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 
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.
Ding ding fucking ding.
I keep thinking about something I read on this site a few months ago, paraphrasing here:
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.
We’re not talking about the US here, there’s an excellent system of public transport in place. Kids can just take the bus.
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.
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.
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.
They shouldn’t have access to motor vehicles to do their dumb shit on
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.
And yet people don’t play around with rentable bikes in the same way for some reason
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.
I don’t see piles of rentable bikes littering the streets. You occasionaly see one abandoned in a bush but usually people return them to the proper bike stands
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
Yeah, the current implementation utterly reeks of lazy tech bro mentality
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.
functioning within the fantasyland where something that isn’t completely necessary for the techbro company to make a ‘profit’ is done at all, i think we can dream bigger than the inconveinient way things are already set up. more frequent drop-offs than bus stops, more frequent bus stops, drop-offs at common destinations we know lots of people will use them: public buildings, multifamily residences, etc.
also obviously this could only actually work as a publicly owned and organized system
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.
I’d be happy if people left them on the side of the road but no, it’s always on the road where they often proceed to fall over and block the path even more
So they’re not free floating?
That’s another problem entirely IMO, fact is kids are going to do stupid shit with whatever vehicle you give them.
Which is why the apps are supposed to be age-restricted
That’s because they throw them in the canals
Throw them all in the pit, I say.
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
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
lol you don’t interact with kids very much do you
Would they leave their e-scooters blocking random streets though
We can agree this is an issue, but in my area at least this is also a large problem with the dockless rental bikes.
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
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
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.
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.
You don’t think theres a significant difference between unpowered personal transport(or assisted power bikes) and those with electronic motors that move entirely on their own power?
Not risk wise. I think more people want to use them because they don’t have to put in the physical effort. Which is good. But then with greater scale you see greater quantities of bad behavior. Cyclists are relatively rare in most US cities.
No I think there’s very little difference between unpowered personal transport and those with electronic motors allowing them to go 15 miles per hour, which at least here is what the scooters are limited to.
You don’t think a kid can find a steep hill if they wanna go fast
Might’ve been bad wording on my part, wasn’t sure what to call them
E-bikes are not slower than e-scooters. In fact that’s my biggest complaint about the fact that my city only has scooter rentals and no bikes, the bikes can go faster and are way easier to ride.
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.
Bikes aren’t motor vehicles
Right, so ban cars to remove their access to motor vehicles (getting run over by cars)