Comments

1

Anything that helps remove whiney millennials and urbanists from the genetic pool gets my full support.

2

@1 harhar

3

Why you guys keep jizzing all over the Slog about this, I’ll never understand. I mean sure, they’re cute and all, the tourists will get a kick out of them, and I guess you’ll enjoy hipstering around with a joint hanging out of your mouth. But they just don’t work that great as an actual transit medium. They’re bumpy, wobbly, and slow as fucking molasses up hills (we have a few). And they’re expensive as shit. You do know most, or even all, of the share bikes—which are actually useful, btw—will disappear once the scooters arrive? You know why? Because the profit margin on the scooters is way higher. So now we will all pay twice as much for something not even half as practical. If you actually gave a crap about real transit, you would ask how someone would take one of these more than a half-mile without risking life, limb, and wallet, not badgering the city to shoot itself in the foot.

5

@3: Anything to criticize Durkan. She beat their favored candidate, and she was endorsed by the guy they tried to run out of office on rumors. Getting beaten twice in one election really hurts, so they neither forget nor forgive.

(Also, as you noted, pseudo-hipster cred.)

6

As a multi-modal transit advocate and user, I have to agree with @3. I spent a day in Denver at the end of a trip using a Lime e-scooter to get around downtown from the train station to park and back to the train and let me tell you, it was a fun ride for a few flat blocks. But as soon as the trip stretched beyond a 1/2 mile, it became a tiresome, bumpy and unsafe ride. I had to split my time between sidewalks, which felt unsafe because pedestrians didn't expect me and in the street (in bike lanes) which felt unsafe because the roadbeds were too bumpy for the relatively janky machines. Not to mention that as small as they are, they have NO business being that close to cars.
Rentable e-scooters are a fun novelty but are not a transportation solution. If you want one so badly, go buy one and ride that. I see them all the time when I am riding to work and those things look much more stable, burly and useful. But asking a bunch of tourists to avoid peds while zipping around the market, or a bunch of hipsters to avoid em while zipping down Broadway, or privileged Ballard-ites to avoid peds is ridiculous. These are not a solution, they're a toy.

7

Private corporations utilizing the taxpayer-maintained public space for profit.

Unless these euphamistically termed "share" corps pay a whopper of a licensing fee to the city, they should be banned, or forced to purchase land for their own parking lots. The majority of revenue from these parasitic schemes should fund public transportation.

Why does The Stranger love these so much? Is it just a juvenile fascination with toys, or do they really not see the problem these share devices represent?

8

Electric rental scooters currently incur higher environmental costs than the alternatives.

"Under our Base Case assumptions, we find that the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with e-scooter use is higher in 65% of our Monte Carlo simulations than the suite of modes of transportation that are displaced."

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab2da8

This is largely due to very short lifetimes for rental scooters.

The study above assumed a lifetime of six months to two years in its computer simulation. Most other studies have found lifetimes to average approximately 3 months, with some as short as 29 days. Manufacturers claim at most a 10 month average lifetime for recent models.

https://qz.com/1561654/how-long-does-a-scooter-last-less-than-a-month-louisville-data-suggests/

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/16/18141418/scooter-vandalism-rugged-bird-lime-spin-acton

9

I guess the shattered brains, broken collarbones, and split lips aren’t enough for you. As well as being essentially non-usable for most people. As well as taking a big ole dump on Gaia our mother the earth. Talk to those guys over at the Limebike warehouse this morning and ask what they think about battery operated scooters and bikes.

10

OMG you guys! Erica C. Barnett is TOTALLY PISSED (again) at you for this!!!

11

@10 Erm, a bit of snark about how it's just now dawning on Nathalie that an empty political announcement might have been empty doesn't quite meet the mark of "TOTALLY PISSED," as you put it.

12

Oh GOODY! These will be so much easier to throw out of the way than those awkward, heavy, bikes are.

13

I always enjoyed riding my bike in downtown and felt safe doing so - traffic is so slow that even a collision was unlikely to be fatal, unlike in other parts of town. For the same reason, I'd love to ride a scooter there too!

14

@3 "I guess you’ll enjoy hipstering around with a joint hanging out of your mouth" - I will, and it's awesome! I rarely see anyone (where I live) using the bikes, but I see all types of folks using the scooters. Not everyone wants to arrive sweaty at their destination.

@7 You're paving the way for mandatory bike registration and licensing.

15

@3: I'm not a hipster -- just a 47-year old urban commuter with back problems. As a result, I'm an example of the kind of person who can't use bikes but can use scooters. Indeed, I just got back from three months in Providence, RI and used the scooters a fair bit to zip around downtown and the university campuses. There's a big steep hill in the middle of all that too. The scooters were great. I realize that folks like me may be small in number, but I don't know for sure. Either way, we're worth keeping in mind when you think about the pluses and minuses of each mode.

Also - bikes and scooters seemed to happily co-exist there, since they each have unique strengths. Not sure why you're convinced that one will drive out the other.


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