[lupusreal]

You need the car if you want to go reasonably fast (much more than 20-30 mph) and stay reasonably safe. You also need the car if you want to haul enough groceries to feed a family for more than one or two meals, or if you want to transport other people who may be too old or young to go cowboying around on an electric scooter. Electric scooters are pretty much only for young urban adults with no children.

Like it or not, cars aren't going anywhere. A scooter lifestyle might work for you but it doesn't work for a large enough portion of the population that your wishes for society will never come to pass.

Btw, electric scooters are possibly the most idiotic form of personal electric transport; electric bicycles are much safer. The geometry of a scooter, small wheels far below the center of mass of the rider, makes them fundamentally unstable at any speed. Considering bicycles exist, scooters are completely senseless and should probably be banned outright. You are far more likely to crash a scooter by yourself, simply by losing control of it, than to crash a bicycle. Scooters really are for young people who still think they're invincible; which explains why most riders don't even wear helmets.

[Toutouxc]

> wheels far below the center of mass of the rider, makes them fundamentally unstable

Having the wheels far below the center of mass of the whole system (rider + scooter) makes them MORE stable, a bit similar to reversing a car with a long trailer instead of a short one. Compare to something like a racing recumbent bicycle, where the center of mass is really low. Those are very hard to balance at lower speeds.

You're so high above the wheels on en e-scooter (or just a regular kick scooter) that you can easily swerve (i.e. laterally displace the wheels, but not your torso) around a pothole or a puddle without changing the direction of travel. That's the opposite of instability.

[lupusreal]

The small wheels of scooters make them more likely to death wobble. I have personally witnessed it happen literal to the name, the rider cracked his skull because he wasn't wearing a helmet of course.

Bicycles naturally stay upright. You can push one without a rider and it will roll alone until it loses speed. Try the same with a scooter and it will immediately fall.

[Toutouxc]

Some scooters are susceptible to death wobble, that's true.

The fact that you can push a bicycle without a rider and it will roll, while most small-wheeled kick-scooters will fall, is not caused by a higher center of mass, but by the geometry of the front wheel, mainly the steering angle, fork offset and trail. Without a rider, a) the center of mass isn't even that different and b) it doesn't really matter how they behave without one, because the rider is part of the system.

[otabdeveloper4]

> if you want to haul enough groceries to feed a family for more than one or two meals, or if you want to transport other people who may be too old or young

This is a "once a week" situation. As time goes on it will become increasingly hard to justify the cost of something you use once a week, especially when other options (groceries delivery) are cheaper and more convenient.

P.S. Scooters are popular because they don't need skill to ride, despite being worse in other respects. As time goes on this, too, will change; learning to ride some sort of PEV will be normal.

[Geisterde]

How many "once a week" situations do you have? I go out to breakfast most weekends with my spouse. Which one of us should ride on the spokes when its 20° out? Do we have to drive seprately now?

[otabdeveloper4]

We use our car once every one or two weeks. (I'm not in the USA.)

[nradov]

Grocery delivery sucks. You have to order too far ahead, actual delivery time is too unpredictable, you can't personally inspect the items, and sometimes you get inappropriate substitutions. Any suggestion of grocery delivery as a substitute for cars is just totally disconnected from reality.

Americans will continue driving to Costco. There is no conceivable future where this minor transportation cost becomes hard to justify, especially when you factor in the cost savings of buying in bulk.

[ghaff]

Grocery delivery is neither cheaper nor more convenient as a general rule. I've only used it once in the past 20 years when I was on crutches and doing a full grocery shopping was awkward.

[otabdeveloper4]

Grocery delivery is cheaper because they save on real estate costs. (You can keep most of your stock in a warehouse with only a small area for walk-in service.)

This is already happening where I live, because it makes economic sense. (They can sell upscale and more varied groceries without paying for upscale real estate.)

[gmac]

YMMV. For me in the UK — where all supermarkets except the discounters will deliver cheaply — it's ENORMOUSLY more convenient: it saves me hours a week that I'd otherwise spend at a supermarket.

[dredmorbius]

It is where land-use patterns are appropriate to it, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002203>.

[adrianN]

I use it regularly as it costs only a few euros to get my groceries delivered and I can do my shopping from the couch in ten minutes.

[dredmorbius]

All of these concerns are predicated on sprawl-based land-use patterns, which themselves are dependent on the automobile. The largest impact of private motorised transportation, after climate, has been on the built landscape.

What was replaced were dense cities and compact towns, along with more distributed rural living, though the traditional form of that, still found in some places in Europe and elsewhere, is of small towns from which farmers travel to their (nearby, but not immediately proximate) fields.

In the city/town example, where the total urbanisation rarely extended more than a few kilometers or miles (as in low single digits), one would walk to shops or the market square, and purchases were carried, occasionally pulled in carts or wagons, or later delivery by the merchant was arranged.

Some goods, particularly fresh / readily spoiling ones (milk, eggs, ice) were delivered by cart door-to-door.

I'm not saying that we necessarily are returning to a similar circumstance, though it's a possibility you and others on this thread seem not to even consider. I'd suggest that this is an error. What a post-carbon world will entail is much more expensive private vehicle costs, where EVs seem to runs 2--4x the cost of an equivalent ICE vehicle, which would make ownership more challenging and various alternatives, including smaller transport options (bicycles, electric bikes and scooters, "city cars", and the like) more viable. I'm going to suggest that the Uber/Lyft ride-hailing revolution has proved a failure with many of the purported benefits (less traffic & congestion, universal availability, lower cost, less demand for parking) falling well short of advertised potential.

And I'm not claiming that the transformation will be instantaneous. Mass-market automobiles first appeared in 1901 (Ford's Model T and equivalent General Motors offerings), whilst tract suburban development didn't gain significant momentum until the late 1940s (Levittown, PA), and weren't fully mature until the 1970s, a lag of a half to three quarters of a century. De-suburbanisation may well follow a similar timescale. And yes, it's worth noting that there were a few minor road-bumps on the path to suburbanisation (the Great Depression, World War II).

[dredmorbius]

Related: "Americans can no longer afford their cars", just posted to HN a few minutes ago:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39005696>

<https://www.newsweek.com/americans-can-no-longer-afford-thei...>

[concordDance]

> Considering bicycles exist, scooters are completely senseless and should probably be banned outright.

Scooters can be quite convenient due to smaller size.

In general, banning things that are too risky for an individual's taste seems wrong. Individuals should be allowed to take risks with their own bodies as long as they are fully informed of those risks. Skiing or having children might be too risky for me but imposing that preference on others isn't showing empathy.