Just this week in Vantaa, Finland three 12-year-old girls piled onto one of those electric scooters you subscribe to with an app and proceeded to get run over by a car at a crossing, killing one of them
The app is supposed to have an age restriction but it’s easy to bypass and you’re not supposed to have more than one person riding on one, which people routinely ignore
I hate seeing kids and teens speeding around dangerously on those fucking things and then just leaving them laying around on high-traffic bike routes because they don’t give a shit since they treat the scooters as completely disposable
Fucking awful bazinga-brained Silicon Valley-ass idea and business model. Actually, there are also bikes you can use with an app but curiously you don’t see kids doing reckless shit with those, almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible 
they are one of those ideas that almost works, except when they fall short it’s a shit show. i pedestrian a few miles a day and, in theory, one of those would be awesome for getting around and expanding my range of daily meandering. except the transportation infrastructure here is a contested shit show of homicidal cars pushing everyone else into unprotected bike lanes that suddenly become storm drains or delivery parking, or up onto narrow sidewalks that won’t allow two normal humans passing each other to do so without one stepping off.
so on the sidewalk, i get insecure bicyclists doing the slalom around pedestrians and then these random toys whizzing along silently. when they are functioning. we’ve had like 3 rounds of companies come in with them and within weeks i see them littered in front yards and across sidewalks, beat to shit. because i mean who really wants to push one somewhere once it tries to extort you for more money and you’re nearly there?
i think the technology might work here more easily if cars and all non-emergency vehicles were banned from existence, and then all the nice wide roads could be partitioned out and shared among the rest of us.
hell no, if we get whole ass yankee wide roads with no cars, i expect a return to laissez-faire road rules. fuck a bike lane if there’s no need to cordon cars away, pedestrians get to walk/run & weave however necessary to get where they’re going. and i really could care less if that means cyclists and electric motor riders have to move slowly to negotiate that
You do not want this in practice, trust me. It’s not fun and it makes so people revert to cars because it’s then the only mode of transport that makes them feel safe.
the precondition is no cars. i don’t see how people would be incapable of sorting and handling themselves without lanes and stringent rules
I assumed that. You can see your imaginary scenario play out in plenty of areas and it doesn’t go to well most of the time. People are going from point a to point b and that means they’re trying to go with some speed. If you make the traffic environment uncertain/unsafe then you get collisions and tensions. This isn’t black&white, there’s times where mixed-use with poor signage can be a good idea, but it’s mainly for recreational areas that make it clear to all that they need to be aware of their surrounding. As general traffic planning it’s not a good go-to.
Oh is that how it works, yeah id be throwing my escooter into the river too if it just stopped working and was like PAY ME