future use was. So even if technically the other framing should be different I have not seen a case where it makes a difference. All while seeing that even pure car infrastructure blockage makes a difference.
Often the car infrastructure itself is what makes getting around without a car infeasible even for short trips - and short trips are a very large portion of trips taken. There are many, many destinations near me that are within easy biking distance, but doing so involves crossing highway ramps and mixing with fast-moving cars.
We do not need to allow cars to take every possible route. Alternative modes of transport are more useful if they're prioritized on the most direct routes. Cars are fast, a diversion won't impact them as much as it does someone on a bike or scooter.
Exactly this reminds me of the Market Street closure in San Francisco, that has the intention and result of inconveniencing citywide traffic while making zero improvements to the tardiness, reach and infrequency of public transit
If you want the real answer it's pretty easy to figure out. There's a group of people that want a particular form of society and that necessitates the absolute removal of the personal car, usually without actually fixing the problems that the car is supposedly causing.
People will adapt to many things, but that doesn't mean it is good - you could stop food deliveries to major cities and they'd empty in days; cars included; but that wouldn't be good.
Yeah, it should be obvious that automobile infrastructure can only support a finite amount of density. Once you cross that threshold you either need to halt growth and aggressively downzone OR build infrastructure for alternative modes of transit to absorb the excess.
Obviously this would be the optimal solution, but we have to operate in the realm of reality. There is no political will to eliminate car centric infrastructure.
There's some will. DC metro is seeing changes. More robust bike lane networks downtown. More bike lanes in the suburbs. More mixed use development near transit hubs (with underground parking or limited parking).
Eliminate, no, but car infrastructure ensures tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of life-altering injuries every year, bakes in climate change (even EVs are considerably worse than every other option), and it costs more than the alternatives – enough so that many cities and almost all suburbs struggle with maintenance and cuts to other services. The combination of those factors make me more optimistic than I’ve been in the past that we’ll see a shift away from the 20th century “one person, one car, every trip” mentality. We don’t need to eliminate cars, simply not subsidizing them at the expense of everything else would yield huge health, pollution, and quality of life improvements.
In the 1970s the Netherlands looked much like any slice of America you could randomly choose - that political will might be impossible in America, I'm genuinely uncertain if the hole has been dug too deep at this point, but in a more healthy political environment it certainly can be done... but it isn't easy.
Now you have to take a photograph when you end a ride to prove that you did it responsible. There are many areas that are marked as slow-speed and many areas that are marked as no-park. The most central parts are entirely no-park with exceptions for dedicated bicycle-parkings.
Scooters that are misparked can be confiscated and the company needs to pay a fine to get it back.
It took a little while but now it seems to be respected by the vast majority and it has become a decent addition to other public transportation.
And I say this as someone who did despise them in the beginning.
Lots of other areas to discuss though, such as whether they last long enough to make environmental sense etc.
This is absolutely not true; look at any cities around Europe, or at Japanese cities, neither of those are "car oriented city with gigantic box stores surrounded by lakes of parking lots".
In the case of Japan, life develops around the train stations indeed, where all the shops and entertainment is, and between those stations are the residential areas, so scooters are perfect here.
In European cities (smaller) it's normally organized in rings, where most things you'd want to do are within the city center, or around large neighborhoods but also in circles (larger). So you can take a train/bus/cycle/scooter to the center, then going to the different places either walking or with the scooter.
No, the real solution is spread stuff around, so that not everyone wants to go to the exact same place at the same time.
Residential and business districts should not be a thing. Offices should be located right next to houses. (With the exception of "roudy" or loud places like music halls and bars.)
Shifting a large city away from having a lot of car infrastructure sounds extraordinarily complex, expensive, and time consuming. I would potentially support it, but surely scooters are cheaper and quicker to implement.
the first step, repainting lines on roads to add (ideally protected) bike/scooter lanes, is a large but imminently manageable project that can get done quickly. while that's happening, you direct various agencies to favor bike/scooter parking over cars, perhaps introducing necessary legislation to that effect. the harder and longer changes are removing/reducing over-zealous zoning, deceptive environmental lawsuits, and overly-specified building codes. it won't happen in a few months, but a lot can happen in a few years for a motivated electorate.
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It's really unfortunate it went this way, because Atlanta badly needs alternative transpiration options. We would likely have been better off with heavy enforcement around proper storage and riding of scooters, but so many people absolutely hated them due to how it was handled that I'm not surprised to see a ban instead.
The poor handling of how they were rolled out did a lot of damage long term to fixing transportation. Now there will be an uphill battle against a ban passed in reaction to the mess they created. Disappointing all around.
While I don't personally like the idea of using one (I prefer a bike or walking), they have been really popular.
One of the interesting effects is that along with a huge surge in ebike riders, scooters have made drivers much more alert to non-car road users. Cyclist friends have told me that cycling around town feels much safer, with drivers giving them more room, and fewer moments where it's obvious the driver just wasn't paying attention.
The unexpected is always going to be dangerous just because it's unexpected.
What I would like is basically rebranding bike lanes as low-speed mobility lanes. Take the parking and/or right lane full-width, put up bollards, and zone it for vehicles with a max speed of 20mph (bike, scooter, trike, hoverboard, electric wheelchair, who cares - if it doesn’t pollute and takes up about as much space as a person, it’s welcome). If space allows, add protected parking spots for pickup/drop off and handicapped parking and tell everyone else that they need to pay market-rate for parking.
Here in the DC area I have a particular love for Capital Bikeshare because they're extremely affordable and (mostly) use dedicated docking stations.
It's not the scooters that are the problem, it's a city environment that encourages aggressive and careless driving.
Scooters may be annoying, but at least they aren't deadly.
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A few months ago I saw a man in Seattle die while riding an electric scooter on a street going down a hill. He was going way too fast, probably trying to keep up with the cars I think, started wobbling, fell, and bounced his head off the street. Dead on impact. Two points:
1. These scooters are not stable enough to operate at road speed safely. The wheels are too small for it, the dynamics of controlling one at speed are all fucked up. They are substantially less safe than even bicycles.
2. Rental scooters don't come with rental helmets. I think a helmet would have saved his life. But the whole supposed convenience of the scooter rental scheme assumes no helmets, since virtually nobody leaves home in the morning carrying a helmet on the off chance they may want to rent a scooter.
Bicycles aren't unsafe in themselves, see lots of cities where cycling is a very common and safe mode of transportation. Scooters on the other hand are indeed a lot less safe due to their small wheels, short wheelbase and awkward stance of the rider. That said, it's the urban planning that makes cycling unsafe in many places, not the device itself.
Banning e-scooters wholesale rather than figuring out how they can be part of a safe mobility culture is like banning combustion vehicles at the onset of the invention of cars.
I will agree though that safer electric PEV like e-bike or e-tricycle are likely safer, as are those with speed governors, and add in dedicated protected lanes.
2. Agreed. Crazy to me that people ride these without helmets. There's also foldable helmets for people annoyed by the size of regular ones. Protected bike lanes also improve this.
That said, banning scooters is a step backward.
There is one company I'm aware of that at least operates here in Canada called Neuron, which has helmets attached to every rental scooter. You're told by the app to put it on.
Is there an example of a city who has handled them correctly? Your description describes every implementation I've seen thus far.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/05/10/electric-scooters-ar...
Their popularity has killed off a previous bike hire scheme, which is a bit of a pity, but they are a lot handier...
Then they got banned because people are idiots and rode them idiotically and left them everywhere.
The city then brought them back, put caps on their speed, forced them to be rode only on streets and financially incentivized people to leave them in predetermined drop-off areas. It lasted about 2 weeks before that was shown to not work, because, again, people didn't really pay attention to the rules (and some of the rules, such as banning them from sidewalks, are outright dumb due to the fact that dangerous wild driving on main roads is celebrated in Miami).
It really is unfortunate just like you said - because they were a real asset to public mobility.
Then use some geofencing to fine people who fail to park/etc them properly.
Sure, allowing people to drop them off in the middle of a congested sidewalk is easy on the asshole doing it, and the companies might have a bit less revenue because its inconvenient to park them properly, but so what. They might be able to make some percentage of the fine back if people still refuse to comply.
The sidewalk is public space, they have _LESS_ rights as a corp to be there trying to profit off it than the citizens walking the sidewalk IMHO.
Scooters are great, they are low-cost easy way to get around. I think anger in Atlanta towards the scooters, is similar to why Marta will never go up 75.
Instead, we have bars (RiRa and Hand In Hand were unable to afford leases pre pandemic) shutting down, street drifters, crime, and significant amounts of drunk driving.
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This is also a city where the police have done nothing to stop people riding go carts and stuff on the streets disrupting traffic and hurting people. Or tent clusters on sidewalks and off ramps.
So it was weird they banned scooters and allow things with no benefit to the city.
There’s also an angle that the city is really big on pushing their boondoggle public transport streetcar project and didn’t like cheaper and more environmentally friendly options available for the public.
I think Atlanta banned the scooters because the companies didn’t pay off the right locals. They could have tried to fix the issues and work with the scooter companies.
Yeah I wish more people would recognize this. Many "transit activists" are basically just lobbyists for the regional MTA/MTDs and want to minimize competition.
The year before the pandemic I spent each day on my walk to/from work arguing with scooter drivers about them being on the sidewalk and how dangerous it was. A child was hit by one in my area and seriously hurt.
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But it is illegal. Each time I take it out I run the risk of getting a fine - but for now I'll take the risk as the benefit is too great for me. I'd love to buy a 'legal' one and would happily pay whatever registration or insurance was required.
A bicycle is fine but you have to put in effort which is not always appealing and you can't take it into buildings (though on the other hand it's more reasonable to leave it locked up outside).
There's definitely a unique space that e-scooters occupy where they're better than every other option.
On the scooter I go the supermarket with the scooter, do my shop and it is so much easier to scoot home with a bag over the handlebar than it is on a bike.
I love cycling and I cycle a lot for pleasure, but for errands the scooter is just perfect, no effort, easy to take in the house or pub, or train, or shopping. After a day of work I often just want easy.
Before I had the scooter I did likely cycle more, but I also used the car much more.
At least for me. I have a very short walk to the store, and I'd consider a scooter but using the bike is just too much of a hassle most of the time.
As a worst-case example, take crossing the Queensboro Bridge which took about ~30 mins by foot, ~20 mins by kick scooter, and less than ~10 minutes by bike or electric scooter. On the surface that seems like a kick scooter fills a valid niche. However, on a sustained uphill a kick scooter is more tiring than walking and not substantially faster, so it's often simpler to just carry it. It is faster on the way down, but also stressful as you have to sit on the brakes the whole time to keep from going too fast on 200mm rubber wheels over cracked concrete. Saving ten minutes of walking just wasn't worth the extra stress and weight.
You can get kick scooters with inflatable tires and suspension but they're so low volume that it's not much more expensive to get a mass-produced electric scooter.
I have a $7,000 e-bike and this guy is like $4,500 but can go sixty and they also can accept a trailer with an 80? mile range...
I am currently trying to figure out a trailer solution for my bike, which only pushes me to 20 MPH (Class I) (class II have a throttle thumb lever - Class III push to 28 MPH) (But cost ~$15K)
Completely unfounded but I think there is a lot of pressure being applied by the taxi groups to try and discourage them.
UK is almost as bad as the US when it comes to car-centricism, or it was historically.
https://www.halfords.com/cycling/advice/are-electric-scooter...
“ Currently, there isn't a specific law for e-scooters so they are recognised as "powered transporters" - falling under the same laws and regulations as motor vehicles, and subject to all the same legal requirements - MOT, tax, licensing and specific construction. However, because e-scooters don't always have visible rear red lights, number plates or signalling ability, they can't be used legally on roads. Private e-scooters can only be used on private land and not on public roads, cycle lanes or pavements. The only e-scooters that can be used on public roads are those that are rented as part of government-backed trials. E-scooter trial in London, June 2021 IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES Do I need a driving licence? Yes. To use an e-scooter from an official trial, you need to have category Q entitlement on your driving licence.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48106617
Then Uber came and that largely went away b/c why fight over a cab when you could call and Uber?
Then CitiBike came along. It was amazing that you could just get a bike and ride somewhere. That is, until you were riding it to a commuter bus or train station at evening rush hour. Suddenly, you have 5 mins to catch your train and you see one open slot in the bike return. Another person also sees that spot and you race towards it until you ave to say "Back the F@#$ off, that's my spot!"
In other words, if cities want to have these options then should address directional supply and demand issues otherwise people are just going to say "Not worth the hassle"
Same with the bike rental things like CitiBike - there should be roving vans throughout the city moving and balancing the slots based on usage. They have the data, use it. They could even offer to "fix" problems (e.g., arrive at the train station and there's not a slot available? CitiBike will send a vehicle to get you to your destination within reason).
[1] https://citibikenyc.com/bike-angels
There are, and the system does rely in part on this rebalancing act to be functional. (Also to bring the E-bikes in for charging — sadly the stations won't be able to charge those for some time yet.)
Simple solution:
1) Cities establish guidelines on legal parking / riding. 2) Impose large fines for violations. 3) Scooter companies pass on those fines to the rider who parked illegally.
But instead we have a bunch of blue cities banning the most affordable, equity enhancing, zero emissions, last mile transportation solution.
The micromobility ban was implemented in the city of Atlanta on 9 August 2019. We use high-resolution data from 25 June 2019 to 22 September 2019 from Uber Movement to measure changes in evening travel times between 7:00 p.m. and midnight
The data was very specific to evenings in certain areas.
I don't believe this report is proving anything it claims.
I should add though - they are dangerous, even when we’ll done, and riders shouldn’t be cavalier. I fell once (I’m coordinated and competent - but a crack in a sidewalk, in broad daylight, got me) and feel extremely lucky to have gotten away with nothing more than a skinned knee and palm.
The solution is to build better public transportation options. That will necessarily include removing a decent amount of the car infrastructure, but you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.
The way you frame it, it sounds like (and it often is the case with people framing it this way) that you think that if we remove car infrastructure, people will be forced to use other means of transportation to get around. And while technically true, all it will actually do is piss people off and make it so much harder to get around.
It's also a vicious cycle: making public transit marginally worse increases the number of people who drive to get places, which makes the government build more roads, which makes cities sprawl more, and eventually you end up with a city like Atlanta that spans 50 miles and is barely navigable without a car.
Yes, it will piss people off - it will make cities MUCH less convenient for suburban drivers. That's not a bad thing unless you happen to be a suburban driver.
Bikes are simply better at point-to-point transportation (the same advantage that cars have), except that they don't take up a lot of space so it's actually a scalable solution to have everyone using them to get around even in a dense city; see Amsterdam as an example.
The humungous parking lots, the 50-foot wide roads, the high speeds, the increasingly larger vehicles, the demolished housing for more freeways, parking minimums, extensive R1 zoning... They all contribute to a city exclusively for cars. Even if we don't get rid of ALL of it, we can certainly cut it back significantly.
Maybe ban cars in places where we don't need them anyways like Valencia street in San Francisco or the Spanish super blocks. Decrease speed limits and design streets to enforce them properly. Add walking and cycling paths to the grocery stores. Add raised crosswalks. When you don't have people using their cars to travel 5 miles everyday it leaves them open to the people who REALLY need to use them. Allow walkable neighborhoods in city planning initiatives.
People WANT to live in places like these, but we refuse to build them for some reason. It's why walkable neighborhoods, built when they were still legal, cost an arm and a leg now. Heck, we even build theme parks to give people a vague feeling of being someplace like that. People go on vacation to countries with places like that.
My sense of why this framing is popular is that we've had ~30+ years of passing "public transit" initiatives that are doomed to fail because we would not disrupt car infrastructure. This becomes a double-whammy because we spend money to get very mediocre results, and people reasonably blame the transit system.
Instead, if you're clear from the start that you are going to remove an entire lane in the city for your BRT system - you face more opposition, but you have a much better chance of implementing an actual BRT system!
I think reasonable people can disagree on this, but it's not a mystery how we got here.
It is also not like car infrastructure would turn into non-existance. It most cases all that happens is reuse. Playing fields. Pedestrian areas. Bike lanes. Bus lanes. Bike areas.
The only common thing is they all cist car infrastructure space. This is the common ground. The reallocation of that infrastructure and space is a different story.
I have yet to see a case where it didn't pass people off no matter what the future use was. So even if technically the other framing should be different I have not seen a case where it makes a difference. All while seeing that even pure car infrastructure blockage makes a difference.
We do not need to allow cars to take every possible route. Alternative modes of transport are more useful if they're prioritized on the most direct routes. Cars are fast, a diversion won't impact them as much as it does someone on a bike or scooter.
Because it's the actual solution.
> you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.
You don't have to hope. They will adapt.
People will adapt to many things, but that doesn't mean it is good - you could stop food deliveries to major cities and they'd empty in days; cars included; but that wouldn't be good.
Now you have to take a photograph when you end a ride to prove that you did it responsible. There are many areas that are marked as slow-speed and many areas that are marked as no-park. The most central parts are entirely no-park with exceptions for dedicated bicycle-parkings.
Scooters that are misparked can be confiscated and the company needs to pay a fine to get it back.
It took a little while but now it seems to be respected by the vast majority and it has become a decent addition to other public transportation.
And I say this as someone who did despise them in the beginning.
Lots of other areas to discuss though, such as whether they last long enough to make environmental sense etc.
In the case of Japan, life develops around the train stations indeed, where all the shops and entertainment is, and between those stations are the residential areas, so scooters are perfect here.
In European cities (smaller) it's normally organized in rings, where most things you'd want to do are within the city center, or around large neighborhoods but also in circles (larger). So you can take a train/bus/cycle/scooter to the center, then going to the different places either walking or with the scooter.
Residential and business districts should not be a thing. Offices should be located right next to houses. (With the exception of "roudy" or loud places like music halls and bars.)
Remove all zoning laws and it takes care of itself over time. Zoning is always "keep [thing people want] away from [place where people want it]".
All that accomplishes is putting services that people want further away from them.
It's like hotfixing a completely broken pile of spaghetti code in prod, it'll save your sunday evening but you're in for 6 months of rewrite anyways