Reply to Cities starting to ban scooters. DC to follow?

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Cities starting to ban scooters. DC to follow?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think you either need to limit them to bike lanes OR limit their speed by a lot. People driving a motorized vehicle on the sidewalk 20-25 mph are dangerous, full stop. Especially when there are small children and dogs and people in mobility devices as well. Kids and dogs tend to shift direction quickly and don’t always have great awareness of their surroundings. Someone in a mobility device needs to always be given right of way. Scooters need to be slower or banned from sidewalks.

And before you yell at me about cars: speed limits for cars should also be lower and I think private cars should be banned from very dense urban neighborhoods with good public transportation access (you need to ensure it stays accessible to people with limited mobility). But I think that’s a separate conversation. I’ll note that this thread was started with discussion of Paris banning scooters. Paris recently moved aggressively to limit cars in many parts of the city, to great benefit of people who live there. So it’s not like banning scooters is a “pro-car” position.[/quote]

Rental scooters (which is what Paris banned) already are speed-limited to 10 mph in DC. And rental scooter parking can be geo-fenced, so the rental company doesn't stop charging you until you have returned your scooter to a designated scooter parking area.

For people on scooters to ride in bike lanes, there need to be bike lanes.

Cars could also have speed-limiters. Why don't we do a lot more of that?[/quote]

Well as a pedestrian in DC, I find the scooters still go too fast. Either they are not actually speed limited or 10 mph is too fast to travel on a busy city sidewalk.

I always support new bike lanes.

I would support speed limiters on cars.

You are trying to make this an either/or and it's not. I probably agree with most of your position on cars, but I ALSO think scooters are hazardous in the city and as someone who walks 90% of the time, I find them to be dangerous and also just to make the experience of walking in the city more stressful and less pleasant.

City transportation infrastructure should be built around pedestrians/public transportation first because everyone is a pedestrian at some point and public transportation is the single most accessible mode of transport. THEN cyclists. THEN small motorized vehicles like scooters and maybe e-bikes (not sure whether these should fit into cyclists or motorized, open for debate). Then cars very last. But this conversation has nothing to do with cars. It is about the balance between small motorized vehicles and pedestrians. The pedestrians needs should be first. If scooters pose a danger to pedestrians or make people uncomfortable walking on sidewalks (something that could push them to drive more!) then scooters should not be on sidewalks.

Bikes also don't belong on sidewalks for the same reason, which is one of many reasons I support bike lanes and giving more of the road over to bikes instead of cars.

But you are being super single minded in your car hate, and it's obscuring the fact that many pedestrians don't like scooters for very valid reasons. We should not have to ban cars before we can address the hazards caused by scooters.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics