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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.
"The weather is perfect, the ocean is a stone's throw away and each block has something interesting to see."
Yes... generally the ocean.
It also stinks to high heaven in the summer and is full of rats.
I never got the appeal of Venice past, say, a single postcard photo.
Seriously. I'm going to have to RTFA.
WTF is a bird scooter?
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?
Insists they get off of his lawn.
are begging for money to buy a scooter?
I'm just guessing, if you're homeless, other than a house or car, a scooter wouldn't be on the list of things you need to survive.
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
I was quite interested in how these water scooters worked until I realised we weren't talking about the actual Venice.
So, basically, living in LA is shit? Well, I kind of knew that.
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
it's their website that bugs me.
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
Stopped a guy recently to talk to him about his Onewheel. It works like a Segway, and has Tesla batteries in the deck and a fat wheel that gets you around on most terrain. Seems cool (but expensive). For some reason, personal transportation devices that don't have a stick with handlebars seem less intrusive to me, but I don't know. No way you'd catch me on a Bird or Segway, but I'd give the Onewheel a try.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
not everybody's a retiree or so rich they don't need to consider getting to work on time...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This happens with technology quite frequently. It's not the technologies fault, it's the people's fault.
The founder of Bird is quoted as having said he wants there to be "more Birds than cars".
I'm pretty sure what he wants to see is people riding mass transit and using a Bird to get from the transit to their home. This might actually work in Los Angeles, but I am dubious about the idea in any place where winter involves snow and ice.
It would work great if we all moved into giant underground cities, but if we do that, I want to see slidewalks as shown in The Caves of Steel .
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I was picturing the OTHER Venice -- the one in Italy with gondolas and canals.
Problem? Is it a problem for a twentysomething to walk a single mile?
I dunno about Venice, but here in the U.S., apparently, it's hard enough to get people to even go outside let alone walk a mile, so yeah maybe it's a problem.
Self-absorbed assholes... in Los Angeles?!? Say it ain't so!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
How do Bird scooters work during acqua alta? Aren't they dangerous in water?
Oops, nevermind. Wrong Venice.
Kriston
Asking Wikipedia for bird scooter got me this
Seems to have dropped an "o", though.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
right? They're not ruining everything. It's exaggeration for effect and occasionally an old man yelling at clouds. It's a few extra people on scooters. If anything it's a good thing if it makes it so folks can use public transportation. You'll thank them for the cleaner air and less traffic when you're driving.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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
These are local news for me - I encounter the birds all the time while biking through Venice. The birds look a little unsafe for the riders, but less so than the skate boards that are also common, and better overall than an equivalent number of cars and skateboards in any mix. If you read the post carefully, it's not about the birds; it's that the birds are yet another tool to help yuppies avoid the homeless.
And they laugh at your puny scooter "problem".
It was quite fascinating to see a sea of scooters weaving in and out of traffic, with seemingly no rules. Yet I only saw one get bumped, and one near-accident. There was no road rage, they all just coexisted. It was like one of those schools of fish in the ocean: somehow they didn't run into each other.
Now, not that the scooter problem in Venice isn't a problem, it may be very annoying. This was an op-ed piece meant for the local population... how it made a tech "news" site like /. is beyond me. Well, actually not not that surprising at all. News, we hardly knew ye.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It's not the scooters that are ruining Venice, it's the idiots that live in Venice that are ruining Venice. This generally applies to most of southern CA as well.
Just carry a shovel with you when walking on the sidewalk. Many uses, from a gentle nudge to an accidental drop across the sidewalk... to a full out hit somebody upside his face for being an (inconsiderate) idiot.
No, I don't actually advocate others do this; I have a license for unconcealed carry.
In all seriousness, using these things on the sidewalk is just stupid. As a bicyclist, I also hope they don't get into the bike lanes and pose a danger to cyclists. The best place for them is the freeway where traffic is going at the same speed...
I fail to see how this is meaningfully different from bicycles or other modes of transportation. I'm also failing to see how the author is supporting their thesis. How is Bird ruining Venice? The author brings up a lot about the enormous, mortifyingly embarrassing homelessness problem in California, and they try to link Bird to that by saying that they're being selective about who can use them?
I seriously can't tell if the author is upset that there are too many, too few, an inoffensive amount of them, just with the wrong users, that they're only accessible to certain subclasses of homeless (ones that have valid ID, access to a reloadable credit card/google/apple pay, and a prepaid phone with data plan, which is a much larger subset than you think because quite a lot of the homeless people in California are really only guilty of not being able to afford the monstrously overpriced real-estate in California).
So seriously, what the hell is the complaint? It just seems like the author specifically dislikes them because "everybody" who uses them rides around like a dick, but they realized that is hardly an argument and really more of just a stupid tweet, so they try to justify it by throwing a bunch of stuff in there that's meant to make you feel like Bird is somehow victimizing the homeless.
With regards to the viability of Bird in other places, ie Wisconsin. As someone who has lived in the northern midwest, our public transportation isn't always the best outside of the biggest, densest cities. Something like Bird, even if it was only viable during the warm months, would be an absolute godsend to tons of people who would love to be able to ride a bus, but can't because the nearest stop is two and a half miles away, and 80% has no sidewalk and "what's a bike lane?" What about people who are physically able to work and can ride a scooter, but due to physical disability or age can't walk terribly far, or very fast?
A thing doesn't have to fix every single person's problem to be useful, and this sure just feels like the whining of someone who hasn't had to participate in reality for awhile--and I might be stereotyping here, but "Ex-NFL player, turned author" seems to fit that bill pretty well. Just another unjustifiably wealthy person upset that the world isn't completely perfect for them.
When you say “Venice” most people will think “Venice, Italy” not “Venice, California”. It’s like when my cousin says he lives in “Hollywood”, I asked when did he move to California. He lives in “Hollywood, FL”.
It's not the scooter that's the problem, it's that he's driving with a cell in his hand.
Most likely trying to find a location.
I've been to Venice, stayed a few weeks.
Better solution: realize why people are doing something and address the cause.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That's the brilliant part. Nobody! Without that subsidy, the free market will revert to deflation, and all that redneck money will skyrocket to the moon like bitcoin.
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.
Also, why is this on /.?
If it bothers you that much, carry a short length of thick rope with a knot tied on the end. You have just as much right to swing a rope near the ground on a busy sidewalk as the guy on the scooter has to go 15mph without paying attention. It's not your fault when his front wheel catches and he gets reminded that gravity is unforgiving.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I don't know what it's called but I saw a guy many mornings on Collins St Melbourne, on basically a single wheel with two foot rests, kind of like a Segway but miniaturized. When he came to a red light he would just 'stand' there, and it was incredibly pedestrian friendly. Way cheaper than a scooter if your intent is to plow through sidewalks.
The problem is not Bird itself.
I think the real Venice would disagree: they clearly have a real bird problem.
Well, if they almost have a collission with you because of not paying attention, than it also means you can tip them over easily with a slight kick to the bird..
The Bird "How It Works" web page (https://www.bird.co/how) doesn't explain how to flip the Bird!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What would the Federal Government do without the all tax revenue from the world's 5th largest economy? Answer: Tax all you delusional Trumpsters a lot more.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I too live in an area which can be thick with visitors. In our case, it was a local resort that would rent scooters to its guests. Combining the effects of too much sun, too much beer, and poor visibility on small, twisty roads, it's inevitable that we'd have a few accidents per year. They stopped right after a guest missed his son's wedding due to getting an ambulance ride to hospital. The scooters did seem to be a menace, being likened by some to wasps. Just zipping around, never know where they're going to pop out of.
Interestingly enough, the same resort transitioned to offering electric-assist bicycles instead. These apply some multiplier to the rider's effort, such as +50%, +100%, or a negative amount to slow down and recharge batteries going down our steep hills. As far as I can tell, they're just people on bikes now, no real hazard at all. I suspect that having to apply at least some modest effort helps focus attention.
The solution is simple: No motorized vehicles on sidewalks. Worrying about getting hit by a car will keep people off their phones, or quickly weed out the bad apples Darwin style. Yes, this means that electric wheel chairs will have to travel in the street as well (and it's a bit freaky when you see it happen in Boston), but there's really no reason any motorized vehicle shouldn't be going the speed limit in city traffic other than it is under-powered.
Hello Nate Jackson, would you mind posting here on Slashdot a photo of somebody riding a bird scooter with one hand and holding (reading) a smartphone with the other?
When new kids moved into the neighborhood, we took them 'scum skidding' as an initiation.
They'd follow us on bikes. We'd go ride through the green algae in the local paved over creek (think LA river).
The trick is to get up your speed before you got to the zero friction area, then coast, absolutely straight. The new kids didn't know that, so they were 'scum skidding', ended up looking like the 'Swamp Thing'. Good times.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What's the Indian rate per driver? It's _easy_ to have a low rate per person. Just don't have any vehicles.
I bet the road fatality rate at McMurdo station (Antarctica) is really really low.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It was quite fascinating to see a sea of scooters weaving in and out of traffic, with seemingly no rules. Yet I only saw one get bumped, and one near-accident. There was no road rage, they all just coexisted. .
It's what I call 'social transport'. Cars are very unsocial because you are insulated from other people, you can't easily communicate and you can easily injure or kill others so they just promote anger. Walking/cycling/scootering/golf kart etc all tend to be more social not only because you occupy less space and move more slowly, but you can also interact with others as humans and maintain some sort of empathy because you are all equally exposed to each other.
I look forward to the day when cars are removed from dense, large, cities, and are replaced with more socially considerate options.
As someone living in Pune, India I can confirm this sea of two-wheelers - scooters as well as motorcycles... Every week I see 2-3 deaths in local papers due to people needlessly dying due to not wearing helmet and other protective gear. Then there are college-kids who get high on speed. And then there are frustrated IT people rushing to punch in, industrial workers rushing for shifts, and the potholed, narrow roads! I myself prefer going 1-2km extra at times just because I hate riding in traffic!
I thought rising water levels and tourists were ruining Venice, but apparently this article is not about the little-known place in Europe of the same name.
I hear this a lot, but really the only Californians you hate are the loud opinionated ones who move and demand everyone be like them. They're so in control of the State, they can't imagine being anywhere where everyone doesn't think like them.
I'm from California, and have lived in various places in my life. I've always viewed the concept as being a guest, even if I had planned to stay. Don't bitch at the locals, don't make a big scene, don't complain about how much it isn't like California.
Just shut up, observe, and enjoy yourself. Try something new.
I'm the kind of person you wouldn't notice.
Which is odd, as it makes me more tolerant of things than the normal crowd of diversity fanatics.
Your assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is a giant Trump fan is wrong.
Stop viewing everything as binary, or a two dimensional continuum.
Wait, you were riding to Exposition and Sepulveda, used to live in Santa Monica ten years ago, and spell neighborhood "neighbourhood"?
Also, "There is literally no situation that I can think of where a person in a car is preferable to a person on a scooter." I can think of a bunch just off the top of my head
Freeway,
Long travel
going to another state.
rain....
Finally: Venice , CA is simply a haven for homeless and tourists. There's not much more to it other than overpriced real estate.