Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

I'm a strong adherent of electric transportation, having recently upgraded from an electric moped to an electric motorbike.

I've also used these rental scooters all over my city (Vienna, Austria) to get around and I find them very convenient when, in a pinch, the excellent public transportation doesn't work out.

That said, I think there is a major modification required to these devices that will radically decrease the accidents: they need to make a sound.

Seriously, riding an electric vehicle is one of the most pleasant, enjoyable experiences around - but getting hit by one is easily one of the worst surprises imaginable. Every week, I count the number of people I could've hit full-force with my electric motorbike, if I hadn't been paying EXTRA attention to the street - on average I have one to three near-misses every week. I don't blame the pedestrian - after all, I'm keeping EXTRA attention for them, since I know my weakness: I am silent as heck in a city full of pedestrians whose survival skills have been honed on hearing whats around the corner.

Those days are over. We need speedo-synthesizers now. I've half-considered writing one myself (synthesizers are my thing) but I'm pretty sure its something that needs to be so reliable that it has to be built into the OS.

I wish Apple would address this. It'd be so much safer on the roads if we had great sound design alerting pedestrians to the hooning idiot coming around the corner. And thats the issue with these electric scooters - too often they are being operated by idiots. And yes, I class anyone riding a scooter without at least a bike helmet on, to be a full idiot.

tl;dr - Scooter companies need to start hiring sound-designers to keep ignorant pedestrians on the pavement before they get demolished by the silent, excellent transportation options hitting the scene ..

> e-bikes/bikes that can be left freely

That's the whole point: they can't.

You cannot dump your crap on the street and expect that to be ok.

If you can't just park your car on any random sidewalk or dump your bike in the middle of the street, what leads you believe that it's ok for a multinational to dump their crap all over a city?

Construction companies have to file for permits and pay all kinds of fees to temporarily park a trash bin on the sidewalk. People have to pay fees to get the trash company to take care of furniture you want to throw out, and you still can't just leave it on the sidewalk. What leads you to believe that it's ok to dump all sorts of crap on a sidewalk, specially when they are mainly used for joyrides?

Meanwhile, there are countless solutions for personal mobility that have been around for ages. Hell, is a bicycle an alien concept? Let's not fool ourselves into believing that a multinational's abusive business model is the only way anyone can move from point A to B.

Here in Romania, THE CARS litter the urban spaces. There are cars parked everywhere: on the sidewalks, on the side of the road in parallel with those on the sidewalks, in bus stops, on all the green spaces, on no-access markings of the roads, etc. I wish people would use more e-scooters & e-bikes. 8-10 rental e-scooters fit in the same sidewalk space a car would occupy and a car can't be moved if the owner isn't there.

> Most scooter-haters

Please don't.

There is no such thing as "scooter haters".

Companies like Lime are criticised for their abusive and antisocial business practices of dumping crap on the public space without any concern, criteria or care, and pretend everyone around them to just suck up the externalities to validate their business model.

No one cares if you ride your whatever on roads or bike lanes. People care when you dump your crap all over the place and get them in the way of everything. You'd hear the exact same complains if instead of escooters you dumped washing machines.

Whenever I visit Paris as a tourist, I have another impression.

Each time I stop, as a pedestrian, to wait for a traffic light to turn green, grumbling Parisians walk around me and cross the street with complete disregard for the red light. (I'm not sure I've ever even seen a Parisian pedestrian waiting for a traffic light. They might wait for traffic to clear a bit, but not until there's a green light.)

So to me, it looks like the locals have zero respect for traffic rules. Therefore I'm not surprised that new modes of transport come with a lot of problems.