I'm not with you on this one.

I don't live in California and the amount of electric scooters I've suddenly seen out of nowhere is crazy. It might be a fad, but unlike you, I'm more like 30% thinking it is a fad vs 100%.

My reasoning:

* Batteries have gotten better than even the basic Segway days

* The scooters are portable. You can fold them and take them in to your dorm, apartment, etc, preventing theft. A lot of work places won't complain about you charging them at work either

* The entry level price is so much lower. I never saw a casual person on a Segway, but I see casual people on the electric scooter bandwagon already

* There is also a large subset of folks that had Razor scooters. I wasn't part of that, but I can understand them being more willing to adopt if they had previously used unpowered scooters.

* Running in to someone might be a problem on San Francisco sidewalks, but it isn't on, say, ISU's sidewalks.

Charging inside your house is very dangerous, especially in NA where most houses are wooden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EljeP5XmETA

Same is true of cellphones and laptops. It depends on the brand.

1 scooter battery equals several or tens of notebook batteries, mobile devices generally use safer li polymer ones nowadays.

These scooter batteries sustain intense charging and discharging cycles, I won't bet my house and life on it.

At my hackerspace we charge our 18650 cells inside those green ammo boxes. Battery lockboxes are a way to stay pretty safe, even if a li-on, li-po, or lead acid battery explodes, in a steel box it can't do so much.

Obviously, doesn't help without removable batteries, which are more common on ebikes.

Same in Korea. Electric scooters everywhere. Even scooter rentals are popping up around the city.

Korea is a lot more dense than California though and Korea has better public transportation to complement/supplement the scooters. The scooters are only going to work for people in denser cities. We need more high speed rail and mass transit options. These scooters are only a partial solution to a much larger and complex problem.

exactly. america is not just NYC&SF. Electric scooter is not going to solve bigger transportation infrastructure problem the one that really needs to be solved. I see at as a supplementary mode of transportation that will be MAYBE overall a 1% of the total solution.

Personal electric vehicles are completely symbiotic with public transit, that's why they're called "last mile" vehicles; because you take mass transit to within a mile or two, and then hop on your scooter, e-board, EUC to go the rest of the way.

Wouldn’t walking or cycling be healthier?

A bicycle is difficult to bring on many forms of public transportation, and can require a change of clothes. Scooters can fit on a luggage rack.

Walking is much slower, of course.

I enjoy walking and cycling, but not for my commute. It takes an hour to walk vs. 20 mins to cycle or scoot. If I cycle I arrive unavoidably sweaty. My scooter is fantastic for commuting. When I want to walk, I go to the lake with my wife.

It’s faster than walking. And just try cycling in a skirt suit.

Electric scooters are easier to take on public transit than bicycles, and enable more trips without cars for people who are electric scooter close to a transit route on both sides.

More than anything else, people actually taking public transit enables more spending on public transit, and more spending on building public transit accessible housing and workplaces, both of which will again encourage more use of public transit.

"What we really need is [large project x] and [public good y] so therefore no one should work on [other project z]" is a stale argument and even if some benevolent dictator got their way, wouldn't even work.

You expect a high speed train station outside your front door? Awfully optimistic of you.

Little need for high speed rail when you’re talking about daily commuting. Personally may last five apartments have all been in short as in under five minute walking distance of a subway, that’s the advantage of living in high density areas.

I live in London, and I can tell you that you pay significantly more in order to be within 5 minutes of the tube. And some people want to have children and don't want them out on the streets in the city, so they pay significantly more in order to be close to fast rail links.

If you live, work and shop within five minutes of subways then you have no real use for a scooter. That isn't the case for most people, however. We can't all move to the big city.

That’s a fair point, but they are also rather useless in the ultra low density country or extreme urban sprawl. They are really only extremely spread out US style cities. Where, cars are almost useless, but you can’t really walk to everything useful.

High speed rail would allow people who live in Milwaukee and Madison to commute to Chicago, and vice versa. What is a 3 hour drive would become a 45 minute commute, which is reasonable considering the distance.

Cost of living drops off as you leave metro areas. Like another responder to your comment noted: people pay for convenience. I'd say cost is a disadvantage of living in a high-density area.

High speed rail can’t do multiple quick stops. So, you can get to a city’s center with it, but acceleration and deceleration times plus station time means you are stuck with subways for in city use. You can’t use high speed rail and and a subway system to move very far and still have a 45 minuet commute.

So, now you need to live near HSR and your job also needs to be next to HSR in order for that trip to work.

Come to Detroit where our only public transport options are "SMART" (slow) buses, the Detroit People Mover (a joke that barely circles a small area downtown), and the newly built Q-line that travels only a few miles straight back and forth.

IMO the addition of birds and limes has been really nice.

I ride my EcoReco electric scooter from Mountain View to Cupertino every day. It’s great and I don’t have to wait on buses. Are you going to spend billions to run a train from Mountain View to Cupertino? In the meantime, I have a heck of a fun commute.

It's dangerous, weather matters.

... and yet scooters (and bikes) still work brilliantly for briandear, myself and thousands of other people - and at a much lower cost than driving a vehicle or installing rail.

Last mile problem, always the Achilles heel of public transit.

It's a ridiculous headline that's for sure.

Electrified personal transport can help with the last mile but it's of no use if you never get to the last mile without a car.

Also, it's a scooter, "change the world"? If they mean by changing it from having x scooters on the market to x+1 scooters on the market then yes.

Cars aren't the only way of getting to "the last mile." Closing the last mile has been public transit systems' problem for a long time.

Cars changed the world. If scooters change the way people think about public transit and distance within cities, it could very well change how people consider where to live and how to organize cities.

I think you may have misunderstood. I want cars gone. But the public transit system isn't good enough in many if not most places to warrant that, regardless of the last mile, so we should fix that first. Fixing that would change the world (incrementally).

Scooters have been around for literally decades, even electric scooters have been around for a while. Changing people to accept a bit of physical effort to get to their job, be it cycling, walking or electric scootering, is probably a great thing, but it won't solve the underlying lack of infrastructure.

You can't organise around infrastructure that isn't there. In cities where it is there, people use it even without electric scooters and people already move to be close to good public transport.

How would you fix public transport though?

Public transport is terrible in my city, but it's really because the population is too low to support anything better rather than because of any particular problem with the service. There's no fix, except to somehow increase population density by a factor of five.

Any proposed improvements are likely to take years or decades to complete, too. Meanwhile you can stop driving and start scooting tomorrow.

It's also worth noting that scooters are great for much more than just the last mile. I commute 20 km per day on my scooter.