Slashdot Mirror
'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.
who read the title and pictured pigeons wheeling around the Piazza San Marco.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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. When are we sending these assholes back to their home planet?
Well in his defense, when using the word "Venice" in connection to anything but Venice, Italy, it should have a qualifier. Like when I say "I went to Paris" people assume Paris, France and not Paris, Texas. Hell my first thought when reading the headline was "how would they use scooters in Venice".
First world problems
I skimmed the article so you don't have to.
* Bird scooters are electric scooters that one rents using a mobile app.
* Bird scooters are becoming common, and the writer complains he has a near-collision "almost daily" with someone driving a Bird scooter unsafely.
* Homeless people are a problem. Bird, along with all other tech companies, is making this problem worse, because they buy real estate and build new buildings.
* People who work for tech companies ignore homeless people. Zipping along on a scooter makes this easier. Therefore, Bird scooters are "tearing apart the fabric of our Westside society" (this is a word-for-word quote). I guess Westside means the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, which he just calls "Venice" in this article.
* Because Bird scooters are rented using a mobile app, homeless people are unlikely to be able to rent them, and Bird should feel bad about that. (However, the writer also opines that nobody needs a Bird scooter, since it's no real trouble to walk a mile instead of riding a scooter for a mile.)
It's a stupid article and I feel stupider for having read it.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
This happens with technology quite frequently. It's not the technologies fault, it's the people's fault.
Yet another American asserting his right to be uneducated and obnoxious.
But if California is cut off, who's going to pay for all the rednecks in the Trump states to leech corn subsidies or wear uniforms and sit in air conditioned tents for four years at a time?
This article is a ridiculous NIMBY hit-piece. Change is hard but inevitable. Anything that gets people out of cars in hyper-traffic'ed LA is a win for me. With these, and also similar bikeshare systems, people can easily get around an urban center that does not have good public transit (ahem, Westside LA, or most of LA for that matter) quickly and without a car. These take cars off the road and have zero emissions. LA is slowly losing it's unhealthy love affair with cars, but those in the throes of their passion for large metal boxes won't give up their prized possession's street privilege without a fight.
WTF is this doing in Slashdot, besides some tenuous connection to tech / nerd culture due to a) who supposedly rides them and b) how because it's app-enabled creditcard-paid suddenly makes it techy.
TFA is an opinion piece written by an ex-NFL'er, about a localized problem that doesn't affect anyone else other than him, and perhaps a handful of LA Times readers that thinks as he does.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Look, I walk at least a few miles every day for fun, and generally prefer to walk anything under a few miles rather than driving. So I get what you are trying to say.
But lots of people may not have time to walk (even at a brisk clip, it's 15-20 minutes to walk a mile). Or the weather may be such you'd be really sweaty by the time you got somewhere, which is not very professional. There are lots of valid reasons why someone might want some motorized transport to travel more quickly.
Since the homeless have nothing but time, I don't really see why you are trying to make a point they cannot use these scooters too...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Venice.
50% of people on welfare are single mothers over 18 working minimum wage jobs to support themselves and their children. It's a fact. Look it up.
Just because you don't see it from inside your bubble, does not mean these people do not exist, just means that you're not interacting with them on a daily basis.
moox. for a new generation.
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
So exactly the same as bikes then, which have been around forever.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Venice? Why not avoid confusion for 99% of human society and say, Venice, California in the title? Most people in the world don't know Venice, California exists.
Venice, California is a small town of 40,885 people heavily affected by the extreme pollution and extreme traffic jams in the Los Angeles area. The Los Angeles metropolitan area has 18.68 million people.
Venice, Italy is a world-famous city that began soon after 400 CE. The metropolitan area has 2.6 million people.
I was thinking "They have homeless in Italy too?"
Around 48,000 or so, a pretty small share of the overall population, about half the share compared to the US.
Isnt that a purely American problem?
There are 48 times as many homeless in Nigeria than the US, and 14 times as many in South Africa. But it's probably less fun to make fun of homeless Africans, isn't it? Don't worry though, there are other groups you could make fun of too. In Indonesia, there are 6 times as many homeless as in the US. In Haiti it's about 4 times more. Russia is nearly 10x, Venezuela nearly 4x. In Grenada over half their population is homeless, I guess a hurricane that destroys 90% of the homes will do that. Maybe there's a joke you can work into that.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black