Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Is it just me, or does this thread feel unusually hostile towards scooters for being in fuckcars?
Right? The scooters are only in the sidewalks because the cars actively make the roads dangerous for them. But here we are in a place that supposedly hates cars defending them against a very useful replacement for a huge amount of people.
My city has a pretty good protected bike lane network, and a result is you rarely see scooters or bikes on the sidewalks (at least in the parts of town with good protected bike lanes). Instead, you get lots of scooters and bikes zipping safely by without endangering pedestrians. At least on my route to work, I'm about 90% sure there are more commuters in the bike lanes than cars on the road, despite the cars getting 90+% of the road space.
I frickin love protected bike lanes. Turns a stressful experience into a downright pleasant one. It feels 10000x safer than riding on streets without protection.
You should still wear a helmet. It isn't there for cars, it's there because going from biking speed to no speed is more than enough acceleration to cause injury.
They need the same infrastructure that bicycles and have gotten popular really fast. Since the infrastructure cannot accomodate them (no bike lane), the scotters become a nuisance for everyone.
With proper infrastructure though (cycling lanes and parking spots) they are fine. (Some might argue about users not following the rules, I'd say, sometimes you can't respect the rules because the street is shit).
Also private companies monopolising public space, not cool. (that one I still stand by, and I hope they pay "rent" that goes towards maintaining the roads.)
I suspect there is a bit of a compounding effect with renting the scooters (more prevalent where I live), which makes users less respectful. Or a novelty effect with teenagers rushing past on their new toy. In my experience that wears out fast, though.
I guess even here some forget that you can put the scooters on bike lanes :)
I just googled a bit and one claim I saw was that about a third of accidents involve first time riders.
Same here, my town simply has multi-use paths basically on every other street and the only problem i see with e-scooters is that for some inscrutable reason people insist on parking the rental ones literally in the middle of the road???
It's incredibly strange because they don't even park them near a destination, literally just in the middle of nowhere..
But other than that people behave really well, and it makes me smile so very much to see families where the kids have their own bikes and e-scooters and the parents are riding rental ones, the added convenience of e-scooters has absolutely gotten more people out of their cars and actually experiencing the world and interacting with people around them.
That and the assholes who just dump them in the middle of what little infrastructure we do have. Around here they are constantly blocking sidewalk, bike lanes, and mixed use paths.
All city needs to do is to put giant "put ebikes here" sign over on-street vehicle storage spot(in car-dependent places it's called parking spot). One such spot can store 10-20 ebikes or 20-30 escooters.
it's so fascinating how people absolutely lose their minds over e-scooters, and these are people who shit on drivers for doing the exact same thing to cyclists!
Yeah I hate these scooters even with good infrastructure (Germany) people still can't stop themselves from basically trying to run you over and when they are not in use they are usually left in a place (sidewalks, pedestrian paths etc) that blocks pedestrian traffic. Not to mention the people taking shitload of this stuff into the public transport and making it even more crowded.
Never had a driving license, can't be bothered with it when public transport gets the job done.
I remember this happening often in college where some bikers were just an absolute menace and you had to get out of dodge quickly.
They've fixed that around here (Spain) after a couple got a battery fire in a metro car: escooters are banned from public transport.
Luckily bikes are not, which only take up like 5 times the space 🤷
But like people don't ride them badly here, so clearly that's a solvable problem. I'd wager germany generally doesn't actually really have that good bicycle infrastructure.
As for them being left all over the place, that's a regulation problem specific to rental scooters, and doesn't apply at all to privately owned ones but people like you just ignore that completely.
Also like, you've seen where people park their cars, right? a car in the middle of the bike path is vastly more annoying than an e-scooter.
Calling problems "solvable problems" or "regulation problems" does not make them go away they are still problems associated with e-scooters. I always hear good stuff about Germany's bicycle infrastructure but I guess it is suddenly bad when it is covenient for you to make your point.
Of course a car parked on a bike path is more annoying than e-scooters I've never said e-scooters were worse than cars, but still I find them extremely annoying as a person that is travelling mostly on foot.
Probably because these scooters compete with bikes for the space thats left over.
no they don't, what kind of logic is that? By that logic cyclists should hate other cyclists too.
More people using bike infrastructure is great, it makes it visible and increases the likelihood of more money being spent on it.
If there's not enough space in the bike lane for bikes and scooters, that's only a reason to build more and bigger bike lanes.
Sorry bout your circlejerk