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Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: June 28th, 2019, 7:30 pm
by grrdanko
Lyft Scooters rolled out in Minneapolis today.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: July 22nd, 2019, 10:52 am
by trafficeng985
Spin scooters debuted in St. Louis Park today and the old folks are already flustered on Nextdoor that "kids ride these things!"

Damn kids having fun! How dare they during the summer!! Maybe don't drive your oversized SUV 40 mph in a residential neighborhood and we can all coexist...

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: July 22nd, 2019, 11:27 am
by CalMcKenney
when are Spin scooters supposed to arrive to Minneapolis?

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: July 22nd, 2019, 11:35 am
by grrdanko
Spin scooters arrived in Minneapolis about 6 weeks ago.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: July 22nd, 2019, 2:28 pm
by CalMcKenney
Whoops! I meant Jump scooters, my bad.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: July 22nd, 2019, 3:07 pm
by Silophant
Jump/Uber dropped out apparently.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 3rd, 2019, 1:41 pm
by Bob Stinson's Ghost
This looks pretty legit, it appears to be a serious attempt at analyzing lifecycle environmental impacts of dockless e-scooters:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1 ... ab2da8/pdf

If scooter trips replace walking, biking or transit, the net effect is negative, as you might expect. Short equipment lifecycle and rebalancing/charging are also problematic.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 5th, 2019, 6:19 am
by Vagueperson
I don't see scooters replacing car trips

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 5th, 2019, 8:36 am
by alexschief
I don't see scooters replacing car trips
Why not?

For a tourist, they often replace trips that might otherwise be taken by ride share. Why wouldn't that be the case for residents?

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 5th, 2019, 9:56 am
by nordeast homer
Scary thing is I'm seeing families on these things. Twice last week, in separate instances, I witnessed a mom (or older sibling) with 2 kids on a single scooter. In one case they ignored a red light, while traffic was moving, to cut across 4 lanes and kept moving like nothing had happened; how they weren't road kill I'll never know.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 5th, 2019, 10:06 am
by SurlyLHT
They're definitely replacing car trips...especially Uber trips. Someone is also going to get hurt at some point. Part of it is people don't understand how to use the bicycle infrastructure and part is that it's not always convenient

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 5th, 2019, 11:34 am
by xandrex
I'm not sure it's so easy to slot scooters in as being a replacement for any single mode of transportation. At least in my experience, they're kind of in their own category.

My use cases so far:
-My once-an-hour express bus from the U skipped one of its runs. Instead of calling Uber/Lyft or waiting for a much slower regular route (after having already waited 30 minutes), I hopped on a nearby scooter and was home in 15 minutes.
-For walkable distances when I needed to get there quicker than my feet could.
-When a destination is in biking distance but where biking poses a challenge (hopping around multiple spots in the city with people who didn't bike) or where you'd work up a sweat biking.

There are certainly ways to improve the size of environmental impact these scooters have, but I really do think they're pushing us closer to a tipping point on mobility in this city.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 5th, 2019, 12:40 pm
by MNdible
[for the six months out of the year that they're deployed]

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 12th, 2019, 10:05 pm
by Vagueperson
I don't see scooters replacing car trips
Why not?

For a tourist, they often replace trips that might otherwise be taken by ride share. Why wouldn't that be the case for residents?
I suppose this is a good point. I was thinking of privately owned cars. Still, I don't see them replacing longer distance trips, which is what I see cars mostly useful for. True, most people use cars for trips even under 1 mile.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 12th, 2019, 10:47 pm
by Bob Stinson's Ghost
I see about 50 people riding scooters for each one I see pedaling a green or blue Nice Ride.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 13th, 2019, 9:38 am
by VacantLuxuries
[for the six months out of the year that they're deployed]
Thats six months in which people who might otherwise be ignorant of or flippant about our current state of non-auto centric infrastructure sees the city from a similar perspective as a cyclist.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: September 23rd, 2019, 2:13 pm
by dajazz
I was in Salt Lake over the weekend and noticed a bunch of electric Razor scooters with seats and small baskets. Didn’t even realize Razor still existed or that they were in the scooter share market but they are:

https://www.razor.com/share/

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: October 26th, 2019, 11:33 am
by DanPatchToget
I looked through this thread but didn't see anything, when did Bird drop out? I thought I read they were only in St. Paul and I wanted to use up the rest of my credits but now the closest city appears to be St. Louis!

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: October 26th, 2019, 8:58 pm
by Anondson
Bird wasn’t any of the initial four picked this entire year. I remember Bird tried to mount a public campaign to get in.

I seem to recall their non-selection was over not committing to locate a required percentage of scooters in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.

Re: Electric Scooters

Posted: October 31st, 2019, 10:51 am
by kdo5581
I think Bird dropped out of St. Paul because they probably considered this area one big market and (frankly, understandably) thought it would be nonsensical to limit access to one of the two cities here (and let's be real, the less lucrative city probably).