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.