There's something remarkable about the explosion of scooters as an SF public transit category — it's that there *weren't* really electric scooters until they became accessible by sharing/app.
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So — perhaps electric scooters are really that unhelpful to have on their own, and it's a huge experience dealbreaker if you must to take your scooter along indoors with you?
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Or maybe scooters are better modeled as an on-demand, electric single-occupancy "bus" — one that magically has a stop a few blocks away from wherever you happen to be, and goes express direct to your destination every time.
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this! Though, arguably we would have seen this same overnight explosion in bicycle usage had the SFMTA not banned ('capped') bike sharing in SF. Scooters happened to not have been banned due to a loophole.
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And you can have an electric vehicle on 4 wheels with all the torque in the world, more hp than you'll really ever use & capable of going 70mph, but your electric bicycle is kept to an anemic power maximum of 500kW AND these two disparate vehicles are subject to the same laws.
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it really begs the question if our elected leaders are actually at their core trying their best to protect the car monopoly over our public spaces
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I wonder if it's simply a fad, a glitch in human psychology that is not correlated at all with the utility of the scooter
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Perhaps! I would hazard that it's probably at least correlated with a massive multi-decade glitch in urban transit planning and would wager that not having to commit to buying, maintaining, locking and minding a scooter is a major factor in their rise..
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I feel like it's also a glitch of these startups grabbing more zeros than sanely possible within months of launching https://www.recode.net/2018/3/9/17100964/bird-fundraising-100-million-dockless-scooter-sharing …https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/limebike-raises-70-million-as-the-bike-sharing-battle-rages-on/ …
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Feel like the answer is about levels of utility. E scooters aren’t very useful outside flat parts of SF so more valuable as shared than as owned. People I know who own have small specific uses for them (Ferry to office mostly) and not much else (car bike elsewhere).
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Amazon also has an exclusive distribution agreement for the scooter, Mi M365, whereas in other places like Israel, the scooters have been sold in stores. Also, mini EVs generally have the problem of costing a lot when their utility is unproven to the user. Sharing -> ownership
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Scooters actually make a lot of sense for ownership, if you have/want a commute that involves transit.
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