City Lab Popular hostility to e-scooters is puzzling when one considers that the vehicles take up less public street space than automobiles and don’t pollute as much as they do. The more thoughtful e-scooter critics often point to safety concerns, with some justification: The CDC recently concluded that about one in 5,000 e-scooter trips in Austin resulted in a rider being hurt. When e-scooters arrive in a city, an automobile driver must suddenly share road space with a vehicle in an unfamiliar shape, moving in unfamiliar ways.
But such safety fears should be put in context, as riders seem to pose minimal risk to anyone other than themselves. I’m not aware of a single pedestrian in the United States being killed in an e-scooter collision since Bird and Lime launched two years ago; for comparison, in 2018 alone, automobiles killed over 6,200 pedestrians in this country. And yet, a columnist in The New York Times decried e-scooters for “wreaking havoc,” calling on mayors to flex their regulatory powers “like a sober parent” in order to keep citizens safe from them. When automobile drivers recently killed four e-scooter riders in Atlanta, local leaders responded by swiftly imposing a nighttime e-scooter curfew—but not restricting automobiles.
....When e-scooters arrive in a city, an automobile driver must suddenly share road space with a vehicle in an unfamiliar shape, moving in unfamiliar ways—which is stressful. Pedestrians, too, must adapt their behavior when e-scooters show up, keeping an eye out for a rider zipping along the sidewalk or an unused device blocking their path.
Limited urban street and sidewalk space play a role as well. Tara Goddard, a professor at Texas A&M, has observed how scarcity of public right of way can lead individual commuters to self-identify within a group such as bicyclists, pedestrians, or drivers, seeing the others as rivals. No group is going to be thrilled when a new competitor like e-scooters suddenly arrives and requires its own space to move on a crowded street.
What does seem apparent is that popular sentiment toward ride hail and e-scooters does not reflect what we currently know about their effect on cities. Even Uber and Lyft now acknowledge they have worsened congestion, and transportation researchers have repeatedly shown that ride hail contributes to falling transit ridership. But there is little evidence that the average urban resident links ride hail to their slower commute or their transit agency’s yawning budget deficit.
1 comment:
The thing I worry about is these e-scooters usually don't have adequate lighting or reflectors for riding at night. There are no headlights or only 2 tiny LEDs down at wheel level which doesn't really help with visibility. Bikes are required to have head lights and reflectors for biking at night, but E-scooters don't even follow bike law. How drivers are supposed to get used to invisible e-scooters after dark is a mystery to me.
My other concern is I see a lot of e-scooters parked across the side walk which is an issue for mobility impaired people. The old person with a walker or someone in a wheel chair can't move the scooter out of the way. These issues are fixable, but especially with headlights, the companies are just plain stupid to not figure that one out before they hit the streets.
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