It's really unfortunate it went this way, because Atlanta badly needs alternative transpiration options. We would likely have been better off with heavy enforcement around proper storage and riding of scooters, but so many people absolutely hated them due to how it was handled that I'm not surprised to see a ban instead.
The poor handling of how they were rolled out did a lot of damage long term to fixing transportation. Now there will be an uphill battle against a ban passed in reaction to the mess they created. Disappointing all around.
While I don't personally like the idea of using one (I prefer a bike or walking), they have been really popular.
One of the interesting effects is that along with a huge surge in ebike riders, scooters have made drivers much more alert to non-car road users. Cyclist friends have told me that cycling around town feels much safer, with drivers giving them more room, and fewer moments where it's obvious the driver just wasn't paying attention.
The unexpected is always going to be dangerous just because it's unexpected.
What I would like is basically rebranding bike lanes as low-speed mobility lanes. Take the parking and/or right lane full-width, put up bollards, and zone it for vehicles with a max speed of 20mph (bike, scooter, trike, hoverboard, electric wheelchair, who cares - if it doesn’t pollute and takes up about as much space as a person, it’s welcome). If space allows, add protected parking spots for pickup/drop off and handicapped parking and tell everyone else that they need to pay market-rate for parking.
Here in the DC area I have a particular love for Capital Bikeshare because they're extremely affordable and (mostly) use dedicated docking stations.
It's not the scooters that are the problem, it's a city environment that encourages aggressive and careless driving.
Scooters may be annoying, but at least they aren't deadly.
A few months ago I saw a man in Seattle die while riding an electric scooter on a street going down a hill. He was going way too fast, probably trying to keep up with the cars I think, started wobbling, fell, and bounced his head off the street. Dead on impact. Two points:
1. These scooters are not stable enough to operate at road speed safely. The wheels are too small for it, the dynamics of controlling one at speed are all fucked up. They are substantially less safe than even bicycles.
2. Rental scooters don't come with rental helmets. I think a helmet would have saved his life. But the whole supposed convenience of the scooter rental scheme assumes no helmets, since virtually nobody leaves home in the morning carrying a helmet on the off chance they may want to rent a scooter.
Bicycles aren't unsafe in themselves, see lots of cities where cycling is a very common and safe mode of transportation. Scooters on the other hand are indeed a lot less safe due to their small wheels, short wheelbase and awkward stance of the rider. That said, it's the urban planning that makes cycling unsafe in many places, not the device itself.
Banning e-scooters wholesale rather than figuring out how they can be part of a safe mobility culture is like banning combustion vehicles at the onset of the invention of cars.
I will agree though that safer electric PEV like e-bike or e-tricycle are likely safer, as are those with speed governors, and add in dedicated protected lanes.
2. Agreed. Crazy to me that people ride these without helmets. There's also foldable helmets for people annoyed by the size of regular ones. Protected bike lanes also improve this.
That said, banning scooters is a step backward.
There is one company I'm aware of that at least operates here in Canada called Neuron, which has helmets attached to every rental scooter. You're told by the app to put it on.
Is there an example of a city who has handled them correctly? Your description describes every implementation I've seen thus far.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/05/10/electric-scooters-ar...
Their popularity has killed off a previous bike hire scheme, which is a bit of a pity, but they are a lot handier...
Then they got banned because people are idiots and rode them idiotically and left them everywhere.
The city then brought them back, put caps on their speed, forced them to be rode only on streets and financially incentivized people to leave them in predetermined drop-off areas. It lasted about 2 weeks before that was shown to not work, because, again, people didn't really pay attention to the rules (and some of the rules, such as banning them from sidewalks, are outright dumb due to the fact that dangerous wild driving on main roads is celebrated in Miami).
It really is unfortunate just like you said - because they were a real asset to public mobility.
Then use some geofencing to fine people who fail to park/etc them properly.
Sure, allowing people to drop them off in the middle of a congested sidewalk is easy on the asshole doing it, and the companies might have a bit less revenue because its inconvenient to park them properly, but so what. They might be able to make some percentage of the fine back if people still refuse to comply.
The sidewalk is public space, they have _LESS_ rights as a corp to be there trying to profit off it than the citizens walking the sidewalk IMHO.
Scooters are great, they are low-cost easy way to get around. I think anger in Atlanta towards the scooters, is similar to why Marta will never go up 75.
Instead, we have bars (RiRa and Hand In Hand were unable to afford leases pre pandemic) shutting down, street drifters, crime, and significant amounts of drunk driving.
This is also a city where the police have done nothing to stop people riding go carts and stuff on the streets disrupting traffic and hurting people. Or tent clusters on sidewalks and off ramps.
So it was weird they banned scooters and allow things with no benefit to the city.
There’s also an angle that the city is really big on pushing their boondoggle public transport streetcar project and didn’t like cheaper and more environmentally friendly options available for the public.
I think Atlanta banned the scooters because the companies didn’t pay off the right locals. They could have tried to fix the issues and work with the scooter companies.
Yeah I wish more people would recognize this. Many "transit activists" are basically just lobbyists for the regional MTA/MTDs and want to minimize competition.
The year before the pandemic I spent each day on my walk to/from work arguing with scooter drivers about them being on the sidewalk and how dangerous it was. A child was hit by one in my area and seriously hurt.
Parked on sidewalks: yes
Blocking crowded streets: yes
Collisions common: yes
People getting hurt: yesThe solution is to build better public transportation options. That will necessarily include removing a decent amount of the car infrastructure, but you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.
The way you frame it, it sounds like (and it often is the case with people framing it this way) that you think that if we remove car infrastructure, people will be forced to use other means of transportation to get around. And while technically true, all it will actually do is piss people off and make it so much harder to get around.
It's also a vicious cycle: making public transit marginally worse increases the number of people who drive to get places, which makes the government build more roads, which makes cities sprawl more, and eventually you end up with a city like Atlanta that spans 50 miles and is barely navigable without a car.
Yes, it will piss people off - it will make cities MUCH less convenient for suburban drivers. That's not a bad thing unless you happen to be a suburban driver.
Bikes are simply better at point-to-point transportation (the same advantage that cars have), except that they don't take up a lot of space so it's actually a scalable solution to have everyone using them to get around even in a dense city; see Amsterdam as an example.
The humungous parking lots, the 50-foot wide roads, the high speeds, the increasingly larger vehicles, the demolished housing for more freeways, parking minimums, extensive R1 zoning... They all contribute to a city exclusively for cars. Even if we don't get rid of ALL of it, we can certainly cut it back significantly.
Maybe ban cars in places where we don't need them anyways like Valencia street in San Francisco or the Spanish super blocks. Decrease speed limits and design streets to enforce them properly. Add walking and cycling paths to the grocery stores. Add raised crosswalks. When you don't have people using their cars to travel 5 miles everyday it leaves them open to the people who REALLY need to use them. Allow walkable neighborhoods in city planning initiatives.
People WANT to live in places like these, but we refuse to build them for some reason. It's why walkable neighborhoods, built when they were still legal, cost an arm and a leg now. Heck, we even build theme parks to give people a vague feeling of being someplace like that. People go on vacation to countries with places like that.
My sense of why this framing is popular is that we've had ~30+ years of passing "public transit" initiatives that are doomed to fail because we would not disrupt car infrastructure. This becomes a double-whammy because we spend money to get very mediocre results, and people reasonably blame the transit system.
Instead, if you're clear from the start that you are going to remove an entire lane in the city for your BRT system - you face more opposition, but you have a much better chance of implementing an actual BRT system!
I think reasonable people can disagree on this, but it's not a mystery how we got here.
It is also not like car infrastructure would turn into non-existance. It most cases all that happens is reuse. Playing fields. Pedestrian areas. Bike lanes. Bus lanes. Bike areas.
The only common thing is they all cist car infrastructure space. This is the common ground. The reallocation of that infrastructure and space is a different story.
I have yet to see a case where it didn't pass people off no matter what the future use was. So even if technically the other framing should be different I have not seen a case where it makes a difference. All while seeing that even pure car infrastructure blockage makes a difference.
We do not need to allow cars to take every possible route. Alternative modes of transport are more useful if they're prioritized on the most direct routes. Cars are fast, a diversion won't impact them as much as it does someone on a bike or scooter.
Because it's the actual solution.
> you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.
You don't have to hope. They will adapt.
People will adapt to many things, but that doesn't mean it is good - you could stop food deliveries to major cities and they'd empty in days; cars included; but that wouldn't be good.
Now you have to take a photograph when you end a ride to prove that you did it responsible. There are many areas that are marked as slow-speed and many areas that are marked as no-park. The most central parts are entirely no-park with exceptions for dedicated bicycle-parkings.
Scooters that are misparked can be confiscated and the company needs to pay a fine to get it back.
It took a little while but now it seems to be respected by the vast majority and it has become a decent addition to other public transportation.
And I say this as someone who did despise them in the beginning.
Lots of other areas to discuss though, such as whether they last long enough to make environmental sense etc.
In the case of Japan, life develops around the train stations indeed, where all the shops and entertainment is, and between those stations are the residential areas, so scooters are perfect here.
In European cities (smaller) it's normally organized in rings, where most things you'd want to do are within the city center, or around large neighborhoods but also in circles (larger). So you can take a train/bus/cycle/scooter to the center, then going to the different places either walking or with the scooter.
Residential and business districts should not be a thing. Offices should be located right next to houses. (With the exception of "roudy" or loud places like music halls and bars.)
Remove all zoning laws and it takes care of itself over time. Zoning is always "keep [thing people want] away from [place where people want it]".
All that accomplishes is putting services that people want further away from them.
It's like hotfixing a completely broken pile of spaghetti code in prod, it'll save your sunday evening but you're in for 6 months of rewrite anyways
That's only because cars are by far the largest share of transportation period.
When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work", then the best numbers I could cobble together (which are not great) from a few sources are:
Deaths per 100 million miles:
Car: ~1
Bicycle: ~9
Walking: ~16
Motocycle: ~40
Really, there are two different questions to ask:
1. What is the safest way for me to get to work?
2. What is the safest way for all of us to get to work?
You might assume those have the same answer, but they don't. The safest way for all of us to get to work is probably to have everyone walk and/or bike. But if you unilaterally decide to start biking or walking to work in a heavily car-dominated area, you are increasing your own personal risk unless you can find a route that separates you from the cars well.
Transportation safety is fiendishly complex and no one sentence comment on HN will capture it well.
It's true that cars are extraordinarily deadly, and it's also true that most drivers don't want anything done about it if it might inconvenience them.
BS
So this is a problem that will quickly solve itself.
Choosing between the sidewalk with pedestrians and the road with cars, I mean it's obvious right?
https://electrek.co/2020/01/30/limes-electric-scooters-can-n...
Forgot that I take having bike lanes in my town for granted
But it is illegal. Each time I take it out I run the risk of getting a fine - but for now I'll take the risk as the benefit is too great for me. I'd love to buy a 'legal' one and would happily pay whatever registration or insurance was required.
A bicycle is fine but you have to put in effort which is not always appealing and you can't take it into buildings (though on the other hand it's more reasonable to leave it locked up outside).
There's definitely a unique space that e-scooters occupy where they're better than every other option.
On the scooter I go the supermarket with the scooter, do my shop and it is so much easier to scoot home with a bag over the handlebar than it is on a bike.
I love cycling and I cycle a lot for pleasure, but for errands the scooter is just perfect, no effort, easy to take in the house or pub, or train, or shopping. After a day of work I often just want easy.
Before I had the scooter I did likely cycle more, but I also used the car much more.
At least for me. I have a very short walk to the store, and I'd consider a scooter but using the bike is just too much of a hassle most of the time.
As a worst-case example, take crossing the Queensboro Bridge which took about ~30 mins by foot, ~20 mins by kick scooter, and less than ~10 minutes by bike or electric scooter. On the surface that seems like a kick scooter fills a valid niche. However, on a sustained uphill a kick scooter is more tiring than walking and not substantially faster, so it's often simpler to just carry it. It is faster on the way down, but also stressful as you have to sit on the brakes the whole time to keep from going too fast on 200mm rubber wheels over cracked concrete. Saving ten minutes of walking just wasn't worth the extra stress and weight.
You can get kick scooters with inflatable tires and suspension but they're so low volume that it's not much more expensive to get a mass-produced electric scooter.
I have a $7,000 e-bike and this guy is like $4,500 but can go sixty and they also can accept a trailer with an 80? mile range...
I am currently trying to figure out a trailer solution for my bike, which only pushes me to 20 MPH (Class I) (class II have a throttle thumb lever - Class III push to 28 MPH) (But cost ~$15K)
Completely unfounded but I think there is a lot of pressure being applied by the taxi groups to try and discourage them.
UK is almost as bad as the US when it comes to car-centricism, or it was historically.
https://www.halfords.com/cycling/advice/are-electric-scooter...
“ Currently, there isn't a specific law for e-scooters so they are recognised as "powered transporters" - falling under the same laws and regulations as motor vehicles, and subject to all the same legal requirements - MOT, tax, licensing and specific construction. However, because e-scooters don't always have visible rear red lights, number plates or signalling ability, they can't be used legally on roads. Private e-scooters can only be used on private land and not on public roads, cycle lanes or pavements. The only e-scooters that can be used on public roads are those that are rented as part of government-backed trials. E-scooter trial in London, June 2021 IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES Do I need a driving licence? Yes. To use an e-scooter from an official trial, you need to have category Q entitlement on your driving licence.”
Yes scooters blocking sidewalks is a problem, but cars straight up killing people is clearly like 1000x worse.
A bit hyperbolic, don't you think? The average is 1 for every 100,000,000 miles driven. And more like 1 in 600,000,000 if you are talking about people killed by cars who were not themselves in said car.
That is total deaths. Most people killed in a car-related accident are in the car. Pedestrian deaths are around 17% of the total. [0]
[0] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
Is about 55 inches for a current HD pickup, or 9 inches shorter than the average female human. The hood height is a bit lower for the more common half-ton pickups.
The outcome? Instead of widening the roads or eliminating the carpool lanes, they kicked even more cars out, converted additional lanes to carpool / express lanes, and further snarled traffic.
There's a state-wide mandate to reduce commute miles, and most cities have interpreted it to mean "increase congestion", not "improve public transit".
I'm not saying that's their plan, but on the scale of like 2-3 decades it's not preposterous that making driving worse now helps eventually. Certainly it's not worse than widening roads, something that at this point is well understood to not actually help.
(And, no, they are not allowing houses to be built at anywhere near the rate needed to meet demand.)
In my experience, High Occupancy Vehicle lanes restrict usage based on the highness of the occupancy of the vehicle... What does brand have to do with this?
For me, I'd always just risk the fine for the 6-7 years I was down in the Bay Area. It never happened and I got hours or possibly whole days of my life back.
In cambridge MA those electric scooters are quite everywhere. And they don't know where they should go (they tend to go in the bike lane, which I think is correct, even though they annoy us bikers a bit, I think its the moving fast, but not working at it..). But non electrified scooters are back too, along with the occasional one wheel.
Bikes and scotters move you more quickly though certain routes than cars, as you tend to get through each light in just one clycle.
The 3-class system is pretty good for defining e-bikes. But, it's useless for actually enforcing anything.
1 - pedal assist only, 20mph max assist 2 - pedal or throttle, 20mph max 3 - pedal only, 28mph max And anything faster is just an electric motorbike/scooter (and should have tags and a license, etc).
I'm fine with sharing bike infrastructure and multi-use paths with class 1&2 e-bikes, e-scooter with similar speed limits, and anything else in the e-mobility space (e-hand-cycles, etc).
I'm in the DC suburbs and we get a lot of e-bikes, but so far, they're mostly a mix of expensive Trek/Specialized stuff that older or less-able adults ride for fitness. Or, cheap (Amazon, etc) e-bikes used for transport. And bike lane traffic is light enough that there's no conflict.
But, I definitely see the potential problem. A friend just texted me a for-sale listing for a lightweight e-dirt-bike that does 70mph, but from 10' away you'd never know it wasn't a pedal bike at all (looks like a regular downhill race bike).
These small micromobility devices will come to dominate urban city streets over the next decade. These devices typically cost less than $1,500 (a tiny fraction of an automobile), and are significantly faster than driving in city centres. A lot of people will still choose cars for comfort, but the travel time and cost savings of e-mobility are tough to compete against.
I understand the point you're trying to make but this is a pretty insane way to support it. :D Looking at traffic when raining and concluding that the reason it's worse is because there are more cars, ignoring the fact that people drive more cautiously and have more accidents in the rain, is kind of a leap.
I think they also need to discuss other projects which impacted commute times at the time. For example, major work on the GA400/I285 intersection began at that time. Changes to I75 and its dedicated pay lanes was underway. Those two routes are used by huge numbers of commuters every day and the impact was huge.
The micromobility ban was implemented in the city of Atlanta on 9 August 2019. We use high-resolution data from 25 June 2019 to 22 September 2019 from Uber Movement to measure changes in evening travel times between 7:00 p.m. and midnight
The data was very specific to evenings in certain areas.
I don't believe this report is proving anything it claims.
Then Uber came and that largely went away b/c why fight over a cab when you could call and Uber?
Then CitiBike came along. It was amazing that you could just get a bike and ride somewhere. That is, until you were riding it to a commuter bus or train station at evening rush hour. Suddenly, you have 5 mins to catch your train and you see one open slot in the bike return. Another person also sees that spot and you race towards it until you ave to say "Back the F@#$ off, that's my spot!"
In other words, if cities want to have these options then should address directional supply and demand issues otherwise people are just going to say "Not worth the hassle"
Same with the bike rental things like CitiBike - there should be roving vans throughout the city moving and balancing the slots based on usage. They have the data, use it. They could even offer to "fix" problems (e.g., arrive at the train station and there's not a slot available? CitiBike will send a vehicle to get you to your destination within reason).
There are, and the system does rely in part on this rebalancing act to be functional. (Also to bring the E-bikes in for charging — sadly the stations won't be able to charge those for some time yet.)
Simple solution:
1) Cities establish guidelines on legal parking / riding. 2) Impose large fines for violations. 3) Scooter companies pass on those fines to the rider who parked illegally.
But instead we have a bunch of blue cities banning the most affordable, equity enhancing, zero emissions, last mile transportation solution.
I am tired of the litter on our property and sidewalks in our part of town where people pay a premium to not have to deal with this sort of thing. If you don't live in Midtown, you don't have a right to complain. If you rent, you don't have grounds to complain. I do, so I can complain and I will.
I should add though - they are dangerous, even when we’ll done, and riders shouldn’t be cavalier. I fell once (I’m coordinated and competent - but a crack in a sidewalk, in broad daylight, got me) and feel extremely lucky to have gotten away with nothing more than a skinned knee and palm.
The public part is important because an ecosystem is not one individual entity like Bird/Lime/etc where everything for particular mode of travel has to funnel through.
The escooter experiment has basically shown lacking an ecosystem causes problems. And the same thing would happen if “escooter” is replaced with “ebikes” or “eskateboards” or “emopeds”. They would still be scattered everywhere, get in people’s way, etc.
So far the only real ecosystem for transportation we have comes down to cars once again (unless you live in NYC with the subway). There’s not enough momentum to holistically address multi-mode transportation meshed in public life and not just think in terms of “cars and car alternatives”.
I had the opportunity to work with one of the scooter companies (which was underwritten by a large auto manufacturer) a couple of years ago and their organization was a mess and almost intentionally mismanaged.
I could only infer that the large auto company wanted these guys to flail about until local governments would ban this threat to automotive dominance.
Like, just to put this in perspective, I did a bit of digging behind the Atlanta ban. It happened right after (and as a direct result of) these events:
- A 34 year old woman on an e-scooter was murdered* by a driver of a car, in a hit-and-run. [1]
- A 20 year old man on an e-scooter was killed by a negligent driver of an SUV who was charged with 2nd degree homicide. [2]
- A 37 year old man was killed by the driver of a bus who did not see him. Passengers on the bus say he was banging on the bus to alert the driver as he was crushed to death. I'm not able to find out if the bus driver was ever charged for this death. [3]
- A homeless man (of unknown age?) on an e-scooter was killed by a truck. In this case, it does look like the e-scooter ran a red light and the driver was not at fault. [4]
So in 2 out of 4 cases, clearly the car was at fault. The city reached first for not limiting cars in any way, but rather limiting scooters. I mean, I get it. There was no structure for doing anything to cars or the system that causes people to drive everywhere. And to be fair to Atlanta, the ban on scooters was only at night.
We know there are ways to structure cities and traffic laws to make safer spaces for pedestrians and cyclists. Bad saldy, here in America, we are so reluctant to reach for those options. We have so many parking lots, so many stroads, so few walkable spaces. Whenever there's conflict between cars and people, we blame people. And then build extra lanes and extra parking lots and it just gets worse.
By the way, this problem with cars happens here in San Francisco too: My friends and I have all seen an explosion of bad behavior by drivers, including a friend of mine who struck last year in a hit-and-run, breaking his femur. This is not just anecdote: Pedestrian deaths are on the rise here, while citations plummet. [5]
1. * I am not sure if "murder" is legally applicable in this case, but to me, if you strike and kill someone in your car and then run, you're a murderer. https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/scooter-rider-hit-k...
2. https://www.bikelaw.com/2019/06/driver-charged-in-death-of-e...
3. https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/scooter-rider-hit-k...
4. https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/south-fulton-county/man-on-...
5. https://sfbayca.com/2022/07/05/traffic-deaths-in-san-francis...
It was a thing when I was picking careers that they barely hired firefighters because the changes in building codes meant... much fewer fires.
Out in the townships, some went volunteer, and at the ones where it was paid a lot of them cross trained as EMTs or whatever.
I don't think it registered over the years -- I never "just got a job" because everyone in the system -- from the Harvard doctor doing the surgery to the dad from cub scouts, who have known me since birth -- they wouldn't lift a finger to help me if I didn't show them the right card.
And they're going to misunderstand me, on purpose, for the rest of my life, if I try to change that?
I really don't like violence, but I have been bullied all my life, and some days I don't feel like stripping out the emo bullshit and leaving the LinkedIn friendly HN post and I hate these scooter companies that put very real risks out there when many people still don't even have a bank account let alone a smartphone to order up one of these... things.
If anyone has a suggestion on a good scooter model to permanently purchase and pair with a helmet, I think maybe someone should do a startup that rents out helmets instead of chemical fire factories to be thrown into the woods next to the cloud factory.
PS: Do not let Michael Chabon take you to a secondary location, even if it's Halloween.