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 
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.