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Ontario legalizing e-scooters!!! (Bird, Lime, segway, electric kickscooter, micro mobility, electric skateboards)

In my opinion, it's better to work with these kind of trends than to go against them.

And electric mobility has a lot of great benefits for congested cities.
Remember, every person on a scooter is not driving a car!
electric-scooter-in-street.png

Image from https://www.electricridenow.com

However, there are some major transitional issues that need to be addressed.
Take for example insurance. Most people don't realize that their household insurance doesn't cover all the costs in case of an accident.

And with 20kph you can already cause a lot of damage to a pedestrian or cause a bigger crash involving cars.

So, I think we need to start by getting setting some ground rules.
And the first should be that scooter belong on the road or bike lane, and not on the sidewalk.
The speed difference and potential for injury to vulnerable pedestrians is just too high.
 
Joe Electric said:
In my opinion, it's better to work with these kind of trends than to go against them.

And electric mobility has a lot of great benefits for congested cities.
Remember, every person on a scooter is not driving a car!
View attachment 229065
Image from https://www.electricridenow.com

However, there are some major transitional issues that need to be addressed.
Take for example insurance. Most people don't realize that their household insurance doesn't cover all the costs in case of an accident.

And with 20kph you can already cause a lot of damage to a pedestrian or cause a bigger crash involving cars.

So, I think we need to start by getting setting some ground rules.
And the first should be that scooter belong on the road or bike lane, and not on the sidewalk.
The speed difference and potential for injury to vulnerable pedestrians is just too high.
Click to expand...
I am all for electric scooters (and plan on riding on one), but would wearing a helmet and/or having a driver's licence be mandatory?
 
Wearing a helmet seems like a good idea, considering the same speeds and use cases as bicycles.
There have been countless studies proving the benefits of bicycle helmets and they are generally very comfortable.

Driver's license is not that useful in my opinion.
 
IMHO, helmets should depend on scooter weight & speed class.

Electric kickscooters smaller and lighter and slower than a bicycle SHOULD NOT make helmet-mandatory for adults (of our age). We can decide to wear one but it should not break the law if we don't wear a helmet.
Some of the scooters weigh less than a school backpack.

1. Road-Class Scooters
(~30kph and faster): Helmets Mandatory

Road-class scooters like these should have mandatory helmets.
The fast kinds of scooters that should not be in bike infrastructure nor sidewalks.
1580786713078.png
1580786771814.png

(Source: this and this)

2. Trail-Class Electric Kick-Scooters
(~20kph and slower): Helmets Optional

These are the kind of scooters, lighter than a bicycle, yet goes same speed as a bicycle.
They mix extremely well with bicycles in bike infrastructure.
1580786840750.png
1580786871759.png

(Source: Reposted from first page of this thread, and Bird Scooters from Bloomberg News)

These scooters weigh less than a full school backpack and will injure less than a bike colliding with you.

The thing is...
  • They sometimes terrorize pedestrians (just like bikes can terrorize pedestrians too)
  • People are too tempted to ride these scooters on sidewalks which gives these scooters a bad rap.
  • But they generally have pretty good harmony in North American style bike infrastructure & multiuse trails.
Even when I was a cyclist, I was pretty comfortable biking along with those compact Birds which flowed practically perfectly in bike infrastructure. From that, the impatience index of a scooter-in-front actually was less than a cyclist-in-front, so it's irrational to be a "Not In My Bike Lane" mentality with these kinds of tame (to bike infra) scooters. They are unwanted in sidewalk infra -- and risky in arterial roads not optimized for bikes -- but works almost perfect in most bike infra -- as well as tame/residential roads you normally don't mind cycling on.

But yes, we need more bike infrastructure. Where these trail-class electric kick-scooters are the safest (fewest injuries for everyone involved).

Excellent Arguments For Bike & Electric Kickscooters -- Sharing The Same Cycle Lane:
For those who disagree with trail-class scooters sharing bike structure -- please READ this post first -- it is very enlightening.
 
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Joe Electric said:
Remember, every person on a scooter is not driving a car!
Click to expand...
What a ridiculous absolute statement. Every person? How have you come to the conclusion that every scooter user would otherwise be driving a car? For starters you assume that every scooter user is able and presumably licensed to drive a car.

Rental eScooters would be just another option over private bicycles and scooters, bikeshare, walking, TTC, Uber/Lyft, taxis, private cars, and other means of getting around. To assert that every eScooter displaces a car driver is an exercise in naivety, ignorance or willful oversimplification.
 
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I'm visiting LA and they are all over the city. Just ditched. It looks awful. Downtown. Hollywood. Beverly Hills. Santa Monica. Yuck.
 
Freddy said:
I'm visiting LA and they are all over the city. Just ditched. It looks awful. Downtown. Hollywood. Beverly Hills. Santa Monica. Yuck.
Click to expand...
About tipped-over scooters, they annoy me too -- I wrote a post about this too.

Now, of the 4 (now 5 cities) I visited with scooters in 2 (now 3) different countries -- 2 cities had had made a royal mess but the others were OK; had done a much better management/enforcement of scooter parking. Also, the newer version has a double kickstand that makes it harder to tip over by accident (e.g. difficulty parking scooter on uneven ground).

Montreal is working hard to try to control the blight of improperly-parked scooters with one of the strictest set of parking regulations on scooter-share. It'll be interesting to see what they do in 2020 to refine how it fits in a Canadian city (as well as Calgary and Edmonton, which have enacted different rules).

At some point, the blight will be no more objectionable than seeing masses of parked bicycles in Copenhagen/Holland (that doesn't really bother me), or a streetcar-hater's disdain of overhead catenary, etc. As scooters become more durable we have to figure out how it becomes part of our cityscape, whether owned or scootershare.

We never had an era where we had electric mobility devices smaller than bikes become capable of bike speed -- it is a new mobility disruption moment -- like the dandyhorse boom (1820s) or the Model-T Ford boom (1920s) that shook up mobility. There were huge messes in 1820s when the early brakeless bikes crashes into pedestrians and caused bans of that era, and the 1920s Ford when it wrought chaos at first (since there were no traffic lights and no stop signs yet).

Interesting Mobility Blight Parallel: Google "Menace of cars, 1920s" -- like many complaining about electric kickscooters today -- back in 1920s most of the population was complaining about cars. It killed so many horses, children, pedestrians (even with fewer cars back in that era, they killed far more people!). Back then, cars were only owned by the rich, with no formal driver's education legally needed at first. Before Henry Ford brought the prices of cars down to the middle class affordability. This was all before Stop Signs were invented, and before Traffic Lights were invented.

This new mobility revolution (boom of electric kickscooters), while sudden for anybody in this contemporary era -- is much more tame and smaller in comparision. Seeing scooter messes (some more organized, some bigger) in certain cities I've visited, Toronto still definitely needs to eventually figure out the proper way to integrate electrified kickstooters eventually. It would be fruitless to continue to ban them -- 2020 will be the legalization year and we just have to grin-and-bear the imperfections/disruptions -- and fix the issues.

I'm pretty sure in 5 to 10 years, electric kickscooters will be much more well integrated into society, as the teething problems are ironed out.
 

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mdrejhon said:
Toronto's enforcement will have to either be more proactive, or tolerance for scooter mess will have to be higher, or they will have to go to an alternate solution.

Moscow decided to solve their charging / scootermess problem with e-scooter docks:

View attachment 231863

source: How to rent an electric city scooter in Moscow)
Click to expand...

I had to zoom in to be sure I wasn't seeing a hammer and sickle logo on those red Russian scooters.

On another note, who thought it would be a good idea to let people park scooters wherever they pleased? The example in Moscow seems like the only option worth pursuing. It would complement the current bike share system and keep the eye sore to a minimum.
 
mdrejhon said:
Toronto's enforcement will have to either be more proactive, or tolerance for scooter mess will have to be higher, or they will have to go to an alternate solution.

Moscow decided to solve their charging / scootermess problem with e-scooter docks:

View attachment 231863

source: How to rent an electric city scooter in Moscow)
Click to expand...
These are pretty cool, the city could make the company incorporate a couple spots for bicycles to park too, to sweeten the deal. But this solves both the charging and the mess, you're right. I wonder if they could install some sort of helmet dock so as to curb the legal issue people are facing when they ride without a helmet.
 
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