[easytiger]

I've worked in London for near on 20 years. The people using these are not using them as an alternative to a car. If you look about in Z1 the congestion comes from poor road management and an uptick in commercial traffic.

But sure, as a plumber to come to your house on his bike. See how that goes.

The footpaths have been rougly the same around where i live for 4/500 years.

[ehnto]

I haven't spoken about commuting at all. My core point is that car centric city centres sacrificed their space for people to cars, and that blaming scooters for the lack of space was missing the forest for the trees. The fact that you can't fit a pram past a scooter is the same reason businesses can't do alfresco dining, mothers on bicycles have to ride amongst cars, peds have to wait at crossings, walking anywhere is unpleasant and your children can't ride their bikes to school, etc etc. I am not going to pretend it hasn't happened and shift blame to everything but cars just because it's the current status quo.

Before cars your 400 year old road was mixed use, and your plumber certainly didn't turn up in a box van. When cars turned up, everything got pushed onto the sidewalk to make way for cars. It wasn't so long ago, there is no shortage of film of how cities used to be before cars.

[easytiger]

None of this was remotely an issue a few years ago before these schemes were rolled out in my area, entirely invalidating your presumptions.

https://i.imgur.com/8piPcuf.jpg

These schemes provide value to the user because they can be wilfully discarded anywhere.