Transport: Striking back at the e-scooter scourge
Electric scooters are “far too fast to be safe on the sidewalk,” too slow for the road, and too big for the bike lane, said Jill Filipovic in CNN.com. Put it all together, and you have an urban scourge. Residents of one major metropolis agree. In a referendum in Paris earlier this month, nearly 90 percent of those who cast their ballots voted to ban all rental scooters. “More cities should follow suit.” The scooters were pitched as an “environmentally-friendly option” that could replace cars and buses; “what cities have gotten instead is chaos: scooters shooting down sidewalks at dangerous speeds or lying abandoned on pedestrian thoroughfares.” My morning walk in Washington, D.C., has become “a theater of scooter-dodging.” I routinely witness scooter collisions with cars, bikes, and pedestrians. Why does anyone think this is a good idea?
Scooter popularity “soared during the pandemic, when people feared they could catch Covid on trains and buses,” said Tom Nouvian in The New York Times. The rise in ridership also caught cities flat-footed, and they were slow to regulate. France recorded 34 deaths and 570 serious injuries linked to e-scooters, leading the French National Academy of Medicine to label the scooters “a major health problem.” As I crossed the street near Place de la Bastille recently, an e-scooter streaked by me so fast, “I felt like a tumbleweed in a Road Runner cartoon,” said Lee Hockstader in The Washington Post. So I understand the gripes. But this referendum was flawed. Online voting wasn’t allowed, so “turnout was less than 8 percent” and driven mostly by the rich, elderly residents who “fear scooters the most and use them the least.” Banning these “convenient, app-managed, affordable ways of getting around town” isn’t fair to the young workers who give “any city its juice and spirit.”
“Micromobility” presents a mixed bag, said Eliza Relman in Business Insider. Scooters are “not necessarily as environmentally friendly as mass transit,” but they can “replace a significant portion of car trips,” cutting down carbon emissions, particularly for shorter trips. That’s why e-scooters had become a pillar of “15-minute-city” urban plans built around walking and cycling, said Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. The bike-and-scoot-your-waythrough-the-city concept sounds great, “but there’s a difficult balance to strike between ideology and reality.” One lesson from Paris is that the openness to urban-tech experiments has changed post-Covid. City residents are clearly increasingly wary of Silicon Valley–driven urban innovations, such as delivery-only “ghost kitchens” and “dark stores,” and e-scooters littering the streets.