What is the point?
Seems to me just a bunch of negatives.
Walk. Been doing that for all our time. It is exercise, which we are getting less of to health detriment. We have legs, no need to mine and refine all the crap to build a scooter and battery and energy to charge battery. So many scooters in the waste heap, batteries as hazardous waste. More crap to avoid a bit of healthy walking. Hitting other people. Building out charging stations. Companies building out whole fleets, then collapsing, to the dump. Cities installing charging facilities, then company collapsing, to the dump. Theft and mindless destruction of scooters. To the dump.
Personally so pissed off at seeing self satisfied eco twits riding them around.
You can get around much faster if you need to. And in today’s Get It Done Yesterday World, time is money.
Also, I’ve ridden electric motorcycle and the technology is fantastic.
I am not sure what the OP is talking about. If it is those things:
then I agree, they deserve to be banned in urban areas. They are extremely unsafe, are always used without helmets, as the point is to take them spontaneously, are very often used by two people, which is forbidden, but no one cares, are used on sidewalks and roads indistinctly, which is dangerous for pedestrians again as they are silent. And they are hell for blind people when parked, well, parked… left just haphazardly on the curb is more like it. I say ban them or allow them only with helmet, for one person, on the road, not the sidewalk, allow them being parked only in delimitated areas and enforce those rules!
But if we are talking about electric motorcycles, those points already apply (I hope!) and the tecnology is getting better and better. I am looking forward to a good model, reasonably priced, with 200-300 km autonomy. I believe I will not have to wait much longer.
We are already there. I test rode the Zero DSR/X electric motorcycle the other day and it is fantastic! Its range is 180 miles / 288 kms.
But getting back to the OP, yes it may be referring to what is in your picture. I’m really not sure.
With only very slight adjustments this statement would apply to cars, yet it’s the scooters getting geofenced, speed governed, quota’d, and regulated out of existence.
They seem to be getting very popular in the bike lanes of Chicago, which I have no problem with.
After the whole Segway flop, who would have thought that batteries would get small enough to enable things like this to be the future of urban transport.
Interesting; I have never seen one used by two people, although I saw one used by a person and a dog once.
I am sure that electric scooters are regarded very positively by young people, especially teenagers. Who have far fewer opportunities for personal agency when it comes to transport. Anything motorised involves licensed and insurance that puts them financially out of reach. They look great fun. I wish I had one when I was that age.
There is a technology revolution taking place with respect to personal transport. Scooters, skate boards, pedal bikes and motor bikes are benefitting from electrification. Increasing the range of local journeys at modest cost.
Why should older folks who have had electric mobility scooters for years, have all the fun?
It is early days with these new kinds of personal transport. Public authorities know that though they can be misused, they get people out of big automobiles that choke overloaded roads everywhere.
There are experiments with hire schemes and regulation in many cities. Eventually they will hit upon a way to manage the problems rather than try to ban them. I am not sure if policemen are looking forward to chasing after huge numbers of illegal electric scooters.
Eventually this will settle down, just like it did in the early days of the internal combustion engine. When the horse lobby insisted on laws that required a man waving a red flag to proceed in front of one of these infernal machines.
Do they constrain themselves to the bike lanes? Because I’ve seen scooters used in bike lanes, on streets, and on sidewalks - seemingly interchangeably. From my perspective, they move at a speed and in a manner that makes them poor sharers of any of the above. Quite recently, I was driving down a local street and 3 scooters came down off a sidewalk at speed and into a rather small space in slowly moving traffic, where they continued on the street for a while. Just not the sort of behavior I care for when navigating a car.
15mph is IMO quicker than most recreational human powered bikes. (My sister and I bike 25-35 miles 2-3x a week. We go at it somewhat hard, but aren’t crazy competitive. For us, maintaining 15 mph is a pretty quickly pace.). IMO, at that speed, they (and electric bikes) should share the road w/ cars.
Add in use by helmet less inexperienced riders, and I see them as an undesirable hazard.
I’ve mostly seen them downtown near the train station, used by what look like businesspeople commuters. So maybe not so surprising that everyone seems to be sticking to the rules of the road. Of course, it helps that area has dedicated, segregated bike lanes with their own traffic lights.
Well, my impression is that those older folk were using their scooters because they COULDN’T get around on a traditional bike, their own legs, etc. Not a problem for the young people (seemingly down to middle school age) I see riding them on local streets and sidewalks.
I truly appreciate the benefit of using bikes and scooters for commuting and errands. But, IMO, they belong on the streets.
That was written before the pandemic, but shows a tipical attitude: optimistic, problem ignoring, myopic for the concerns of the locals, though towards the end the article gets better:
Paris seems even more fed up than Berlin with the scooters:
And Spain is having enough too (here you see the pictures from a dashcam with the two drivers):
Yes, tourists and young people ride in pairs. Often drunk, and never with a helmet. They are dangerous, because tourists don’t know how people drive in a foreign city and young people because they tend to be reckless (I know, I used to be one of them).
One added difficulty is that the companies offering the service have a very Elonmuskian attitude: they just do as they please, sing high praise for themselves, decry any sort of regulation as oppression or socialism and then vanish when there are consequences.
Oh, and they are not really cheap to ride. That is probably one added reason why people share them. Buying one for yourself could be a solution, but they don’t last long, they say. So not so environmentally friendly as it would seem.
I think I don’t like them: more trouble than they are worth.
Those are the devices I am ranting against. An electric motorcycle or motor scooter similar to say a Vespa are road vehicles so are operated differently. Fine with those.
A pity you did not put this on The Pit, then we could really have ranted! 
If a moderator would like to move it to the Pit, that would be fine.
I am in favour of electric vehicles in general. Just these particular type have a lot of negative aspects. Mostly how they are operated. But other things too.
And like I said before, this happens ALL THE TIME with cars. 43,000 people were killed in car crashes in the US in 2021. That’s 118 people every day. The number of deaths caused by (as opposed to just involving) e-scooters, skateboards, and bicycles is harder to come by, but it seems to be single-digits or low double-digits per year. Try to keep that in perspective. The real scourge of our streets has been so normalized that we ignore it completely.
Cities need more transportation options. And that means building out the infrastructure for those options, not banning them. Do the scooters have a place they can be used and stored safely?
We’ve had plenty of discussions on this board about bicyclists. The underlying problem is cars and bicycles need safe places to operate and the operators need to respect the rules. The same goes for pedestrians, taxis, buses, etc. Enforcement will always be needed, especially when the local culture tends to have little respect for traffic laws.
Los Angeles has been changing public right-of-ways a lot lately. Besides the usual sidewalks for pedestrians and streets for cars, they’re adding many bike-only (plus scooters) lanes, bus-only lanes, and taxi stands. These are sometimes protected by curbs and steel posts. Traffic lights have pedestrian-only periods. They’re adding public storage racks for rental bikes and scooters. These things add up to a more livable and safer city.
Indeed! The city is going through one of its redesigns to accommodate new types of transport. Segregating pedestrians on foot from light cycle/scooter traffic from regular motorised traffic is the latest challenge.
Road users are none too happy about having some of their road space allocated to cycles and scooters. In old European cities road space is at a premium.
London has seen a lot of push back from taxi drivers who think they own the road. They like their new electric taxi cabs, but hate competition from Uber drivers. Both take a dim view of new dedicated cycle lanes and there has been a fight to get them approved.
The simple fact is that forms of transport is changing largely due to improved battery technology. There will be a period of adjustment as the road infrastructure is optimised and the regulations are introduced to manage the co-existence of different kinds of road user.
Old cities have transitioned from horses through electric trams, internal combustion engines buses and car and now various kinds of battery powered conveyances.
There will be problems of adjustment and some road users will not be happy with the changes. But who is happy sitting in a traffic jam? A lot of younger people will not feel the need to learn to drive a car if they have a viable alternative. It will all settle down soon enough.
Is problem in Russia, yes?