Scooter Madness
nytimes.com
Scooter Madness
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: Scooter Madness
#2> Brady Gaulke, a 26-year-old Nashville man, was killed in a collision with an S.U.V. while riding a scooter. His grieving parents have launched a petition to ban the devices in Nashville. “[E]-scooters are unsafe at any speed [...]
I'm just going to take a moment to remark how impressive it is that automakers have achieved this, that the roads are owned by cars and collisions are framed to be the fault of whoever was not in the car that shouldn't be on the road. Cars were invented first, and then Jaywalking (as a crime) was invented second.
In theory, you should evaluate these programs (and other programs like helmet laws) against the risk posed by cars, but unfortunately, when people take bicycles or scooters instead of cars, it frees up space on the road for more cars.
I don't have a particular angle here, I wish we could redesign our cities to accommodate better modes of transportation but that's expensive and there's little political will for it.
Re: Scooter Madness
#3> Last month, the inevitable happened: Brady Gaulke, a 26-year-old Nashville man, was killed in a collision with an S.U.V. while riding a scooter. His grieving parents have launched a petition to ban the devices in Nashville. “[E]-scooters are unsafe at any speed, and we are calling on Mayor David Briley and the Metro Council to ban them from the streets immediately,” the petition reads, arguing that Mr. Gaulke should be “the last victim of an epidemic that the e-scooter companies and local government both refuse to acknowledge.”
Imagine being gaslighted by the auto industry so hard that you think scooters are the problem here, not the car that actually hit and killed someone.
All of the problems that are discussed in this article are artifacts of a culture and cities designed around cars, period.
Re: Scooter Madness
#4It's an easy fix - just add bike lanes and bike/scooter racks.
The benefits of scooters are many: a single lane can accommodate many more scooters than cars. less emissions. faster than public for 1-3 miles. It's worth accommodating scooters.
Re: Scooter Madness
#5This doesn't seem like a very well-written article to me. The main claim is that scooters are dangerous, but since some trips on scooters are replacing trips in other forms of transportation like riding a car or bicycle, you should really be comparing to the dangers of using a car or bicycle. This just has a few anecdotes of people dying on a scooter.
Re: Scooter Madness
#6Here in Chicago, we just started a pilot program of the scooters throughout certain parts of the city this past Saturday [1]. I think that's the right approach to all this. Do a test run with a handful of companies (there is 10 companies here in this trial), and get the data to see how they should move forward. They have pretty strict guidelines on the pilot program, as well. I'm very curious to see how it all goes, and what happens next with them.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-biz-scooter-...
Re: Scooter Madness
#7My primary issues with dockless scooters are these:
1. Solid tires are awful. Harsh ride, unsafe/twitchy as hell on even slightly rough roads, and they don't inspire confidence for handling.
2. Motors that need to be kick-started in order to have enough torque to work are incredibly frustrating to use and don't have enough acceleration to get out of trouble.
Re: Scooter Madness
#8What misguided nonsense. The solution to cars crashing into scooters and bikes (no, cyclists aren't magically protected like she seems to think) isn't to ban them - it's to build proper bike lanes!
And why do people think scooters are street litter when cars aren't? Cars are left everywhere.
This is just classic luddism. "Roads were only for cars when I was young and that shall not change!"
Re: Scooter Madness
#9> Last month, the inevitable happened: Brady Gaulke, a 26-year-old Nashville man, was killed in a collision with an S.U.V. while riding a scooter. His grieving parents have launched a petition to ban the devices in Nashville. “[E]-scooters are unsafe at any speed, and we are calling on Mayor David Briley and the Metro Council to ban them from the streets immediately,” the petition reads, arguing that Mr. Gaulke shoul…
You've pointed out that the omnipresence and logistics of cars are fundamental to entire cultures and cities, and yet when something new is introduced that clashes with that, you're claiming that the people calling for the revocation of the new thing are gaslighted by "proponents" of the established thing - the thing that is cemented into the design of the world already. Given the options to roll back the scooters or redesign a part of civilization, though the latter may be an ideal, surely the parents of the dead calling for the former are not being unreasonable, and even more surely are not "gaslighted"?
Re: Scooter Madness
#10What misguided nonsense. The solution to cars crashing into scooters and bikes (no, cyclists aren't magically protected like she seems to think) isn't to ban them - it's to build proper bike lanes! And why do people think scooters are street litter when cars aren't? Cars are left everywhere . This is just classic luddism. "Roads were only for cars when I was young and that shall not change!"
>build proper bike lanes
Strongly agree.
>This is just classic luddism.
Strongly disagree. To me, the common "luddite" accusation often seems like a disconnected, elitist framing of issues that have important pragmatic angles.