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

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    6 months ago

    Base, superstructure. The scooters are disposable techbro bullshit that clogs the few remaining public spaces. They belong to no one and no one feels any ownership or responsibility towards them. If you use them they’re disposable, if you don’t use them they’re trash and an unwanted obstacle. They’re not public transit infrastructure, they’re shitty techbro “innovation” and everyone treats them as such. There are no ethical scooters under capitalism.

      • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        The issue is your society.

        I think we all agree here. The concept though? No. The “concept” in this faulty society is that of a wasteful techbro scam that is rolled out with little oversight, that makes the current public infrastructure unsafe to use for all others. E-scooters have far.more accidents than bikes. They have a lifespan of 9-18 months and then they’re trashed. They take up space on what little public area that’s left, making cities even less walkable.
        Sure in a rational society rollout and implementation of e-scooters would be done in conjunction with public infrastructure and be well-regulated, but this is not a rational society. We can dream up all sorts of scenarios where this could work fine, but the practical ones are faulty, which is why they receive critique.