Nationalistic swipes are intellectually boring and perturbative—a bad combination. Please resist the temptation and stick with just the substantive content instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Though I think the unstated single most important selling point for the Lime scooter over the electric bike is that you don't need to deal with the homicidal, low awareness, little education American driver and the abhorrent infrastructure (and policies) that enable them.

Except you do some places. In San Francisco it is illegal to ride an e-scooter on the sidewalk. You are supposed to ride in the bicycle lanes.

In San Diego, it is legal to ride on the sidewalk, but pedestrians have the right away. I believe this stems from the city's desire to be bike friendly with their inability/unwillingness to fund proper and adequate bike lanes.

Not sure if you've seen Scoot, but they have all the versions of a "scooter"! :) https://scoot.co/

> Though I think the unstated single most important selling point for the Lime scooter over the electric bike is that you don't need to deal with the homicidal, low awareness, little education American driver and the abhorrent infrastructure (and policies) that enable them.

How so? Both Lime scooters and electric bikes are supposed to be ridden in bike lanes on the road, although enforcement can be hit-or-miss.

When necessary, they're called "kick scooters" and "motor scooters".

There are electric versions of both.

Probably half the younger children round here have a normal kick scooter. They can "walk" with their parents much further without getting tired.

> hitting a pothole on that Lime thing is liable to stop all forward momentum suddenly and precariously

Didn't think of this. Makes sense why they're doing well on the West Coast but not yet rolling out on New York's ice-torn streets.

Oakland, California has some of the worst streets in America, and getting worse. There are Limes and Birds on every corner of downtown.

I live near Downtown Oakland and have yet to see one of these Scooters on the road -- so far the primary use case in Oakland seems to be teenagers blasting around Lake Merritt on the weekends.

There were 6 on each corner of Broadway & Grand at 7am today.

According to the Lime app, there are at least 50 Lime-S scooters within 1km of the corner of Broadway and Telegraph right now. There are 9 outside 12th St BART alone.

I don't think that's the reason. Huge swaths of midtown, particularly, have near perfect pavement.

The latter bit seems unnecessary.

Ok, I know we like to dump on Americans with impunity, and I'm not even going to get into whether it's deserved or not, but have you driven in much of the rest of the world?