There are 23 000 of these cursed things all over Stockholm. I hate them with the fire of a thousand suns.
Theoretically, they are a really good idea. A quick, easy, and cheap way to get from A to B. They are not that environmentally friendly because they have to be replaced every couple of months, but they are – in an ideal world – a good addition to city living. In theory.
In practice, however, they are more often a curse than a blessing. People ride two-up and don’t wear helmets. Users are often underage and ride in heavy traffic or on busy sidewalks. At night, many users are drunk. And worst of all, people toss them all over the place. They just hop off and leave them there. In winter this means that snowploughs have to move them out of the way. They are a tripping hazard for the visually impaired, and block accessibility for everyone. They are used more frequently in crimes – to transport weapons or carry out attacks.
It’s such a pity that so many good ideas are spoiled by people who can’t play nice.
Here is an example of what it looks like near us. To the left of the photo are metal parking structures for e-scooters AND painted parking spots where you can leave your scooter. Do people do this? As you can see, the answer is a bit fat nope. There is one scooter in the middle of the sidewalk, and one in the cycle lane, even though there is proper parking a few metres away. The users just don’t care. And until they do, there is nothing more I would like for these things to disappear off the face of the earth.
Do you have these where you live? What do you think of them?
NYC has similar problems and is doing nothing about it. Our mayor, Mayor Gonna-do, loves a photo op but does nothing to attack the problem. Come to think of it he does nothing else either to help the quqlity of life.
that sounds like our local guy in charge of e-scooters. He talks a lot but things just get worse and worse.
The cycle hire schemes are much better because you have to register to use them and you have to return them to a stand to stop being charged for the hire. The notion of scooters just being dumped all over a city is a terrible idea.
People who rent bicycles also seem to have some knowledge of the rules of the road. E-scooters seem to by and large either be clueless or have no manners.
I live in a small city and they are just starting to pop up but they are mostly personal scooters. Our town hasn’t invested in anything like that yet. We have plenty of bikes we can rent. I live not too far from Hamburg and I sometimes have to go there and they are everywhere and while many of them seem to be able to stand on their own, the problem you are encoutering is creeping up. People seem to show less and less empathy these days and this also seems to be a growing trend…