For half a second I had this vision of Lime jet-skis piling up and blocking the canals of Venice, Italy.
Incidentally, I was in Venice Beach a few weeks ago, and I too witnessed that the scooters are very popular down there, and becoming enough of a fixture that you hear things shouted on the street like "hey, that's my Lime" when someone breaches etiquette and takes a scooter that someone else has just parked and intends to use again right away.
Kids treat them like shit but what is there to do?
So now there’s this sort of quandary I have as a parent: do I tell my kids and or other kids to not play on these scooters? And to take care of them? Where should I draw the line?
I don’t see them in poor areas of town, so it’s like they exist in large part as an almost “parasite” on the good will of nice communities where they won’t be stolen or chopped up for parts. They’re here to make money for a private company.
In a public park or at the public library it’s easy to say: “this is here for our community, by our community, you need to take care of it because we’re all in this together.”
These scooters (despite their benefit) are ultimately taking money out of the community (if they’re profitable) and they’re budgeting for loss and damage, so why not let the kids play on them and damage them?
This is pretty much the same argument as people who litter at ball games and then say "The cleaning crew will pick it up. That's their job."
I think that's a good analogy, but it's not quite right imo. The important factor for me is that, in this specific case the distributor (or whoever is putting them out) is placing them directly in front of a school.
Potential consumers of the service are socially expected to do work to maintain something they didn't put there or ask for and it's being purposefully placed in more naturally risky location. Or they're being placed in a way that's not very nice to others (blocking sidewalks or bike racks).
In the ball game scenario the consumer has chosen to get popcorn, made a mess (either purposefully or accidentally) and then chosen to leave it for others to take care of. So the consumer is being personally irresponsible.
My interpretation is that the scooter companies are being personally irresponsible, but then sort of making it look/feel like the potential consumers are being irresponsible?
You put your backpack in the main walkway of the airport. I tripped over it. Things spilled out of the backpack. Should I feel bad and try and pick up those things? Does that answer change if I see you doing the same thing every single Wednesday when I fly out?
By the way, would you mind photographing the situation here? I think I might change my mind based on how much space these things are taking. My experience in SF is that people go out of their way to have them be in their way. But I may be judging you unfairly to be doing the same.
If there's lots of room, I feel the same about the scooter as I do about the hot dog man.
So, ultimately, it will be to the detriment of anyone who wants to use the scooters. If your kids don't know anyone who uses them or even see them getting used ever, it may not be a very compelling argument.
Any business is predicated on a win-win proposition. Lime / Bird provides the capital, maintenance and network that maintains the scooters, and the people that use them pay the cost of their usage. The money they "take out of the community" is likely outweighed by the positive externalities brought to the community:
1. Traffic is lessened.
2. Jobs are provided to community members to pick them up and charge them.
3. Businesses make more money / pay more sales taxes from higher foot traffic.
4. Community members have a pleasant scooting experience readily available to them on demand.
Of course, scooters also have negative externalities:
1. They are not useful for people with disabilities, and can actively prevent people with disabilities from participating in public spaces when people park the scooters like assholes.
2. People will hurt themselves using the scooters.
3. Piles of dead scooters are aesthetically unappealing.
But these must be weighed against the benefits.
At least for me, there was a clear before and after moment, where you suddenly saw far more people on your block in Venice riding around drunk on scooters all the time, where as before, you hardly saw anyone.
This said, I use them all the time, Venice is a bitch to find parking in, and the neighborhood is just spread out enough where you need a vehicle to get around. Before it would've been a huge pain to grab breakfast at Gusta, head into ocean park for some shopping and then head on down to Washington to spend some time near the pier all before noon.
I think the scooters are riskier in some ways. My experience is with bikes you can easily take one hand off the bike to signal a turn - what your traffic intention is. But with the scooters, it's not really possible to take your hands off the handlebars (you lose control!), and there is currently no blinker control to indicate your traffic intention. I wanted to take a left-turn on a scooter recently and this was an issue. I got honked-at.
I think they should add blinker light controls to the handlebars.
Sorry for asking, but are you thirteen?
A lot of people do. Looking at something and saying "I don't think I would do that because it would be very embarrassing" is a thing adults can do.
And its exactly a moment when one should stop for a second and ask him/herself a question "why would I feel so"?
Wearing glasses, reading books, dyeing hair with some tint, preferring pieces of clothing of some fashion or other, riding a personal vehicle that is supposedly beneficial for ecology (at least at the level of common knowledge) AND evidently improving quality of urban life - all of that shouldn't be embarrassing, or "completely" "socially inept"[1]. Wearing dirty clothes when you have the means not to or not looking after your hygiene should (and I can't really recall anything else at a moment's notice).
I agree it's weird but clearly as we see for cars, choice of vehicle is also driven by style preferences. E.g most people wouldn't buy a pink car with green polka dots.
They certainly can. Calling something with a particular epithet means it bears this particular quality, which is not subjective. The opinion is, but the characterization is not.
I've also gotten used to not hear (or make) such comments in my adult life, contrary to the school years, where it was a norm of communication, unfortunately.
What these scooters have done for SM-Venice is, they’ve gotten people to park farther away and spend less time in cars. Especially the tourists. What does that mean for locals? Well, for one, it means that the nuisance of having to drive slow past people on these things, rather than the nightmare of sitting in standstill traffic if all of those people were in cars instead. Summer traffic in Venice was definitely helped by the scooters, as they replaced a bit of car traffic. These “short haul mobility vehicles” make it much easier for larger groups of people to engage in a large, spread-out, mostly-pedestrian area.
They’re completely dorky and I’ll never be caught dead on one... but, at the same time, there’s serious benefits to us all that these things exist. There’s definitely problems (not sure how I feel about seeing them in piles outside of public schools, such as Venice High, and there’s something very Idiocracy-esque in watching them being used by people who would benefit from walking), but I find it to be an overall net-positive.
I’m interested to see where the next form factors go, and how these things factor into future urban planning decisions. Especially within geofenced environments where you don’t have to pay for them, they just exist. There’s a lot to ponder here.