|
|
|
|
|
|
by Tarrosion
1180 days ago
|
|
|
The discussion around shared e-scooters (and similar micromobility) tends to have a ton of hidden status quo bias. For example, one of the most common complaints about e-scooters is that people leave them all over the place and they clutter sidewalks. This can be a true and valid complaint! But people do that, in part, because cities don't provide good alternatives. A city the size of Paris probably has literally millions of on-street parking spots, or at least hundreds of thousands. (E.g. NYC has ~3 million [1]). Each car-sized parking spot can fit 12 scooters. So replacing 5% of parking spots with micromobility parking would provide space for something like 500,000 shared micromobility vehicles. For context, that's order of magnitude larger than the number of e-scooters in Paris. (FWIW, Paris is maybe not a perfect example here; it's a relative leader in reclaiming space from cars for shared mobility and biking and such. Also when I was there last summer the scooters weren't a nuisance at all because they were overwhelmingly parked in marked areas, not littering sidewalks. YMMV.) But especially in the US, we're so entrenched in thinking that only cars can be real mobility that we can't imagine shifting even 1% of the space and money we spend on cars towards more shared and less polluting forms of transportation. It sucks. [1] https://gothamist.com/news/how-else-could-nyc-use-its-12-cen... |
|
|
These are rental e-scooters. It's not like a scooter shared between friends with no profit motive involved.
> because cities don't provide good alternatives
Strong counter-point. In my city there is a decent amount of bike parking. Yet I've often seen scooters not parked at a nearby bike parking area, even though there's space.
I got very angry with a guy last summer who left his rental e-scooter in the middle of the park pathway next to me, when available bike parking was about 30 feet away. Anyone with a stroller or walker would have had to go on the grass to get around it.
And e-scooter parking seems to take up more width than bicycles. I've seen people park their (non-shared/non-rental) bikes at the edge of the sidewalk, either against a building wall, or against a sign.
They often leave a lot of space between the rental e-scooter and the wall, because people get off a scooter with feet on both sides of the scooter, and because it's too bulky to scooch over to the side, thus blocking more of the sidewalk.
Certainly cars take of an undue amount of space. But that doesn't mean you can assert that cities like Paris only have car parking as the alternative, when they also have bike parking, and have been active in switching away from cars.