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 
On the one hand you have people living in walkable cities that almost universally hate the e-scooter.
On the other you have a bunch of americans who have managed to grasp the concept “car bad”, but have not moved on to the “why” and are thus stuck at not comprehending why people might take issue with the way E-scooters take up public space.
In this situation you chose an example where a car was involved sadly, so your overarching point will not be interrogated, but I just want to say: I agree with you. E-scooters fucking suck, they make life much worse for pedestrians and bicyclists. Traffic here (speaking as a bicyclist) has gotten much better since they’ve been banned from downtown.
I kinda regret being as hyperbolic as I was in the original post and also bringing up the recent accident in Vantaa. I was planning on making a post about rental e-scooters anyway but decided the tragedy was a good illustration of the downsides of at least this specific implementation of the e-scooter. I guess people took my stance as pro-car when it’s more pro-bicycle. I also see the benefits of electric-powered or electric-assisted vehicles for the elderly and the disabled but I don’t think scooters are a good fit for those groups either
You shouldn’t regret that, honestly it’s treatbrain from the other side. Your actual argument shines thru fine, people just dig down on the car thing so they don’t have to discuss the fact that rental e-scooters are a techbro scam in the west.