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 thonk

    • itappearsthat@hexbear.net
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      honestly this is more carbrained than people who fetishize their giant stupid truck. so carbrained that the car, which was solely responsible for crushing the body of a child, is just not even in the picture. cars cease to exist as noticeable objects, they are simple facts, they are of the world itself.

  • itappearsthat@hexbear.net
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    Okay seems like the actually dangerous thing in your story was the car??? Kids should be able to do dumb shit without having to worry about being turned into tomato paste.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      Ding ding fucking ding.

      I keep thinking about something I read on this site a few months ago, paraphrasing here:

      I should absolutely be able to walk around staring at my phone with headphones in. Even at my most distracted, I am more aware than a child, and children should be able to walk around without getting murdered by a driver

      If a child is killed by a car, that is the responsibility of the driver and the infrastructure. Not the child or their behavior. That is something that shouldn’t be able to happen.

      Separated bike paths that are more extensive than the road network. Being on the same path as cars has to be the most difficult, annoying, slowest, way to get to your destination. Pedestrian barriers along most car roads. Tight roads with low speed limits so if a collision does happen no one dies. Make rental scooters and bikes free to use so that children don’t feel the need to save money by piling onto one scooter.

      The solution to this isn’t taking away one of the only methods that children have to get places on their own.

      • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        The solution to this isn’t taking away one of the only methods that children have to get places on their own.

        We’re not talking about the US here, there’s an excellent system of public transport in place. Kids can just take the bus.

      • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        The infrastructure in Vantaa (Helsinki region) is very good compared to most of the world. There are plentiful separated bike paths. Most likely these girls were doing something dumb considering it was three girls on the scooter. The police are considering charging the driver with “aggravated endangerment of road safety” which implies that they were likely doing something to make the driver upset (not that it excuses murder).

        I guess I’d have to see the exact road where it happened, but infrastructure doesn’t work if people go out of their way to use it incorrectly e.g. riding scooters on the road where only motor vehicles and bicycles should be.

        The solution to this isn’t taking away one of the only methods that children have to get places on their own.

        Bicycles still exist. Electric scooters are uniquely dangerous and stupid. They cause a lot of problems in urban centers while not adding any significant benefit over the bicycle.

    • Nacarbac [any]@hexbear.net
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      Agreed, but e-scooter rollouts have basically fuckall integration with the existing infrastructure/forms of travel in a city or with standard driving education.

      While they’re great in theory, they should be being introduced as part of a massive overhaul of personal transportation infrastructure, education, and regulation… or at least some supervision with actual teeth behind it. But we’re probably past the age of doing stuff like that, so as is it’s just letting random companies step in to extract money while impinging on the rough grey area created by existing safety systems.

      Eventually that’ll work itself out, sure, but in much the same way that we started mandating lockout switches on Giant Blending Machines after The Incident With the Giant Blending Machine.

      • itappearsthat@hexbear.net
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        Your complaints are indistinguishable from those levied against bikes. Multiple kids have been piling onto the same bike since forever. It’s even made its way into Boomer/Xer nostalgia bait about riding around your neighborhood with your first love on your handlebars. I guarantee you the death rate is higher for kids on bikes than for scooters. I say this as somebody who loves being a cyclist and uses a bike for literally all of their chores.

          • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            Yes they do what the fuck are you on about. We did all kinds of stupid shit on bicycles as kids, I’m astonished I didn’t have more broken bones as a kid.

              • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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                seems like designated areas to leave rented machines & some kind of penalty for leaving them where-ever is more in order. which also fixes the absurdity of a truck going everywhere a scooter person has at the end of every night to pick them all up-charge-relocate

                • Ngl the fact that they don’t have designated return spots is one of the reasons they’re useful. There’s no way in hell my apartment complex is going to install bike share racks outside each building, the scooters are useful precisely because other people will just leave one in the parking lot where I can take it and I can ride it all the way home.

                  If my city was forced to put up return racks I guarantee the closest one would be by the bus stop, a 10 minute walk away.

              • Edamamebean [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                People don’t return them because proper scooter stands don’t exist lmao. Bike share systems actually have physical infrastructure showing where you’re supposed to return the bike. I worked for one of these scooter companies, “proper parking” was just somewhere on the sidewalk that isn’t obstructing traffic. These are solvable problems, not something inherent to electric scooters.

              • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                You occasionaly see one abandoned in a bush but usually people return them to the proper bike stands

                So they’re not free floating?

          • itappearsthat@hexbear.net
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            It really seems like your complaints are about kids doing kid shit but you know that is stupid so you launder them through complaints about newfangled contraptions

            • doublepepperoni [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
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              My main issue here is the business model, not the e-scooter itself

              I think easy access to essentially disposable motor vehicles incentivises stupid behaviour. If these were their own scooters I assume they’d treat them with more respect

              • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                My main issue here is the business model, not the e-scooter itself

                I don’t think the e-scooters business model is losing out on 2 paying customers as they pile 3 at a time onto one and then also those customers getting killed. I know they’re all run by bazinga tech companies but even that one’s too far

          • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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            They do though??? They absolutely do. Children in particular. Fucking around on bikes is like one of the top things children do.

            They might do it a bit less with the rented bikes than the rented scooters but that’s just because most kids have their own bikes

            • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              Bikes are considerably slower, especially when ridden by children and also obviously don’t move under their own power on level ground. It’s weird that people are in favor of giving children access to motor vehicles in this thread.

              • itappearsthat@hexbear.net
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                The term “motor vehicles” has long been used to refer exclusively to cars, trucks, and motorcycles. You can’t extend this to electric-powered personal transport vehicles like bikes/scooters/skateboards/unicycles and keep the same scary connotations.

                • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  I don’t think doublepepperoni wasn’t talking about e-bikes though, just regular rental bicycles. At least those are super common around here because they’re subsidized by the city while I’ve barely ever seen a rental e-bike.

  • Abracadaniel [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    > scooter boldly states on the front of it “do not ride on the sidewalk”

    > only ever see them used and stored on sidewalks

    thinking-about-it

    spoiler

    there is essentially zero bike infrastructure in this city, no one feels safe using the scooters on the road

      • Chronicon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        the people are probably doing it because of the other negative externalities of the scooters, not just cause its fun to throw heavy shit in the river

          • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            You’d wager wrong. People do this because the e-scooters are parked on the middle of bike paths, pedestrian paths, etc. making the city less traversable for everyone involved. Since the companies that rent them do nothing about this, people have taken the only solution available to them: Destruction.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Base, superstructure. The scooters are disposable techbro bullshit that clogs the few remaining public spaces. They belong to no one and no one feels any ownership or responsibility towards them. If you use them they’re disposable, if you don’t use them they’re trash and an unwanted obstacle. They’re not public transit infrastructure, they’re shitty techbro “innovation” and everyone treats them as such. There are no ethical scooters under capitalism.

          • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            The issue is your society.

            I think we all agree here. The concept though? No. The “concept” in this faulty society is that of a wasteful techbro scam that is rolled out with little oversight, that makes the current public infrastructure unsafe to use for all others. E-scooters have far.more accidents than bikes. They have a lifespan of 9-18 months and then they’re trashed. They take up space on what little public area that’s left, making cities even less walkable.
            Sure in a rational society rollout and implementation of e-scooters would be done in conjunction with public infrastructure and be well-regulated, but this is not a rational society. We can dream up all sorts of scenarios where this could work fine, but the practical ones are faulty, which is why they receive critique.

  • WilsonWilson [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    We have this argument all the time concept vs implementation. Scooters seem like a great idea but when implemented by SV tech bros it ends up being a nightmare. I was in Austin tx for the eclipse and those lime scooters were everywhere. The was a dozen lying on the sidewalk in front of Amy’s ice cream. Scooters abandoned on the grass in front of the capital. I even saw one on the the east-side interstate by the tesla factory. Its a shame Austin didn’t just do the scooters themselves. City employees would drive around with a pickup truck and keep things tidy. Make the first three hours of use free so everyone can use them.

    • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      You got to love the silicon valley innovation of “what if we were just lazy and didn’t pick up the products after people were done using them?”

  • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.net
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    The anti scooter opinion on hexbear is really fucking weird to me, real ranting “the kids these days!!” type shit and just really weird in the context of the rest of Hexbear’s opinions on public transit. Like the electric scooters cause some wires to cross in y’all’s minds that just breaks something

    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

    Children killed BY A CAR but let’s ban the scooter?

    they treat the scooters as completely disposable

    idk chief maybe they can like idk charge a deposit? this isn’t a situation to be like “we’ve tried nothing and im out of ideas, ban scooters”

    almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible

    🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

    • Kultronx
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      nah dawg they are super annoying as it is the people who ride them are the problem. as someone who bikes everyday, statistically i will have to deal with some scooter dbag dude (always a dude) not following the rules and making the road unsafe for everyone, whether it’s pedestrians, cyclists, or drivers. never once heard them use their bell or signal.

    • Hexagons [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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      I can try to square that circle for you. Here’s my (I think pretty reasonable) take on scooters:

      Right now, with city infrastructure the way it is, they’re terrible. There’s nowhere to ride them safely, they get left on sidewalks and bike paths, they’re just extremely dangerous right now, whether you’re riding one or just being around them.

      But. They don’t have to be like this! Get rid of cars, put racks of scooters next to train stations and bus stations, have a bit of societal education about how to ride them safely, and boom! Great solution to the last mile problem! If there are convenient places to park them people won’t leave them on random sidewalks. If streets are full of scooters instead of cars, and if we get some rules of the road engrained in the public consciousness, then they won’t be dangerous, either for the rider or surrounding pedestrians and cyclists.

      They could be (and should be) a great innovation, but their current implementation is so, so fucking bad, and leads to serious danger and accidents.

        • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          Bicycles are far easier to control, and they are designed for speed with 10x larger wheels. It is much harder to weave dangerously through crowds on a bicycle because of its length. The Lime scooters are electric, so it takes zero human effort to do all of the above which creates the perfect storm for people to do dumb things on them, with more ease than a bicycle.

          There’s also the problem that there is not really a good place to place the scooters so they get littered everywhere. All this for something that doesn’t advance us past the bicycle.

          • doublepepperoni [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
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            I’m honestly not the biggest fan of most of these electric-powered street vehicles: e-scooters, unicycles, hoverboards, Segways, etc. They all seem like gimmicky, potentially dangerous novelty gadgets to me and pretty unserious as forms of transport

            Yeah, sure, some of them are certainly portable in a way a bicycle could never be but they seem about as practical and safe as rocket-powered rollerblades

        • SuperZutsuki [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          An ebike is still usable with a dead battery. Ebikes are far easier to control and handle uneven terrain far better. Zero cargo capacity on a scooter. If you want a smaller form of mobility than a bike onewheels, EUCs, and electric skateboards are all smaller and superior to scooters.

    • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      anti scooter opinion on hexbear is really fucking weird to me

      Do you live in an area where scooters create issues?

      Scooters are a solution in search of a problem if you live in a place that already has other sustainable means of transport (separated bike lanes, reliable public transit). Vantaa is one of those places. The scooters do not solve a problem that exists here.

      People ride these things on the sidewalks all the time, it’s fucking annoying. Maybe there is a way to improve them like reducing their speed limits and adding noises like EVs have.

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    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.

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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      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

      • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        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.

        • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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          the precondition is no cars. i don’t see how people would be incapable of sorting and handling themselves without lanes and stringent rules

          • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            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.

    • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.net
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      once it tries to extort you for more money and you’re nearly there

      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

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Surprised at the negative comments tbh. Imagine if a bike share program encouraged people to leave the bikes flat on the ground, wherever? The business model is a net negative for urban centers and needs to be at least reconsidered in several aspects.

    Honestly I’m wondering if the people disagreeing even live with this problem? Finland has excellent cycling and transit infrastructure. Scooters are not the only way people can be car-free here.

    The scooters also just go too fast in my opinion, and should not be silent. It is easy for uncoordinated people to ride the scooters silently through busy sidewalks at like 25 km/h.

    • triplenadir
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      Allowing the scooters to be left on the ground is completely down to (lack of) regulation in the municipalities. the same scooter company in the same country in:

      • city A: completely banned
      • city B: allows scooters to be “parked” (read: abandoned) in any public space
      • city C: requires scooters to be parked in designated, painted bays, out of the way of bike lanes and street crossings

      In city C people get fined up the ass for parking anywhere else (you have to take a photo of it parked to end the trip) and you basically never see a stopped scooter outside an official bay.

      Anywhere you see parked scooters inconveniencing people (Berlin is so bad locals have started hanging them from streetlights), the local politicians made terrible choices.

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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    Even just in normal use they are dangerous, there doesn’t seem to be any helmet laws(nor would they be useful considering the buisiness model) and theres absolutely no built in bell or signal for the rider to use, while also being almost entirely silent, when even bikes make enough noise to be heard without earphones in.

    Even in suburban or literally rural areas you get menaced by these fucking things now, its ridiculous.

  • SuperZutsuki [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    They’re so much worse than bikes. The design encourages you to be reckless and they’re not nearly as easy to control as a bike. The wheels are too small to handle uneven ground well so you could hit a bump you didn’t see at 25-30kmh and eat pavement. And I’ve seen several people walking their personal e-scooters that have run out of battery. They’re too heavy to kick push like a normal scooter whereas an ebike is still a bike if it runs out of battery.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    One of my hobbies is when a scooter is blocking sidewalk access, like would block someone using a power chair or a mobility aid or a stroller or anything, i pick them up and bodily throw them on to something concrete that isn’t in the way. Seriously considering just carrying an angle grinder in my purse and sawing the cursed things in half whenever they’re blocking public right of way.

    I hate them so much. A bunch of bazinga shitheads just drop-shipped them all over the country to colonize and monetize one of the last remaining public spaces.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Dunno, but at least on older versions it was easy to pull the batteries.

      The first gen ones, you could just re-flash the firmware and have a free scooter.

  • Moonworm [any]@hexbear.net
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    The other day I got surprised by a couple on an e-bike flying down the sidewalk as I was leaving a store. They proceeded 20 yards down the sidewalk to where a worker was setting up some outdoor seating and went right up to them before they stopped and then just waited right there, making that person’s job that much worse after threatening to hit them. I kinda think they got lucky and were just able to stop in time. small motorized vehicles either gotta have pretty restrictive speed caps or be prohibited from a lot of pedestrian areas. E-bikes one-hundred percent need to be in the road. Also mandatory helmets, but that should almost go without saying - except I hardly ever see anyone on an e-bike that is wearing a helmet.