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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.
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.
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
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.
#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.