this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Just this week in Vantaa, Finland three 12-year-old girls piled onto one of those electric scooters you subscribe to with an app and proceeded to get run over by a car at a crossing, killing one of them

The app is supposed to have an age restriction but it's easy to bypass and you're not supposed to have more than one person riding on one, which people routinely ignore

I hate seeing kids and teens speeding around dangerously on those fucking things and then just leaving them laying around on high-traffic bike routes because they don't give a shit since they treat the scooters as completely disposable

Fucking awful bazinga-brained Silicon Valley-ass idea and business model. Actually, there are also bikes you can use with an app but curiously you don't see kids doing reckless shit with those, almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible thonk

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[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 77 points 5 months ago (1 children)

car kills scooter users

we should ban the scooters

puzzled

[–] itappearsthat@hexbear.net 54 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

honestly this is more carbrained than people who fetishize their giant stupid truck. so carbrained that the car, which was solely responsible for crushing the body of a child, is just not even in the picture. cars cease to exist as noticeable objects, they are simple facts, they are of the world itself.

[–] Tabitha@hexbear.net 33 points 5 months ago (1 children)

theory-gary the car is a force of nature, an act of God, the scooter is hubris of mankind.

[–] Black_Mald_Futures@hexbear.net 12 points 5 months ago

If man were meant to scoot we'd be born with little wheels

[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 26 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes although to be fair to doublepepperoni, the other complaints mentioned are not contingent on this strange take.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 19 points 5 months ago (6 children)

A car is just the worst case scenario, but these things are routinely involved in other types of accidents as well

[–] itappearsthat@hexbear.net 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 19 points 5 months ago (4 children)

People riding them drunk, falling and fucking themselves up.

You could say "don't ride them drunk then", but when there's zero oversight that's what's going to happen.

[–] space_comrade@hexbear.net 25 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

People riding them drunk, falling and fucking themselves up.

This happens with bicycles pretty regularly too.

You could say "don't ride them drunk then", but when there's zero oversight that's what's going to happen.

What oversight exists for bicycles?

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[–] itappearsthat@hexbear.net 47 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Okay seems like the actually dangerous thing in your story was the car??? Kids should be able to do dumb shit without having to worry about being turned into tomato paste.

[–] ClimateChangeAnxiety@hexbear.net 26 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Ding ding fucking ding.

I keep thinking about something I read on this site a few months ago, paraphrasing here:

I should absolutely be able to walk around staring at my phone with headphones in. Even at my most distracted, I am more aware than a child, and children should be able to walk around without getting murdered by a driver

If a child is killed by a car, that is the responsibility of the driver and the infrastructure. Not the child or their behavior. That is something that shouldn’t be able to happen.

Separated bike paths that are more extensive than the road network. Being on the same path as cars has to be the most difficult, annoying, slowest, way to get to your destination. Pedestrian barriers along most car roads. Tight roads with low speed limits so if a collision does happen no one dies. Make rental scooters and bikes free to use so that children don’t feel the need to save money by piling onto one scooter.

The solution to this isn’t taking away one of the only methods that children have to get places on their own.

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[–] Nacarbac@hexbear.net 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Agreed, but e-scooter rollouts have basically fuckall integration with the existing infrastructure/forms of travel in a city or with standard driving education.

While they're great in theory, they should be being introduced as part of a massive overhaul of personal transportation infrastructure, education, and regulation... or at least some supervision with actual teeth behind it. But we're probably past the age of doing stuff like that, so as is it's just letting random companies step in to extract money while impinging on the rough grey area created by existing safety systems.

Eventually that'll work itself out, sure, but in much the same way that we started mandating lockout switches on Giant Blending Machines after The Incident With the Giant Blending Machine.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Kids should be able to do dumb shit

They shouldn't have access to motor vehicles to do their dumb shit on

[–] itappearsthat@hexbear.net 25 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Your complaints are indistinguishable from those levied against bikes. Multiple kids have been piling onto the same bike since forever. It's even made its way into Boomer/Xer nostalgia bait about riding around your neighborhood with your first love on your handlebars. I guarantee you the death rate is higher for kids on bikes than for scooters. I say this as somebody who loves being a cyclist and uses a bike for literally all of their chores.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

And yet people don't play around with rentable bikes in the same way for some reason

[–] space_comrade@hexbear.net 25 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yes they do what the fuck are you on about. We did all kinds of stupid shit on bicycles as kids, I'm astonished I didn't have more broken bones as a kid.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 13 points 5 months ago (8 children)

I don't see piles of rentable bikes littering the streets. You occasionaly see one abandoned in a bush but usually people return them to the proper bike stands

[–] Dolores@hexbear.net 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

seems like designated areas to leave rented machines & some kind of penalty for leaving them where-ever is more in order. which also fixes the absurdity of a truck going everywhere a scooter person has at the end of every night to pick them all up-charge-relocate

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 14 points 5 months ago

Yeah, the current implementation utterly reeks of lazy tech bro mentality

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[–] itappearsthat@hexbear.net 13 points 5 months ago (6 children)

It really seems like your complaints are about kids doing kid shit but you know that is stupid so you launder them through complaints about newfangled contraptions

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[–] ClimateChangeAnxiety@hexbear.net 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They do though??? They absolutely do. Children in particular. Fucking around on bikes is like one of the top things children do.

They might do it a bit less with the rented bikes than the rented scooters but that’s just because most kids have their own bikes

[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 11 points 5 months ago (10 children)

Bikes are considerably slower, especially when ridden by children and also obviously don't move under their own power on level ground. It's weird that people are in favor of giving children access to motor vehicles in this thread.

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[–] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 12 points 5 months ago

Right, so ban cars to remove their access to motor vehicles (getting run over by cars)

[–] Abracadaniel@hexbear.net 27 points 5 months ago

> scooter boldly states on the front of it "do not ride on the sidewalk"

> only ever see them used and stored on sidewalks

thinking-about-it

spoilerthere is essentially zero bike infrastructure in this city, no one feels safe using the scooters on the road

[–] tactical_trans_karen@hexbear.net 27 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Local city by me has had frequent problems of people throwing them into a river. My opinion on this is the two wolves meme.

[–] Black_Mald_Futures@hexbear.net 12 points 5 months ago

how else are you supposed to feed the eels

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[–] WilsonWilson@hexbear.net 25 points 5 months ago (2 children)

We have this argument all the time concept vs implementation. Scooters seem like a great idea but when implemented by SV tech bros it ends up being a nightmare. I was in Austin tx for the eclipse and those lime scooters were everywhere. The was a dozen lying on the sidewalk in front of Amy's ice cream. Scooters abandoned on the grass in front of the capital. I even saw one on the the east-side interstate by the tesla factory. Its a shame Austin didn't just do the scooters themselves. City employees would drive around with a pickup truck and keep things tidy. Make the first three hours of use free so everyone can use them.

[–] FourteenEyes@hexbear.net 20 points 5 months ago

You got to love the silicon valley innovation of "what if we were just lazy and didn't pick up the products after people were done using them?"

[–] itappearsthat@hexbear.net 18 points 5 months ago

in a way they took the shopping cart return problem and blew it up a hundred thousand times

[–] Black_Mald_Futures@hexbear.net 23 points 5 months ago (13 children)

The anti scooter opinion on hexbear is really fucking weird to me, real ranting "the kids these days!!" type shit and just really weird in the context of the rest of Hexbear's opinions on public transit. Like the electric scooters cause some wires to cross in y'all's minds that just breaks something

Just this week in Vantaa, Finland three 12-year-old girls piled onto one of those electric scooters you subscribe to with an app and proceeded to get run over by a car at a crossing, killing one of them

Children killed BY A CAR but let's ban the scooter?

they treat the scooters as completely disposable

idk chief maybe they can like idk charge a deposit? this isn't a situation to be like "we've tried nothing and im out of ideas, ban scooters"

almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

[–] Kultronx@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 5 months ago

nah dawg they are super annoying as it is the people who ride them are the problem. as someone who bikes everyday, statistically i will have to deal with some scooter dbag dude (always a dude) not following the rules and making the road unsafe for everyone, whether it's pedestrians, cyclists, or drivers. never once heard them use their bell or signal.

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[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

they are one of those ideas that almost works, except when they fall short it's a shit show. i pedestrian a few miles a day and, in theory, one of those would be awesome for getting around and expanding my range of daily meandering. except the transportation infrastructure here is a contested shit show of homicidal cars pushing everyone else into unprotected bike lanes that suddenly become storm drains or delivery parking, or up onto narrow sidewalks that won't allow two normal humans passing each other to do so without one stepping off.

so on the sidewalk, i get insecure bicyclists doing the slalom around pedestrians and then these random toys whizzing along silently. when they are functioning. we've had like 3 rounds of companies come in with them and within weeks i see them littered in front yards and across sidewalks, beat to shit. because i mean who really wants to push one somewhere once it tries to extort you for more money and you're nearly there?

i think the technology might work here more easily if cars and all non-emergency vehicles were banned from existence, and then all the nice wide roads could be partitioned out and shared among the rest of us.

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[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Surprised at the negative comments tbh. Imagine if a bike share program encouraged people to leave the bikes flat on the ground, wherever? The business model is a net negative for urban centers and needs to be at least reconsidered in several aspects.

Honestly I’m wondering if the people disagreeing even live with this problem? Finland has excellent cycling and transit infrastructure. Scooters are not the only way people can be car-free here.

The scooters also just go too fast in my opinion, and should not be silent. It is easy for uncoordinated people to ride the scooters silently through busy sidewalks at like 25 km/h.

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[–] Parsani@hexbear.net 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] SuperZutsuki@hexbear.net 15 points 5 months ago

They're so much worse than bikes. The design encourages you to be reckless and they're not nearly as easy to control as a bike. The wheels are too small to handle uneven ground well so you could hit a bump you didn't see at 25-30kmh and eat pavement. And I've seen several people walking their personal e-scooters that have run out of battery. They're too heavy to kick push like a normal scooter whereas an ebike is still a bike if it runs out of battery.

[–] Huldra@hexbear.net 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Even just in normal use they are dangerous, there doesn't seem to be any helmet laws(nor would they be useful considering the buisiness model) and theres absolutely no built in bell or signal for the rider to use, while also being almost entirely silent, when even bikes make enough noise to be heard without earphones in.

Even in suburban or literally rural areas you get menaced by these fucking things now, its ridiculous.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 12 points 5 months ago

They're especially awful on twisty urban sidewalks and footpaths where you'd have trouble maintaining equivalent speeds on a bike

[–] jackmarxist@hexbear.net 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

American infrastructure and society is straight up hostile to 2-wheelers.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 12 points 5 months ago

I'm from Northern Europe and so far it seems there's a split in opinions between US and European commenters which is interesting

[–] Frank@hexbear.net 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

One of my hobbies is when a scooter is blocking sidewalk access, like would block someone using a power chair or a mobility aid or a stroller or anything, i pick them up and bodily throw them on to something concrete that isn't in the way. Seriously considering just carrying an angle grinder in my purse and sawing the cursed things in half whenever they're blocking public right of way.

I hate them so much. A bunch of bazinga shitheads just drop-shipped them all over the country to colonize and monetize one of the last remaining public spaces.

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[–] Hestia@hexbear.net 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Anyone know where the tracker on those bad boys are? Asking for a friend...

My friend had some ideas on repurposing their motors...

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[–] Stoatmilk@hexbear.net 10 points 5 months ago (9 children)

They should either lower maximum speed those things go to 15 km/h or actually build road infrastructure for them, and ban users who leave them in the middle of the road, those things are a menace

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