I've owned both a scooter and skateboard for 7 months.
I disagree, you can ride a scooter on a sidewalk safely and I need to do it from time to time. Of course, I don't prefer it. But it's pretty easy to do safely and it shouldn't bother anyone if done correctly.
The rules I follow:
1. Go much much slower.
2. Stay far away from other people and blind corners.
3. Always assume a person is about to make an erratic movement
4. Never pass closely to a person. When passing, go their walking speed + 1mph. It should be a similar speed differential to passing someone when you're walking.
5. If you have no space to pass, you need to go walking speed
until space opens up.
6. if the sidewalk is too packed, just get off and walk it.
7. If you have far visibility (no blind corners, doorways, storefronts, etc) and there is no one in sight, let'er rip.
It all depends on the conditions. You should never blow by people at 15 mph. I commuted partly on 5th street in downtown Los Angeles and never had an issue, a close call, or had someone bat an eye. The goal is to blend in with other people walking.
It's not impossible, but it's unrealistic to expect that everybody who can poke their finger on an app button will do this.
If scooters require knowledge, thought, and skill to ride well on a sidewalk, then the two obvious answers are a) require training and a road test, or b) ban them on sidewalks. I don't much care which we go with, but having recently almost gotten flattened by some rental e-scooter idiot on the sidewalk, I think we need to pick one.
There is no particular reason for me to think casual app-based renters will ever learn this etiquette, especially given the high tourist density in SF.
And regardless, if etiquette is needed for safe and effective sharing of the sidewalks, it's up to these scooter companies to make sure that etiquette training happens before they accept money and turn somebody loose. Otherwise it's classic "privatize the gains and socialize the losses" foolishness.
Well, it's not much different than cars then where people drive foolishly all the time and there aren't enough cops to catch them all.
For example, I almost never see people reserve the passing lane for going fast or passing which is dangerous. People almost never use blinkers. Except, unlike scooters, they are driving vehicles that weigh two tons and are going 65+ mph. And they even require licenses.
So that's a pretty low bar, and not very damning if scooters have some etiquette issues.
The difference is that people aren't driving cars at 65 mph down the sidewalk. Or even 15-20 mph. Or at all. Because it's illegal and somebody could easily lose their license for it. So if you're saying we should make it not much different than cars in the sense that it's illegal, that's fine by me.
I'm not sure that's the widespread behavior though. (And I agree that partial cautious sidewalk use is fine.) A lot of users seem not to want to use roads or even non-separated bike lanes period.
> I disagree, you can ride a scooter on a sidewalk safely and I need to do it from time to time. Of course, I don't prefer it. But it's pretty easy to do safely and it shouldn't bother anyone if done correctly.
Keep it simple. "Can" but people won't. There is reason in this post ... but the law should remain that riding on sidewalks is illegal.
"Trusting" strangers on scooters to slow down is unwelcome heart-burn, as a pedestrian. "Will they slow down for me? Will they move off to the side? Will my dog stray into their fast-moving path? Will my dog, who freaks out for any person-riding-on-vehicle, freak out as this scooter crawls past? Do I need to pull the neck-collar on my dog hard so he stays sufficiently close to my feet as the person riding on the vehicle passes?"
None of this thinking should be necessary for a pedestrian. Keep the law set. Stay off the sidewalks.
Go further, require license-plates for scooters, to track infringement of riding on the sidewalk. Report scooters dragged into the lane. There is something fundamentally "not right for a metropolitan" about these smallish, easily misplaced vehicles.
This. It's all about relative speed difference. If the cars are going slow then riding with them is no problem. If there's no (slow) people on the sidewalk then you can ride there.
Agreed. The one thing that is scary for everyone in these situations is the element of surprise. If you eliminate the "blowing through stoplights" or the hurry and brake fast behind a pedestrian, or worse, you eliminate 95% of the issues.
It shouldn't be the opinion of the person on the scooter what is safe or not safe to do with said scooter on the sidewalk. Take space away from cars, not pedestrians.
Well, thank you, that's very good, but that doesn't exactly solve the problem.
I'm a hard-line rule following bicyclist, but I have no control over the other cyclists that blast past me at red lights. What are we supposed to do, render our nonexistent authority over them? I suppose I can say "please don't do that," but I try that and it has no effect.
I applaud your attempt at civil discourse. You deserve a medal for patience. Thank you for posting as I think discussions like this could use more of your style.
Given how few of the riders are wearing helmets, they seem to at the very least be unaware of the risks they are taking.
> ... and others safety.
Power is intoxicating. Being in a more powerful vehicle on a surface shared with other less powerful vehicles makes some people ignore others' safety, or discount the way in which their actions imperil others.
Anyone who has ridden a bike/motorcycle in regular traffic can attest to that experience around cars: you assume you are invisible to them. I've seen many high-powered cars/trucks/motorcycles swerving and accelerating dangerously around less powerful vehicles in traffic.
Similarly, I've seen motorcycles driving fast down bike lanes to get around car traffic.
It's a similar situation between the scooters and pedestrians on busy sidewalks.
> They belong in the bike lane (which should exist in the first place), and their speed should be capped in areas of dense foot traffic
These are great ideas. Write them into your representatives. Designated street-side scooter parking would also be a plus. Not only does it signal to drivers "consider another option," it also deals with the scooter litter problem.
(To form, San Francisco chose the worst of all options and coronated two companies chosen by bureaucrats to run amok in the city.)
I was just in LA, and scooters are everywhere. However, they're all parked upright, and in most cases even organized into a nice, out of the sidewalk path, line (initially I thought that Bird/Lime/etc were paying people to do this, but I saw a mix of different brands aligned as often as just one).
When they first launched in LA, this wasn't the case, it was just as much of a free for all as SF. SF succumbed to regulatory capture, but LA was able to figure out a way to allow all of the companies to exist in a better way.
Note that I was told that in some parts of LA, the organization is still pretty bad, but I was in Brentwood, Santa Monica, downtown, and Venice, all of which were in reasonably good shape.
Counterpoint, I live in downtown SF and walk everywhere (Lived in lower polk, work in fidi, now live in Nob Hill). Even at their peak, I never once had a scooter in my way. Characterizing the situation here, even at its worst, as a "free for all" is a gross exaggerating.
So, an important lesson I've realized from the whole scooters thing is that if you have a bunch of inconsiderate idiots in your city, regulation isn't going to fix that problem.
So I'm not surprised you have a totally different view. Your view is going to reflect the values of the people around you. You may be surrounded by polite people.
Take riding on the sidewalks. Any sensible person would understand that operating a vehicle moving 15-20mph on a 3-foot wide sidewalk, in a dense urban area with people coming into/out of buildings, delivery personnel wheeling hand trucks, small children, parents with strollers, people walking cats and dogs, etc is just dumb. Yet, I see kids in Oakland doing this daily, and even though it's codified into the Oakland Municipal Code that this is illegal (motorized vehicles on the sidewalk), people do it anyway.
I got so fed up with this, I (intentionally) veered about 6 inches left walking on the sidewalk last week, causing someone going ~15mph to get knocked off of the scooter. Other times, I just stand in the middle of the sidewalk and play chicken. I weigh 240lbs so it's usually pretty effective.
It is indeed up to the law to legislate what is and isn't allowable behavior. But at the smallest scale, it's neither possible nor desirable to get a cop standing on every block, or surveillance cameras everywhere. You just have to trust people will exercise some level of decency and concern for others, which seems notably absent from day-to-day interaction where I live. You can't change that with laws.
It certainly would be amazing if national incentives could be set up to redesign streets nation wide to favor bikes and pedestrians in the same way we do cars.
I disagree. Bike lanes are extremely dangerous for cyclists and the current implementation of bike lanes in this country are really just big automobile lanes.
It puts all the risk on the cyclist. I have had numerous friends get hit and run while riding bikes on bike lanes, most recently a friend died from it.
I'll happily receive any citations for riding my bike or e-scooter on the sidewalk, and take full responsibility for any accidents I get into. It's not even up for discussion in my mind.
In the UK:
> In 2015, two pedestrians were killed and 96 seriously injured after being hit by a bicycle. But every year more than 100 cyclists are killed and more than 3,000 seriously injured on British roads
I don't think you're making a very compelling justification for bicycling on sidewalks.
Your statistic regarding UK pedestrians being killed/hit vs bicyclists being killed/hit isn't strong as it's probable that nowhere near as many bicyclists choose to ride on the sidewalk as compared to staying in bike lanes and roads. That is, if more bicyclists opted to ride on sidewalks, the incident rate would certainly increase.
Additionally, rationalizing this in terms of the risk towards the bicyclist just comes off as selfish: "I'm not comfortable with the risk I'm facing while bicycling on the roads, therefore I will put pedestrians at risk instead."
Perhaps instead of endangering pedestrians, something more constructive would be to engage politically to improve the situation (maybe you do this already, if so, awesome!).
In south Australia its legal to ride a bike on the sidewalk and every time I have seen someone do it they have done it safely and respectfully. There are some streets that are just too dangerous to ride on and hardly anyone ever walks on the sidewalk.
Marginally. They do help some cyclists, and they reserve space for future, better bike lanes. On the other hand, they're inefficient because most people rightfully determine they're unsafe and won't use them, which gives ammo to anti-bike crusaders.
> They belong in the bike lane (which should exist in the first place)
A bike lane really isn't safe enough to get people on bikes and scooters into it. It needs to be a separated cycle track like what is common in Copenhagen. This takes more space, but increases capacity of the whole road (the cycle track has more capacity than the driving lane it takes away).
There are a zillion other benefits too - more active/healthier population, higher retail spending along the cycle track (https://its.ucdavis.edu/inthenews/the-complete-business-case...), higher property values, only taking 30lbs of metal with you on every trip instead of 2000lbs, potentially local fuel source (food from nearby rather than oil or electricity from afar), etc etc etc.
In my city, we have a small conundrum. The scooters move more like bikes than walkers, but the language on our bike trail system explicitly forbids any "motorized vehicles". Of course, reasonable people could argue that such a law can be ignored, but I know I'm risking a ticket if an officer so chooses.
Also, bicyclists seem to seriously hate the scooters. I'm not entirely sure why, but it seems to be that they're just not used to having much traffic on "their" paths.
FWIW, most places have a definition of "motorized vehicle" written into their laws somewhere, and it's usually not "any vehicle with a motor". motors under a certain power outut or vehicles capped to a certain speed don't usually count as motor vehicles, to allow things like mobility scooters & powered wheelchairs to travel on sidewalks or bike paths.
> The scooters move more like bikes than walkers, but the language on our bike trail system explicitly forbids any "motorized vehicles"
If the bike lane laws disallow motorized vehicles, then how does the sidewalk law allow it? It sounds like the laws need to be updated to allowed motorized electric vehicles capable of going up to some reasonable maximum speed in the bike lane. Basically the inverse of the law that prevents mopeds and golf carts from going on the freeway today.
i'll reiterate my favored solution (for urban areas): turn parking lanes into protected bike/scooter lanes. that solves the safety problem both ways (cars on one side and pedestrians on the other).
until then i'm fine with scooters being encouraged (but not forced) to use less busy roads, and tolerating them on sidewalks for major roads without bike lanes.
Another perspective, from a skateboarder:
In New York skateboarders are banned from sidewalks and have to skate in traffic. I've got a solid push and hold my own among bikes and cars but, regardless, get all kinds of flack from drivers. When I take the to sidewalk due to dangerous road conditions pedestrians are simply far too unpredictable, scared, and oblivious to permit me on board so I reluctantly walk.
You know who I never see walking when they're on the sidewalk? Scooter riders, electronic and otherwise.
> They belong in the bike lane (which should exist in the first place), and their speed should be capped in areas of dense foot traffic.
I live downtown Minneapolis and have been almost hit by scooters multiple times. They are everywhere. I have no problem with them, but please follow the rules. I've had people on the scooters yell at me to get out of the way both oncoming and from behind.
In Dallas (and elsewhere I imagine) we're supposed to use them on the street, and most people have been learning this. First time I rode one on the sidewalk I barely got down one block before people in cars were telling me to get off the sidewalk. Once on the street I had no trouble sharing the road with other cars, though this was downtown where the speed limit is lower. The scooters seem to have been a little more warmly accepted than the bikes, where parked bikes which take up more space were clogging up sidewalks.
This summer when I was in San Diego for a half marathon I was standing on the sidewalk waiting when out of nowhere a scooter rider was crossing the street, hit the sidewalk curb, which was higher than they expected, and endo'ed right next to me. It was almost like the latest South Park episode. The scooters can be tricky to ride for new people, are fast, and really should only be used while wearing a helmet.
> meaning side-walk devices should go at max 10 mph.
10 mph is more than enough to injure someone on collision, especially if that person is frail. Average human walking speed is 3mph. Runners average 10mph, but a running human has a lot more control over their momentum than someone in a vehicle, because they are expending their own energy to move, rather than using an external propulsion system, and they aren't on wheels.
> Talking about such, is there any data on accidents caused by e-scooters? (percentage wise e.g. vs bikes)
I don't know, but except for small children, bikes are already banned on most sidewalks in cities with a lot of foot traffic. Some adults choose to ignore those rules, but that's a different issue.
On the other hand, a 3,000lb car going 35mph is far far FAR more than enough to injure or more likely kill a human on a scooter if they're forced onto the roads.
If the only argument is one of how much damage would happen in the case of a collision, bikes and scooters belong with pedestrians and not with cars. We don't need to speculate what happens when a car hits a bicyclist, it happens every day and the common outcome is that the biker dies.
There has to be a better argument for sentencing bikers and scooter riders to death.
Flipping that around, if scooters can't operate safely on the road they should be banned from the road. Which effectively bans scooters and bicycles in any place where there is no bike lane.
The core difference is it's other people that get harmed on sidewalks vs. the scooter rider on roads. I suspect most people are fine with people risking other own lives more than other people.
At the core scooters don't really change that much about transportation vs bikes or simply running. However, they can be really convenient. So, it's going to be interesting to see how things evolve.
I think it does depend on the city though. I'm really excited to try these out next time I'm in Charlotte or Raleigh. The sidewalk network in those places tends to be pretty lacking in the first place, and as a result, there are only a few spots with anything close to dense foot traffic on sidewalks. It's also usually a pretty long walk to anywhere due to everything being built at car-scale. If anything, I'm hopeful that the adoption of these may pave the way to a better side-walked future in cities like those.
I don't know about the sidewalk network being lacking in Raleigh although I admittedly tend to stay within a fairly small area. Many of the sidewalks are wide and don't have a huge amount of foot traffic. The roads tend not to be too congested either in the city core.
That said, I think it took about 4 hours from my arrival a few weeks back to nearly being run down from behind on one of the streets with a narrower sidewalk. A lot of riders definitely weave around people and generally expect walkers to get out of their way.
On the plus side there weren't a lot of parked e-scooters blocking sidewalks but there were some and I saw even more in Atlanta this past week. Not enough to be a meaningful problem for pedestrians but certainly for anyone in a wheelchair or mobility scooter.
They are parked so haphazardly as well. Years long fight for the physically changed to have any mobility is being undone by these scooters blocking the sidewalks. I can walk around them but what will a person in a wheelchair do? The feature that makes them the most convenient and why people use this over bikesharing is the fact that they can be dropped of anywhere and that's exactly what the major problem with it as well.
If you care about disabled mobility, the NYC’s subways need to be at the top of the list for any outrage. Elevators are every half dozen stops, if that and the ones they have are used as urinals half the time. Disabled mobility in cities has bigger problems than scooters.
They just appeared seemingly overnight here recently. They seem quite popular, but aren't really practical on rainy days. Will see what happens when winter really hits. I can't imagine many people preferring them to a car on a snowy, slushy day or with temps below freezing. Also wondering how they'll handle salt exposure, and how the cold will affect battery life.
I'm not sure if I agree with the bike lane point (versus street anyway), but I will say that after visiting SF for the first time a few weeks ago one of the first things I noticed about downtown was the number of scooters and scooter/motorbike parking everywhere.
You don't see much of anywhere near that much around Toronto.
I agree with your comment, but this is the law already.
I'm strongly in favour of more scooters/e-bikes in the city (and fewer cars), and I'm also strongly in favour of writing tickets for anyone who is antisocial enough to ride on the sidewalk.
If traffic cops spent a week or two rigorously enforcing the law, I bet you'd see a sharp drop-off in this behaviour.
(However given the number of cars, including cop cars, that I see blocking intersections after the lights change, I'm not sure that there's really a commitment to enforcing traffic laws in SF, even where this would be a revenue-generating activity).
A motor-propelled machine going 15 mph doesn't belong on the same surface as a baby stroller, a senior citizen, or a person with a disability.
They belong in the bike lane (which should exist in the first place), and their speed should be capped in areas of dense foot traffic.