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

    • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      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.netOPEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        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.netEnglish
      7·
      6 months ago

      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.