this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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It's hard to really think of a use case for scooters that isn't already fulfilled by e-bikes, and there's already good biking infrastructure throughout the city that's rapidly developing, including storage and parking. I can understand an argument that a new transit mode that would require a lot of infrastructure isn't worth it.
Some people clearly prefer e-scooters over bicycles, otherwise they would not have been successful so far.
Parking for e-scooters isn't "a lot of infrastructure" when in the space of just one car you can park, say, 8 e-scooters? If we are going to be so particular about the downsides of e-scooters then we also need to take a hard look at the immense externalities of cars, from on-street parking to street noise and road maintenance costs.
How much of that preference is expressly because they don't need to be parked, which residents are increasingly finding intolerable?
Remove that, and I don't really see the benefit over just investing more money in expanding bikes. By all means, absolutely do take more space from cars though. They're a blight.
You could try to mandate parking them is designated zones that are currently used for automobile parking, though I do wonder how effective enforcement would really be.
Mandated parking zones are very effective because you can't really end the trip if you're not on a parking zone, meaning that you keep getting charged until you park it in a parking zone.
Here you could leave the scooters anywhere for about a year, and it was nice because I could take one right to my doorstep - but my neighbours took them inside their house, and there were scooters everywhere taking up sidewalks. Around a year ago, it changed and now there are predefined parking spaces, around 50m or 100m from each other. I haven't seen "abandoned" scooters outside of parking spaces for a few months now, and a lot of people still use then anyway.
Escooters are really, really lot more convenient than ebikes on very short distances and if you need to carry the scooter/bike with you in further public transport or take it inside to workplace
Scooters are much cheaper than e-bikes. You can probably get two e-scooters for the price of an e-bike. They are probably closer to regular bikes in price. But regular rental bikes are less attractive to people with low fitness levels. Especially when they have airless tires.
Do e-bikes not have the same problems as e-scooters? If no, why not?
A huge reason why the companies behind the scooters have been able to fund it is because they haven't had to build any real support infrastructure since they can just take advantage of public sidewalk space. e-bikes have had to deploy actual infrastructure with parking and docks.
If we were coming from point zero, I wouldn't see a huge reason for one or the other, but at this point, infrastructure already exists for bikes, so why spend more time and use more limited street and parking space and money for another mode of transit that doesn't really solve any new problems?