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.
"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.
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?
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 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
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/
If you're homeless and need a way to get between the overpass where you sleep, the minimum wage job across town, and soup kitchen, then scooters or something else might be pretty well needed.
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
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.
Something about flocks and hatching, just to make it more confusing.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
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
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.
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.
WTF is a bird scooter?
A well a don't you know about the bird?
Everybody knows that the bird is the word.
Ba-ba-ba bird bird bird, bird is the word.
#DeleteChrome
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.
The problem is not Bird itself.
I think the real Venice would disagree: they clearly have a real bird problem.
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.