Those that leave their broken rigs, and their spent batteries in suboptimal places, gets spun into hatred for our sport? passtime, transpo. Like it or not, we are ambassadors. The last thing we need is a bunch of arsonist Karens on our cases.
Why the French are setting fire to e-scooters
E-scooters are controversial in France, as they are in many other countries.
Paris will hold a referendum on April 2 in which the city’s inhabitants will decide whether to ban the 15,000 electric scooters that are available for hire.
While some Parisians see them as a convenient and eco-friendly way of traveling around the capital, others say they are frequently dumped on pavements, tossed into the Seine and pose a danger to pedestrians. Why the French are setting fire to e-scooters (msn.com)
Yeahh the culture around rental scooters is terrible, even though I do blame people who do stupid things it’s just bad incentives all around. IMO the blame lies much more with the rental companies, but a lot of users need to grow up a bit and think about everyone else
Rental scooters need smart dedicated parking racks. I know this defeats the purpose of being able to get one anywhere, but the bigger problem is they are always on their sides or just strewn in the grass.
If they were able to put racks in strategic locations and require the scooter rider to latch the machine into the rack to return the rental that would solve most of the problems.
on a personal note I don’t use the scooters because one time in Spain we were unable to check it back in, which meant we couldn’t leave it until we called the company, waited on the phone and then they explained to us that there wasn’t anything they could do because it wasn’t online - yet we were still responsible for the machine until it was checked in. So we had to roll it around until it finally got a signal, which literally took an hour.
The rack could also be a smart check-in. As soon as you click the scooter into it you are no longer responsible for the machine.
If you took one dedicated parking spot out of every block in major cities you could rack all the brands of scooters in the same space (and the revenue generated by that one space would exceed standard parking fees)
Additionally you could have smaller racks and brand-specific racks wherever if you made them look decent.
Initial setup would be expensive, but if you made the racks bespoke charge ports then you’d be cost neutral with the current “send people out in vans to swap battery packs” strategy.
As someone who has been around extensive dockless rental e-scooters, and also extensive docked rental e-bikes, I have to say the vehicle type isn’t what makes the difference. It’s the dock.
I agree, docked rental e-scooters are much, much better than dockless ones, as long as the area has enough density to support docks that aren’t too far apart from one another.
The dock also eliminates people driving around late-model pickup trucks that pollute a lot, to collect them all and charge them almost every night.
This is how the public bicycles work in my city, it’s already good and could be much better if the terminals to check a bike out were reliable. I’d love to be able to check one out from my phone instead
Also @b264 yeah density of stands is very important. Our city centre has good coverage but further out they just don’t exist at all. It’s still handy because the bikes come with a permanent lock and the rental is cheap so you can just lock them outside a shop instead of docking and undocking. A lot of people pass my place on their way out to a wood-lined spot by the river away from the city centre, they just pay the €1.50 fee for a 2 hour trip
I don’t think any of us here would intentionally leave any part of our boards lying around. At worst we may create more road trash if a part breaks off only to be yeeted into the void while in the street. Or I can see something getting left behind during a true accident and subsequent medical emergency.
I am guilty of having parts come of my board and then being unable to find them, but I do always make an effort to look for them unless it isn’t safe to. (think busy intersections/ roads where you are fine if you keep moving at a good speed but would be dangerous to go on and ride slow enough to find the missing part) I see way more shit and trash in the road after a low speed fender bender though, so I know the few times it has happened to me it at least hasn’t caused anyone any issues.
In Austin they did this for the bikes but for the scooters they decided to put the racks on the side walk. However, from what I saw racks were only a thing for one specific type of scooter out of the 3-4 different scooter types that were available.
Also the scooters were horrible with one struggling to go 10mph while going uphill. I did have my dog with me so I weighed a bit more but the total weight would have been bellow the average American’s weight. The cost was on par with an uber or lyft once you took into account the low speeds and insane price per minute they charge you.
The rental e-bikes were also kind of crap but that is mostly because none of them had a throttle and it would only allow the motor to run while you were pedaling with full strength. It was cheap for a full day of unlimited rentals but having to pedal 24/7 is a huge issue when in the middle of Austin TX during the summer.