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'Bird Scooters Are Ruining Venice' (latimes.com)
Nate Jackson, writing for LA Times: Although I would like to avoid them, I have no choice but to consider them because I live in Venice, which is where the first Bird (electric scooters) hatched and where the flock is thickest. Bird's founder and CEO, Travis VanderZanden, says, "We won"t be happy till there are more Birds than cars," so I guess I am supposed to get used to it. [...] Suddenly, almost daily, I have some near-collision with a Bird scooter rider -- he who sees nothing but the phone in his hand, thinks of nothing but the next text, and hears nothing but whatever music he has chosen to pump through the white inserts protruding from his wasted ears. He who, despite all that, is still traveling up to 15 mph on the street or sidewalk.
Aside from road safety, which has been discussed thoroughly in this and other papers, Bird is also tearing away at the fabric of our Westside society. In Venice and Santa Monica, where Bird is centralized, thousands of people live on the streets, which helps explain the scooter's popularity. With a press of a throttle button, one can be whizzing along, leaving it all in a blur. Bird calls this solving the "first/last mile" problem. Problem? Is it a problem for a twentysomething to walk a single mile? To most residents, Venice itself is the solution: The weather is perfect, the ocean is a stone's throw away and each block has something interesting to see. But to walk through Venice is to understand that human misery exists just outside the frame of your Instagram feed.
Aside from road safety, which has been discussed thoroughly in this and other papers, Bird is also tearing away at the fabric of our Westside society. In Venice and Santa Monica, where Bird is centralized, thousands of people live on the streets, which helps explain the scooter's popularity. With a press of a throttle button, one can be whizzing along, leaving it all in a blur. Bird calls this solving the "first/last mile" problem. Problem? Is it a problem for a twentysomething to walk a single mile? To most residents, Venice itself is the solution: The weather is perfect, the ocean is a stone's throw away and each block has something interesting to see. But to walk through Venice is to understand that human misery exists just outside the frame of your Instagram feed.
Looks like these are electric rental scooters. You unlock one with an app on your phone, take it out for a spin. Once you reach your destination, you leave it somewhere else to charge and use the app to lock it up, thus making it available to someone else. https://www.bird.co/how
Where I live, scooters and bicycles go in the bicycle lane. And if there is no bicycle lane, they go on the street. Never the sidewalk.
Set that rule. Then make sure to enforce it, and that includes letting the riders know that you do enforce it. ... ?
Then you would not get scooters where they don't belong and the most annoying, distracted scooter-riders won't like to ride in the most car-congested streets anyway.
Problem solved
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
His assertion about phones in hand is just put me off as well. The scooter drivers have a right to be on the road. If they don't follow local laws (cell phone driving laws) then ththey police will deal with it. You don't get to decide what others use. So yeah, used to it.
The problem is not Bird itself. I think it's a great idea. But I live in Bird territory, and I can tell you that a good portion of the time, it's the riders themselves that are the entitled asshats. They have no problem riding on crowded sidewalks, running stop signs, and general other fuckery (2 people riding on a Bird at the same time) at 15 MPH. There have been several collisions with pedestrians that I've read about (read Nextdoor in a Bird neighborhood). In the last week, there was a Bird collision with another car, as well as one that happened a few months ago.
The police are *sort of* dealing with the problem, but they're pretty busy handling many other issues.
Every week there's another article about some ridiculous new shit literally thousands of people are doing that's ruining everything, and it's absolutely never relevant outside either LA or SF.
The last story along these lines was just three days ago... and it was about Washington, DC, which is several thousand miles away from both cities you mention.
You may have gotten that impression, though, because many of the companies causing these "problems" are headquartered in California's Silicon Valley.
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