I live in Denver where we have a more recent law that says scooters are toys, which means they are only legally permitted on the sidewalk.
This means you have scooters, which are silent like a Prius, speeding along at 20mph next to pedestrians.
I support these scooters because they can reduce car usage, but they could have worked with the cities to make sure they were rolled out in a responsible way. But these companies must “disrupt,” right?
Also, we have four or so scooter different companies operating here. Which means we now have scooters everywhere. Some in the walkway, some toppled over, etc.
> I support these scooters because they can reduce car usage, but they could have worked with the cities to make sure they were rolled out in a responsible way. But these companies must “disrupt,” right?
I understand what you're saying and agree that it should work that way in an ideal world.
But government bureaucracy moves incredibly slowly, especially for things they don't have very much incentive to do anything about. Imagine a business approaching a governing body and saying "I want to roll out electric scooters to the city!" They would probably get little more than a raised eyebrow and minimal progress over the course of years, not to mention they may simply choose to be lazy and reject it entirely.
When a business "disrupts", it might be inconvenient, but it actually provides incentive for the government to move.
Hmm, I wonder how feasible it would be for the next generation of scooters to have pedestrian-collision avoidance tech built into them. Put in a camera or two, some neural nets or whatever other tech is needed, and the scooter would limit its speed to something near (1.5X or 2X) walking speed when you get close to a pedestrian.
Even if you ban scooters from sidewalks, it's still going to happen, so this could perhaps increase safety. And maybe even allow the two to peacefully co-exist.
I could have made this clearer, but the benefit would be that it would be a whole lot easier to argue for less stringent speed limitations when not around pedestrians.
Thus the benefit to the user would be higher speeds most of the time and faster travel overall.
This means you have scooters, which are silent like a Prius, speeding along at 20mph next to pedestrians.
I support these scooters because they can reduce car usage, but they could have worked with the cities to make sure they were rolled out in a responsible way. But these companies must “disrupt,” right?
Also, we have four or so scooter different companies operating here. Which means we now have scooters everywhere. Some in the walkway, some toppled over, etc.