Just this week in Vantaa, Finland three 12-year-old girls piled onto one of those electric scooters you subscribe to with an app and proceeded to get run over by a car at a crossing, killing one of them
The app is supposed to have an age restriction but it's easy to bypass and you're not supposed to have more than one person riding on one, which people routinely ignore
I hate seeing kids and teens speeding around dangerously on those fucking things and then just leaving them laying around on high-traffic bike routes because they don't give a shit since they treat the scooters as completely disposable
Fucking awful bazinga-brained Silicon Valley-ass idea and business model. Actually, there are also bikes you can use with an app but curiously you don't see kids doing reckless shit with those, almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible 
The anti scooter opinion on hexbear is really fucking weird to me, real ranting "the kids these days!!" type shit and just really weird in the context of the rest of Hexbear's opinions on public transit. Like the electric scooters cause some wires to cross in y'all's minds that just breaks something
Children killed BY A CAR but let's ban the scooter?
idk chief maybe they can like idk charge a deposit? this isn't a situation to be like "we've tried nothing and im out of ideas, ban scooters"
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I can try to square that circle for you. Here's my (I think pretty reasonable) take on scooters:
Right now, with city infrastructure the way it is, they're terrible. There's nowhere to ride them safely, they get left on sidewalks and bike paths, they're just extremely dangerous right now, whether you're riding one or just being around them.
But. They don't have to be like this! Get rid of cars, put racks of scooters next to train stations and bus stations, have a bit of societal education about how to ride them safely, and boom! Great solution to the last mile problem! If there are convenient places to park them people won't leave them on random sidewalks. If streets are full of scooters instead of cars, and if we get some rules of the road engrained in the public consciousness, then they won't be dangerous, either for the rider or surrounding pedestrians and cyclists.
They could be (and should be) a great innovation, but their current implementation is so, so fucking bad, and leads to serious danger and accidents.
What do these things have over a bicycle
Bicycles are far easier to control, and they are designed for speed with 10x larger wheels. It is much harder to weave dangerously through crowds on a bicycle because of its length. The Lime scooters are electric, so it takes zero human effort to do all of the above which creates the perfect storm for people to do dumb things on them, with more ease than a bicycle.
Thereβs also the problem that there is not really a good place to place the scooters so they get littered everywhere. All this for something that doesnβt advance us past the bicycle.
I'm honestly not the biggest fan of most of these electric-powered street vehicles: e-scooters, unicycles, hoverboards, Segways, etc. They all seem like gimmicky, potentially dangerous novelty gadgets to me and pretty unserious as forms of transport
Yeah, sure, some of them are certainly portable in a way a bicycle could never be but they seem about as practical and safe as rocket-powered rollerblades
An ebike is still usable with a dead battery. Ebikes are far easier to control and handle uneven terrain far better. Zero cargo capacity on a scooter. If you want a smaller form of mobility than a bike onewheels, EUCs, and electric skateboards are all smaller and superior to scooters.
Aren't at least some of those things pretty accident-prone as well, some even more so than scooter type vehicles?
I don't know, the ER doctors on the news made them sound like diabolical death traps and skull pulverizers
they did this to bicycles like a 150 years ago
can't scoot on a bicycle
You're not helping the case for scooters here
Do you live in an area where scooters create issues?
Scooters are a solution in search of a problem if you live in a place that already has other sustainable means of transport (separated bike lanes, reliable public transit). Vantaa is one of those places. The scooters do not solve a problem that exists here.
People ride these things on the sidewalks all the time, itβs fucking annoying. Maybe there is a way to improve them like reducing their speed limits and adding noises like EVs have.