A few months ago I saw a man in Seattle die while riding an electric scooter on a street going down a hill. He was going way too fast, probably trying to keep up with the cars I think, started wobbling, fell, and bounced his head off the street. Dead on impact. Two points:
1. These scooters are not stable enough to operate at road speed safely. The wheels are too small for it, the dynamics of controlling one at speed are all fucked up. They are substantially less safe than even bicycles.
2. Rental scooters don't come with rental helmets. I think a helmet would have saved his life. But the whole supposed convenience of the scooter rental scheme assumes no helmets, since virtually nobody leaves home in the morning carrying a helmet on the off chance they may want to rent a scooter.
Banning e-scooters wholesale rather than figuring out how they can be part of a safe mobility culture is like banning combustion vehicles at the onset of the invention of cars.
I will agree though that safer electric PEV like e-bike or e-tricycle are likely safer, as are those with speed governors, and add in dedicated protected lanes.
Speaking of.. the Amish use scooters fairly extensively, but not typical scooters. Their scooters have very large tires by scooter standards; tires meant for children's bicycles. I think these would be much safer than typical small-tired scooters.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=amish+scooter&iax=images&ia...
I got the thing because I loved e-scooters so much but I felt like buying an e-scooter was an unacceptable action given how much it would increase my probability of lifechanging injury or death. But ultimately I found myself stopping using it.
Plenty of cities did just that, after a rash of pedestrian (and equestrian) deaths. What resulted was a multi-decade lobbying effort that redefined the "street" to mean a thoroughfare for combustion vehicles.
Plenty of cities are now walking back that effort and are once again banning combustion vehicles in their cores, or at least are not dedicating the space entirely to cars and trucks. A ho-hum example is Kaiserslautern, Germany, where you can drive in the city core, but it's just much more efficient to park in a lot outside the core and walk.
In the process of typing this comment, I discovered that I agree with your overall point, but I would suggest ditching the "protected lane" part and simply take away the dedicated space for cars.
2. Agreed. Crazy to me that people ride these without helmets. There's also foldable helmets for people annoyed by the size of regular ones. Protected bike lanes also improve this.
That said, banning scooters is a step backward.
You sure? Applying brakes to someone rolling downhill can make them fall because their body is still in motion, and now the scooter isn't moving at the same speed, and they were not prepared for it.
It might be possible to find a hill steep enough to overcome the braking force, or one that results in a strong enough braking force to make the scooter difficult to control, but it should be obvious to most people that attempting such a thing is dangerous.
I might do it anyway to save my life, but it would definitely be a deterrent.
Also heads come in sizes, so a single helmet would not really work - you'd need "helmet stands" where you could get one that fits, and that give them a disinfectant spray between customers (likes shoes in a bowling alley).
Maybe Amazon style lockers?
(Disclaimer: Just an idea.not sure how practical it would be)
A scarf style thing is hopefully not as gross to share as a helmet.
To be honest, I think helmets are good, but a mandate has its own issues. I think usually the culprit is extremely bad infrastructure for not-cars; few places have bike lanes which are safe and comfortable to use and in good condition. Or bike racks which might be a logical place to otherwise put scooters. Sidewalks are usually not a good substitute, and even where they exist often they may not be ADA compliant in terms of ramps or width, they are bumpy due to tree roots etc. displacing the sidewalk panels from their original position and creating unsafe bumps, etc.
Two issues:
You have to bring your own, which is a relatively large thing you have to remember to bring and store. Either people forget them, or can't be bothered... because the whole point of the scooters is ad hoc transportation if needed when it isn't expected.
You get one provided (on the larger ones that include them), but now you have a singular helmet which may have just been used by a sweaty gross human. And it just got put away into a sealed box.
The only thing I can think of to alleviate both of those fears (and still allow Scooter sized things to exist..) would be some sort of helmet vending machine with a 'used helmet' return box. It'd require way more helmets and some sort of cleaning mechanism, but at least that would solve or alleviate the two main concerns. It does immediately mean you now need scooters in close proximity to vending machines though...
For people to actually carry one, it would probably need to pack up to the size of a tote umbrella.
2. How is cleanliness handled? Maybe I’m an outlier for sweat, but I don’t think many people would be ok with wearing my used helmet.
However, there are a few issues with helmets, one of which is that a lot of people think it's gross if they have to use a helmet someone else just used, especially in a city where you're bound to sweat profusely when outside no matter what time of the year it is. Imagine putting on a helmet that's covered with the sweat of 2 or 3 people that have also rode the scooter in the last 2 or 3 hours? Yuck!
Requiring helmets is a great idea - but a crux of the issue is that people will ignore requirements as much as they possibly can and will try to spoof the requirement every chance they get. There's a moped company in town called Revel that operates a bunch of moped rentals similar to scooters. They require all riders to wear the provided helmet, and even financially incentivize other users to report people riding without helmets. That hasn't solved anything, and I see people riding those things without helmets on multiple times every single day.
Bicycles aren't unsafe in themselves, see lots of cities where cycling is a very common and safe mode of transportation. Scooters on the other hand are indeed a lot less safe due to their small wheels, short wheelbase and awkward stance of the rider. That said, it's the urban planning that makes cycling unsafe in many places, not the device itself.
Bicycles with helmets are fairly safe. Without helmets? No way, I'm not riding without a helmet. But scooters without helmets are much worse, I wouldn't dare go much more than 10mph on a scooter without a helmet.
It's entirely possible to ride a bike in a way that actually doesn't require a helmet. It's VERY boring :-P , but nevertheless practical and doable.
I've fallen a few other times besides those two, but those are the worst two and I think without a helmet I would have been seriously injured if not dead.
I think it's all relative to how much you're approaching it as "road cycling" vs "urban commuting". If you keep the seat high, lean forward, and pedal near your limits, you definitely need protection even if the road is empty. But if you're going at a pace and a posture that lets you stomp your foot down easily, the dangers come down to total loss of control(e.g. downhill, failing brakes) and unpredictable traffic.
The biggest danger with electric mobility going forward lies in blurring of the distinctions. When they're brought up to highway speeds, what you have is an underbuilt motorcycle with no safety features or licensing requirements.
(Why am I using >50 km/h as the benchmark? Because that's the sort of speeds you easily end up at if you try to keep up with cars downhill.)
----
Edit: it seems that people are missing critical words in my comment:
- "Ordinary upright/city bike" means "not road/touring/etc bikes". They are constructed differently and comfortably do well over 50 km/h.
- "Downhill" means significant gravity assistance for a few seconds up to a minute, and not "sustained under pedaling power alone". I'd be impressed if you regularly did 50 km/h on the flats with one of those bicycles.
Not many people will do >50kmh even downhill (even with disk brakes), and on the few occasions I've done so, I absolutely would not say there are "significant controllability problems". In fact, quite the opposite.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN6Z8UgVOuw Nb - these were shot in the days before the 'supertuck' (sitting on the crossbar) was banned.
Who on earth is using ordinary city bikes at 50km/h near cars? Even class II e-bikes are limited to 20mph/32kph.
Class III are limited to 28mph/45kph but are forbidden from bike paths.
[edit] 50kph under your own power is the average speed at the Tour de France.
My bike was quite stable at 40mph.
No I wouldn't go that fast on a bike path, this was only due to the power of gravity.
Now, I fully agree with the spirit of your post. Even the spots I'm talking about are short bursts.
There is one company I'm aware of that at least operates here in Canada called Neuron, which has helmets attached to every rental scooter. You're told by the app to put it on.
I'm buying my own e-scooter for when the snow clears. And a helmet.
The solution is to build better public transportation options. That will necessarily include removing a decent amount of the car infrastructure, but you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.
The way you frame it, it sounds like (and it often is the case with people framing it this way) that you think that if we remove car infrastructure, people will be forced to use other means of transportation to get around. And while technically true, all it will actually do is piss people off and make it so much harder to get around.
Bikes are simply better at point-to-point transportation (the same advantage that cars have), except that they don't take up a lot of space so it's actually a scalable solution to have everyone using them to get around even in a dense city; see Amsterdam as an example.
In my week in Manhatten last month I saw several crashes (including a near miss with a sit-down scooter riding in the bike lane who had to bail and slide before nearly crashing into a crowd of pedestrians), pedestrians jumping out of the way of bikes who don't stop at red lights, and bikes swerving around car traffic barely getting by without taking out car mirrors or getting run over.
Biking in Manhatten is not for the faint of heart and not for anyone who isn't decently athletic.
You could have lauded the subway system, but you chose bikes?
Regardless, are you really saying that "bikes are simply better at point-to-point transportation" for most people in Manhatten? Because that's absurd.
And yes, I would say it's best for most people in Manhattan. It would be even better if we build more bike lanes and get more cars off the road.
Compared to the NYC subway it was faster, more consistent, and less prone to delays.
Compared to biking in the suburbs the car traffic typically moved more slowly, I didn't have as many close passes, and drivers seemed more aware of their surroundings. In the suburbs the majority of the people I see biking are middle-aged men in lycra, whereas in the city it seemed more like a demographic cross section.
I also saw other cyclists cross on red lights, knock into pedestrians, and swerve erratically in traffic, though I also saw drivers, moped riders, and pedestrians do the same at roughly the same rate so I always assumed it was a crazy New Yorker thing and not a crazy biker thing.
It is also not like car infrastructure would turn into non-existance. It most cases all that happens is reuse. Playing fields. Pedestrian areas. Bike lanes. Bus lanes. Bike areas.
The only common thing is they all cist car infrastructure space. This is the common ground. The reallocation of that infrastructure and space is a different story.
I have yet to see a case where it didn't pass people off no matter what the future use was. So even if technically the other framing should be different I have not seen a case where it makes a difference. All while seeing that even pure car infrastructure blockage makes a difference.
No, I said technically people will adapt and take the shitty and overrun public transportation because there's no other option. It's not a solution because it often drastically increases travel time, put people in danger because public transportation without proper security is much more dangerous, and overall it will rightfully piss people off.
The solution is improving public transportation. This isn't something that people are advocating for. They just want the cars out.
The movement has no hope if the movement is simply trying to get rid of cars. "Fuck cars" as they say.
At the end of the day it comes down to: car infrastructure, walkability - choose one.
It's also a vicious cycle: making public transit marginally worse increases the number of people who drive to get places, which makes the government build more roads, which makes cities sprawl more, and eventually you end up with a city like Atlanta that spans 50 miles and is barely navigable without a car.
Yes, it will piss people off - it will make cities MUCH less convenient for suburban drivers. That's not a bad thing unless you happen to be a suburban driver.
If suburban drivers and homeowners weren't benefitting from urban success and externalizing all their costs then those properties would already be close to worthless.
It is my understanding that many car dependent suburbs got subsidies from higher levels of government to build new roads [0], which allowed them to expand their tax base, but that the density of their taxpayers, per mile of infrastructure, is not enough for longer term expensive maintenance after several decades. This applies not just to roads, but also water and sewer infrastructure. Cities with ten times the density of suburbs have an easier time paying the fixed per-mile portion of infrastructure costs.
The infrastructure in suburbs has already been subsidized, and may need more subsidies. Or services will degrade.
I don't know that anything you said above conflicts with what you said about mixed use, I wasn't sure about the funding part though.
People will adapt to many things, but that doesn't mean it is good - you could stop food deliveries to major cities and they'd empty in days; cars included; but that wouldn't be good.
Because it's the actual solution.
> you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.
You don't have to hope. They will adapt.
You remove mobility, and you remove any hope for underserved communities to survive, let alone improve.
Instead, you could advocate for MORE mobility via better public transportation. But you don't for some reason that I may never understand.
We do not need to allow cars to take every possible route. Alternative modes of transport are more useful if they're prioritized on the most direct routes. Cars are fast, a diversion won't impact them as much as it does someone on a bike or scooter.
The humungous parking lots, the 50-foot wide roads, the high speeds, the increasingly larger vehicles, the demolished housing for more freeways, parking minimums, extensive R1 zoning... They all contribute to a city exclusively for cars. Even if we don't get rid of ALL of it, we can certainly cut it back significantly.
Maybe ban cars in places where we don't need them anyways like Valencia street in San Francisco or the Spanish super blocks. Decrease speed limits and design streets to enforce them properly. Add walking and cycling paths to the grocery stores. Add raised crosswalks. When you don't have people using their cars to travel 5 miles everyday it leaves them open to the people who REALLY need to use them. Allow walkable neighborhoods in city planning initiatives.
People WANT to live in places like these, but we refuse to build them for some reason. It's why walkable neighborhoods, built when they were still legal, cost an arm and a leg now. Heck, we even build theme parks to give people a vague feeling of being someplace like that. People go on vacation to countries with places like that.
My sense of why this framing is popular is that we've had ~30+ years of passing "public transit" initiatives that are doomed to fail because we would not disrupt car infrastructure. This becomes a double-whammy because we spend money to get very mediocre results, and people reasonably blame the transit system.
Instead, if you're clear from the start that you are going to remove an entire lane in the city for your BRT system - you face more opposition, but you have a much better chance of implementing an actual BRT system!
I think reasonable people can disagree on this, but it's not a mystery how we got here.
Now you have to take a photograph when you end a ride to prove that you did it responsible. There are many areas that are marked as slow-speed and many areas that are marked as no-park. The most central parts are entirely no-park with exceptions for dedicated bicycle-parkings.
Scooters that are misparked can be confiscated and the company needs to pay a fine to get it back.
It took a little while but now it seems to be respected by the vast majority and it has become a decent addition to other public transportation.
And I say this as someone who did despise them in the beginning.
Lots of other areas to discuss though, such as whether they last long enough to make environmental sense etc.
In the case of Japan, life develops around the train stations indeed, where all the shops and entertainment is, and between those stations are the residential areas, so scooters are perfect here.
In European cities (smaller) it's normally organized in rings, where most things you'd want to do are within the city center, or around large neighborhoods but also in circles (larger). So you can take a train/bus/cycle/scooter to the center, then going to the different places either walking or with the scooter.
Remove all zoning laws and it takes care of itself over time. Zoning is always "keep [thing people want] away from [place where people want it]".
All that accomplishes is putting services that people want further away from them.
It's like hotfixing a completely broken pile of spaghetti code in prod, it'll save your sunday evening but you're in for 6 months of rewrite anyways
Very much the ideal. Unprotected bike lanes end up as parking for gig workers way too often.
For example, make it fully legal to do whatsoever you want to an unmanned non-emergency vehicle parked blocking a bike lane. Very soon an industry of car-destroyers would pop up producing amusing videos for everyone to watch.
Residential and business districts should not be a thing. Offices should be located right next to houses. (With the exception of "roudy" or loud places like music halls and bars.)
What I would like is basically rebranding bike lanes as low-speed mobility lanes. Take the parking and/or right lane full-width, put up bollards, and zone it for vehicles with a max speed of 20mph (bike, scooter, trike, hoverboard, electric wheelchair, who cares - if it doesn’t pollute and takes up about as much space as a person, it’s welcome). If space allows, add protected parking spots for pickup/drop off and handicapped parking and tell everyone else that they need to pay market-rate for parking.
Cars are dangerous and the best engineering solution is to isolate pedestrian scale speed and mass transfer from multi-ton industrial equipment. So go 3D, give cars their own isolated layer, give pedestrians and slightly faster moving exposed humans their own layer.
I'm split between an idea like Tokyo's underground mall areas (which work really well with climate control) and just over-specing several stories above ground for a platform layer that can be level across the whole city and completely free of non-emergency moving vehicles.
On a side-note, I was in Boston this summer and it's so much more of an airy and accommodating place than I remember from 10-15 years ago. Lot's of the COVID traffic calming and patios still in place. Awesome, go Boston!
DO NOT run a red light in front of a cop in DC. I'm just putting that out there as kindly intended advice. If you go to DC thinking it's free reign, you're likely to be disagreeably surprised. Especially if you're in the parts of the city that I'd imagine most of the people on HN would be likely to be in.
And Heaven help you if, well, other agencies watching DC misinterpret your red light running. You may be in the wrong place at the wrong time and find yourself trying to explain that to people who, as a general rule, don't believe in coincidence.
Yeah. Just don't draw that kind of attention to yourself in DC. That leads nowhere good.
I wouldn't say there are big problems at all, it mostly works ok. I'm glad there are new options. But infrastructure alone isn't enough. Like the parent, I do think there are low-quality users who don't give a shit & act bad, in a way I'd never see from for example a bicycle user. How problematic is that? So far it's generally not so bad. But bad users, bad parkers, and full bike racks all take their toll. It seems unlikely a lot of these things will get better over time.
Here in the DC area I have a particular love for Capital Bikeshare because they're extremely affordable and (mostly) use dedicated docking stations.
This is, for me and my wife, the entire point. We had a docked bikeshare system in Seattle and the docks were never where we needed one, particularly since Seattle's topology--a city known internationally for being incredibly flat and dry--meant that the docks on the bottom of a hill would be perpetually full and the ones at the top of the hill were always empty.
But these things are an absolute godsend for someone who can walk, but can't walk far, or who has the occasional struggle with hills. The bus or train can't go everywhere, but a scooter can get you between the spot where the bus let you off and the spot where you want to go. That's how my wife and I use them and they're amazing and, frankly, I hope they never go away.
> The companies running them all seem content to just proliferate scooters all over the street with no regard for expense or the non-scooting public
This is probably true, but I think a lot of people just don't see themselves as "the scooting public" except for the brief time they might be using one.
It's the same problem with cars, just downsized a great deal. We're incapable of building separated infrastructure, mostly due to cost, partially due to fear of loss from space given over to cars. We try these bandage workarounds, like scooters, but because we've half-assed everything except the infrastructure for cars (and because people's expectations are so high around the new idea), we wind up with a situation where everyone is frustrated because no one's needs feel met even though there are clearly uses for them.
Much could be done to "fix" the scooter issue by working with the city rather than antagonistically against it, for example, on streets with parking (almost all of them) the first parking space on each block could be a designated "scooter pile".
Then modify the app to charge you a $10 "you're a dick" fee that is refunded when the scooter detects that it was thrown in the scooter pile, or similar. If you make it more advanced, let anyone with the app claim the fee if they return a scooter.
No, but the 2 or 13 are and then a scooter can go where we want if that's not close enough or if it's a particularly bad walking day.
> Much could be done to "fix" the scooter issue by working with the city rather than antagonistically against it
I completely agree! However...
> for example, on streets with parking (almost all of them) the first parking space on each block
...this is astoundingly difficult to pull off in Seattle because people who drive cars have a very high fear of loss, as a general rule, and vehemently oppose efforts to turn car storage areas over to areas for other vehicle types. It's why we've wound up with painted-off areas that get used for refuse bins instead (blocking off where the scooters should go).
> Then modify the app to charge you a $10 "you're a dick" fee
The two apps we use require that you take a picture of where you left the thing when you park it and both of us in the past few months have gotten an email, one apiece, saying "you parked wrong, next time it's $25." (They were right, we didn't leave enough space, we've gotten more diligent.)
You might want to preemptively contact your city councilmember and share your thoughts with them. Or go one step further and attend one of the meetings to speak on mic about it. Remember that they're far more likely to hear from people who complain, and it takes just a single council session to ban them.
I can't speak to Seattle specifically, the DC area is quite hilly in some places so I've seen the same problem, exacerbated by the fact that DASH buses are free which means people will happily CaBi downhill and DASH uphill. I'm not sure how dockless fixes this though except for the fact that dockless bikes are always e-bikes which are easier to take uphill. But docked e-bikes can get you the same effect as long as there are actually docks at the tops of the hills. I find that Capital Bikeshare is really good about placing docks at bus stops and train stations and having a high enough dock density that you'll rarely need to walk more than a couple minutes from the dock to reach your destination.
> This is probably true, but I think a lot of people just don't see themselves as "the scooting public" except for the brief time they might be using one.
The scooter companies may perceive everyone as either a sometimes-scooterer or a potential convert to scooting but I don't know how true that is in reality. On top of that, people who ride transit, ride bikeshare, or ride a bike for their daily needs are typically quite happy to self-identify as such. I personally don't ride scooters but am a daily user of CaBi and one of the local bus systems (DASH).
> It's the same problem with cars, just downsized a great deal.
I can and do agitate for taking space from cars and restoring it to people. It's just frustrating that what little space is available for scalable mobility like walking and biking has even less to work with because of scooters and bikes cramming up already narrow spaces (like the 14th St. Bridge between Arlington and DC, whose pedestrian passage is already uncomfortably narrow, has several bikes and scooters abandoned there at nearly all times.)
This is an entirely reasonable point and that's likely where Seattle's bikeshare system failed. The operator was borderline incompetent, but also siting docks in Seattle is very difficult because of the propensity for car drivers to vocally oppose any efforts at space reallocation. It's getting very frustrating, especially now that they got a Mayor elected and a head of the Council's transportation committee who are both quite pro-car.
Sadly, this happens in all US cities. Motorists in and around cities are extremely territorial and want the right to use many times more public space than is allocated to other forms of transportation, in addition to huge portions of private land via parking minimums. Successful bikeshare programs like DC has, while they still have a long way to go, are so valuable in showing what could be in this country.
The apps will remind you repeatedly to park correctly and will fine you if you don’t, which I’m pretty sure they’re required to do as part of their licensing conditions.
As a thought exercise, any time we see widespread lawlessness ask whether it’d still happen if, say, a random citizen could get $100 by sending a video to the city (ala NYC’s truck idling law) or if the city employees like cops or parking enforcement had similar incentives. There are downsides to that kind of thing and I’m not suggesting it as the ideal general policy but I think it is important to remember that most of the time these are not problems we don’t know how to fix but rather problems people don’t think are their job to fix.
It's shooting themselves in the foot (because people driving less results in less congestion and competition for car parking spots), but as this thread demonstrates, there's no shortage of counter-productive thinking around non-automotive transportation.
In theory, you are correct.
In practice, drivers feel that they are entitled to it, to the exclusion of parking for all other vehicles.
If London can find plenty of space for scooter parking (and it has), I’m sure any North American city can.
It's not the scooters that are the problem, it's a city environment that encourages aggressive and careless driving.
(Sarcasm, for the uninitiated.)
Scooters may be annoying, but at least they aren't deadly.
Please stop whitewashing incidents and the behavior of the scooterists.
And I'd much rather deal with a moron on a scooter than a moron in a car. I'd daresay that statistics on both deaths and injuries caused by alternative modes of transportation are with me on this.
I mean, I get it. Scooters are a little scary and annoying and take up space. People don't like them.
All these same criticisms apply for cars, but dialed up to 11.
While I don't personally like the idea of using one (I prefer a bike or walking), they have been really popular.
One of the interesting effects is that along with a huge surge in ebike riders, scooters have made drivers much more alert to non-car road users. Cyclist friends have told me that cycling around town feels much safer, with drivers giving them more room, and fewer moments where it's obvious the driver just wasn't paying attention.
The unexpected is always going to be dangerous just because it's unexpected.
Is there an example of a city who has handled them correctly? Your description describes every implementation I've seen thus far.
With 2000 escooter accidents and 20+ deaths idk if we can call it a great example
edit:
I checked the numbers, ~6000 accidents, ~40 deaths
Knowing that it includes escooters as they're motorised vehicles, and given the number of cars vs escooters I'd say you're muuuuch more likely to get wrecked on a escooter than anything else you could use on the road. Bicycles have the same deaths stats as escooters but in Paris we have
450k+ cars 500k+ bikes 15k escooters
https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/05/10/electric-scooters-ar...
Their popularity has killed off a previous bike hire scheme, which is a bit of a pity, but they are a lot handier...
Parked on sidewalks: yes
Blocking crowded streets: yes
Collisions common: yes
People getting hurt: yesStill, the problem is that it's possible. Paint isn't infrastructure.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/09/18/slaughter-of-the-inno...
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2013/11/11/three-killed-by-curb-...
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2013/11/04/charles-hynes-brings-...
Now show your work. Give me all the fatal electric scooter crash stories.
Scooters are great, they are low-cost easy way to get around. I think anger in Atlanta towards the scooters, is similar to why Marta will never go up 75.
This is also a city where the police have done nothing to stop people riding go carts and stuff on the streets disrupting traffic and hurting people. Or tent clusters on sidewalks and off ramps.
So it was weird they banned scooters and allow things with no benefit to the city.
There’s also an angle that the city is really big on pushing their boondoggle public transport streetcar project and didn’t like cheaper and more environmentally friendly options available for the public.
I think Atlanta banned the scooters because the companies didn’t pay off the right locals. They could have tried to fix the issues and work with the scooter companies.
Yeah I wish more people would recognize this. Many "transit activists" are basically just lobbyists for the regional MTA/MTDs and want to minimize competition.
The year before the pandemic I spent each day on my walk to/from work arguing with scooter drivers about them being on the sidewalk and how dangerous it was. A child was hit by one in my area and seriously hurt.
It was a terrible idea, because the city had 2 mandates to allow them to come back - 1. Speed caps (10mph), and 2. mandating that all scooters were banned from sidewalks.
If you know anything about how terrible Miami drivers are, you'll quickly realize that those mandates were designed to make the scooter idea fail. Forcing someone to go 10mph on a busy multi-lane road known for bad drivers is a death wish.
Then they got banned because people are idiots and rode them idiotically and left them everywhere.
The city then brought them back, put caps on their speed, forced them to be rode only on streets and financially incentivized people to leave them in predetermined drop-off areas. It lasted about 2 weeks before that was shown to not work, because, again, people didn't really pay attention to the rules (and some of the rules, such as banning them from sidewalks, are outright dumb due to the fact that dangerous wild driving on main roads is celebrated in Miami).
It really is unfortunate just like you said - because they were a real asset to public mobility.
Then use some geofencing to fine people who fail to park/etc them properly.
Sure, allowing people to drop them off in the middle of a congested sidewalk is easy on the asshole doing it, and the companies might have a bit less revenue because its inconvenient to park them properly, but so what. They might be able to make some percentage of the fine back if people still refuse to comply.
The sidewalk is public space, they have _LESS_ rights as a corp to be there trying to profit off it than the citizens walking the sidewalk IMHO.
Instead, we have bars (RiRa and Hand In Hand were unable to afford leases pre pandemic) shutting down, street drifters, crime, and significant amounts of drunk driving.
It's really unfortunate it went this way, because Atlanta badly needs alternative transpiration options. We would likely have been better off with heavy enforcement around proper storage and riding of scooters, but so many people absolutely hated them due to how it was handled that I'm not surprised to see a ban instead.
The poor handling of how they were rolled out did a lot of damage long term to fixing transportation. Now there will be an uphill battle against a ban passed in reaction to the mess they created. Disappointing all around.