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

    • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      It’s a fine enough intermediary solution, but you’ve just replaced car-centric infrastructure with scooter-centric infrastructure. When people are against cars it’s not specifically the “car” part it’s the way motorized vehicles make the infrastructure worse for all. Replacing cars with scooters isn’t really a good idea.

      What you see most other places is that they convert wide roads to large pedestrian crossing and bicycle lanes and then on a longer timespan narrow them down to create small green spaces, resting areas and public utilities like repair stations, kiosks and public toilets.