Slashdot Mirror
Pedestrians, E-Scooters Are Clashing In the Struggle For Sidewalk Space (latimes.com)
Slashdot reader mileshigh writes: Activists in California have filed a federal lawsuit alleging that parked scooters littering sidewalks interfere with sidewalk accessibility for people with multiple types of disabilities and violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Many people have been wondering when this would happen since California courts are notoriously friendly to ADA complaints and lawsuits. Realistically, this type of lawsuit may well be the Achilles' heel of scooter-sharing services, especially if they're granted class-action status as this lawsuit is requesting. Will likely be the first of many. "Without full use of the sidewalk and curb ramps at street intersections, persons with mobility and/or visual impairments have significant barriers in crossing from a pedestrian walkway to a street," the suit alleges. "This is exacerbated when the sidewalk itself is full of obstructions and no longer able to be fully and freely used by people with disabilities."
The suit accuses the city of not maintaining streets and sidewalks in a way that doesn't discriminate against the disabled and allowing "dockless scooters used primarily for recreational purposes to proliferate unchecked throughout San Diego and to block safe and equal access for people with disabilities." The lawsuit also alleges the scooter companies have been allowed to "appropriate the public commons for their own profit."
The suit accuses the city of not maintaining streets and sidewalks in a way that doesn't discriminate against the disabled and allowing "dockless scooters used primarily for recreational purposes to proliferate unchecked throughout San Diego and to block safe and equal access for people with disabilities." The lawsuit also alleges the scooter companies have been allowed to "appropriate the public commons for their own profit."
Why would anyone think it was ok to ride a motorized vehicle on the sidewalk?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The contractors who move the Lime bikes around seem to have instructions to put them in people’s way - in the middle of walkways and open spaces. The other day I watched a wheelchair rider at UW attempting to maneuver around some bikes which were basically blocking the entry to a sidewalk. I moved them off to the side, but this is happening often enough that I’m almost to the point of just tossing them into the bushes.
#DeleteChrome
They got laws passed to treat e-scooters like a human-powered bicycle, not a motorized vehicle. It's gotten to the point where the pro-electric crowd is overriding common sense laws created based on vehicle mass and velocity.
Because its a cultural long term issue that has been delayed to deal with for quite a while.
Basically kick bikes are considered sidewalk worthy by US and British law. Where bicycles has to go on the road, due the same legal history from the early 1900s.
And this isn't the case all over the world, but thats a different issue.
The actual problem is that due the way cities are built, streets are somewhat undersized for actual populated areas. By itself it became this way because legally your options where to bike on the road, drive to work, or walk on the sidewalk. Combined with sidewalk's in USA generally not being structure to being a walkable long path that goes to your destination, combined with light crosses and terrible zebra stripe placement.
Now, if biking on the sidewalk where the norm, you could have had this lawsuit a few decades earlier, since electric kick bikes(scooters) is basically doing what bicycles would do in the same area, plus the speed of commuting. Objects like hooverboards occupy the same niche with the same principles, but are generally not littered across the streets because they are personally owned objects.
So this is not about motorization, this is about undersized streets and rental companies flooding the marked with a product that people will hire for amusement or commute speed. And once hired, it will be left somewhere. US culture will increase the litter of these products, but that would still be the case in other countries due the rental model flooding the marked and not paying for the cost of pick up.
send meter maids around to collect the scooters that are illegally parked and auction them off. This is what most municipalities are doing and it pretty much would wreck their business model, which they seem to be aware of .
I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea. It could potentially make commuting by bus viable in major cities that were laid out with cars in mind and do so long before self driving cars are a thing. But more thought needs to be given to it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I sometimes see them parked in the bike lane as well where I live.
Suffice to say they quickly and mysteriously relocate to nearby bushes or ditch.
thwy had gone into hibernation for the winter
The scooters that is
although there aren't as many pedestrians around at the moment - some of the sidewalks are very slippery. Thats the problem when it gets just above freezing guring the warmest part of the day, and cools down to single digits at night.
If a City wants to allow e-scooters, the e-scooter companies should pay for use of City infrastructure via a permit or licensing mechanism so that the scooters can be placed in designated areas carved out near bus stops and the like and not clutter sidewalks. Any e-scooters not licensed or permitted should be impounded.
Other scooters?
Complaining about bans on plastic bags and straws is a distraction from real issues like mass surveillance/privacy rights, planned obsolescence/e-waste, poor quality education, and a generally authoritarian bent in the US. No one wants to bring back lead paint, carbon tet cleaning products, DDT, or PCB-based transformer oil -- environmental laws aren't evil.
Complaining about bans on plastic bags and straws is a distraction from real issues like mass surveillance/privacy rights, planned obsolescence/e-waste, poor quality education, and a generally authoritarian bent in the US. No one wants to bring back lead paint, carbon tet cleaning products, DDT, or PCB-based transformer oil -- environmental laws aren't evil.
The plastic bans in the US are there to prevent Africa and China from dumping plastic in the oceans.
No - doesn't make sense to me either.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They got laws passed to treat e-scooters like a human-powered bicycle, not a motorized vehicle.
Citation needed.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I moved them off to the side, but this is happening often enough that I’m almost to the point of just tossing them into the bushes.
Did the scooters accidentally malfunction after you moved them? Sometimes kinetics happen.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There is literally no way to sanely combine a single passage for both pedestrians and vehicles of any form. Governments that allow the abuse of pedestrians by any vehicle do so quite purposely, do DISCOURAGE walking. It is notable that many SF short stories in the 50s and 60s explored this theme, with citizens arrested and given psych evaluations if they insisted on still walking to places outside.
In the recent past, plebs were purposely controlled by severly limiting their ability to travel any distance beyond tiny limits, and plebs tended to live and die in a very small radius. Today, the SJW movement demonises most methods of travel used by ordinary people. The Deep State intention is a future where the plebs once agian live and die in highly contained regions.
The 'electric' car and 'oil is bad' movements are a key part opf this strategy. Humans that travel are a problem to the Deep state demons in many ways- not least because they learn that their own societal rules are pretty much arbitary.
Every quality of life ordinary people enjoy is currently under concentrated attack by warmongering neoliberal outlets like slashdot. Tony Blair's orwellian planetary agenda is hurtling ahead in every major empire power, and forced on the people of the nations controlled by these empires. Those voices that oppose the demonic Blair, and the blairites that impose his will in pretty much every nation are carefully attacked.
(and yes, I'm aware Britain is one of those nations that currently limits electric vehicles on pavements, but that isn't a counter argument since the Deep State has to tailor its methods for greatest impact in any given society)
Ding ding ding - we have a winner! You dear AC have combined almost every wing nut touchstone into a nice concise package, and adequately proven that the solution to everything is getting rid of e-scooters!
Now bonus points if you can wrap the whole thing in a bow, and tell us how this promotes dogs and chinchillas living together in sin, and the damn teenagers dropping thought control pods disguised as fertilizer pellets on your lawn.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
US trash gets shipped there, in addition to ending up in our own waterways. No - you're not exactly a genius. Many countries are taking similar steps of necessity. Stop being stupid.
A.B. 1096
Other countries tend to follow the US lead on environmental issues. Even Jamaica just banned single-use plastic bags, plastic straws, and Styrofoam containers.
US trash gets shipped there, in addition to ending up in our own waterways. No - you're not exactly a genius. Many countries are taking similar steps of necessity. Stop being stupid.
So you are telling me that China just dumps the US trash in their rivers?
And they don't accept US recyclables any more - been more than a year - and by your logic, there is no more trash emanating from the Yangtze - which is responsible for 55 percent of the trash in the entire world.
The really clever thing is it comes from multiple spots along the river, meaning that China takes the plastic, distributes it along it's river system in many points, and instructs it's citizens to look like they are dumping their very own trash. Freaking brilliant.
You have a newsletter? Or at least T-Shirts. Your ideas are very very intriguing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No, the "pro-electric crowd" is using common sense to update laws based on vehicle mass and velocity. An e-scooter, when considered with its rider, is not significantly different in mass and velocity to bicycles, nor is an e-bike.
Complaining about the nuisance of scooter dumping is one thing, lying about their utility is quite another.
They're all over my campus. When I encounter one either blocking a sidewalk, or anywhere near a ramp, I toss the fuckers into the bushes/landscaping. They're not mine. They're not the universities. They're not supposed to be there. If anybody else, individual or company, puts anything in the middle of the sidewalk, it's abandoned trash, and as far as I know, anybody can take it. I once saw a blind person walking on a sidewalk and running into one of those things, and I lost my mind.
See anything abandoned in a sidewalk? It's your moral obligation to get it the fuck out of there for people who can't navigate around them. I've actually gotten good at getting some distance with the fuckers with a single foot under the center of them.
I don't respond to AC's.
That would be a real shame if something happened to them after they were moved. A real shame.
I don't respond to AC's.
Accidental kinetic damage would at least be a better option than cutting the brake lines, which some jerk has been doing around here. That’s just sociopathic.
#DeleteChrome
Who was the first admin to surveil the opposition party? LBJ is the first I know of (where it's proven). Surely it was done before that.
Anybody? (I'm thinking it was likely Washington.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They exceed 10KM/hr on sidewalks, so you simply can't get the things.
Which is a bit of a shame, I'd like to try one. As annoying as they apparently are, we have a ridiculous insane population boom here (fuelled by the govt) and public transit and roads have become a nightmare (my morning commute has doubled via public transit, simply due to more stops, more starts, more traffic and more people getting on and off the cable car / tram)
I'd love to jump on a scooter and get to work that way.
a 2.5mile trip shouldn't take 45 minutes via public transit. (and yes, Americans, I know I'm the lucky one here with such a short commute)
I'm not sure banning human legs is practical; since they can make you run.
Scooters by Lime and Bird have a top speed of 15mph, well within the human running range (and not just the top athletes, those guys can hit the mid 20s). Or should running on the sidewalk be banned too? I think the issue isn't speed itself, but unsafe speed. Ticket people being unsafe on these things like we ticket unsafe driving and biking.
Is that like when businesses allow their customers to park on the street?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Now that Boing Boing showed us how to convert the Bird eScooters and other suing the same standard Xi scooter into a stock one sans lockouts and GPS via a $30 circuit board, enterprising individuals can pickup the illegally parked scooters blocking sidewalks and recycle them. Sell them for 1/2 to 1/3 the price of a new one and profit while solving a problem for the city and saving them money all the while adding to the local economy.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Republicans believe laws are things enforced by an armed government. They aren't suggestions, politicians and bureacrats don't get to follow them *when they feel like it*.
lol
Republicans are the gods of selective enforcement, and general hypocrisy. Oh, we can't have a controversial president name a supreme court justice. We have to let the next guy do it. Oh wait, it's our guy, so we have to make sure he names the next justice, hell or high water. Blah blah blah bull fucking shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
LOL that's the stupidest shit I've read since your last comment.
Using shit you heard on AM radio about what libraaals think doesn't make you look educated.
Republicans hate government, they certainly hate enforcement of laws in the general case. It is only when they see hippies or brown people that they desire police action; not to enforce the actual laws, but just to go and bully the baddies.
The scooter company are the ones parking the scooters on the side walks. Generally they start by getting 5 or 6 and putting them in a lone at intersections. Later on customers use these, get bored, and toss them in the bushes in leave them in the gutters. So most that I see on sidewalks are the scooters that haven't been used.
Worked for us: https://www.abc.net.au/news/20...
the Yangtze - which is responsible for 55 percent of the trash in the entire world.
That's.......so far from true I can only imagine you were drunk when you wrote it.
I imagine you meant to say, "55% of the plastic that got to oceans from rivers came from the Yangtze river" but that is very far from what you actually said.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Surely, the invisible hand of the free market will solve this. Why, let people do what they want and magically they won't leave things lying around and getting in people's way, because free market.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
You put something that is not a bicycle into the bicycle lane you are going to get a lot of angry cyclists harassing you.
Serves me right for saying 'anybody'. They are anybody.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> According to wikipedia, you people had a field of 17 major candidates in your primaries.
> Did you select any of the reasonable candidates?
That's right, there were at least a dozen traditional Republican candidates, this big group of "reasonable candidates" (per Republican criteria for reasonable) including Kasich, Cruz, Marco Rubio, etc. And then there was this weirdo, Trump, who stuck out like a store thumb. There was Trump vs "everybody else", and the whole #nevertrump. The fact that he stuck out as clearly different from the dozen or so normal Republican candidates demonstrates something right there.
You asked "Did you select any of the reasonable candidates? " - well yes, I did, most Republicans did. Most of us favored either Kasich, Cruze, or Rubio, with many supporting other choices such as Jindal. Generally, anyone who chose Cruze would have been okay or Rubio and vice versa, they were similar enough. Kasich had pretty similar policy proposals, so most Republicans would have been fine with him. Then there was Trump, who was well outside the norm. To put it simply, the votes for "reasonable" were split many different ways, while the 30% who wanted weird all chose Trump. Which is sad.
I have a hard time finding anything to like about the guy. By luck or whatever, so far the country is doing pretty well - maybe despite Trump, maybe he's a jackass who also happens to sign off on good policies. Anyway, I'm glad he hasn't done much damage. The economy is good shape, though worries about the partial shutdown and confronting China are a drag. The shutdown sucks because both Trump and the Democrats have dug in their heels with exact opposite positions; there doesn't seem to be much room for negotiation. Democrats could have gone back to the positions they advocated in 2014, which basically agree with Trump on border security (he basically wants to finish what Obama started), but currently they are saying they insist on going the opposite direction and won't budge.
And in California, riding bicycles on sidewalks is left to the cities. It's illegal in San Francisco, and many of the LA suburbs - you have to use the street. Additionally it is illegal to turn without signalling. And per the link provided above, electric scooters are bundled with motorized bicycles/mopeds - and are thus prohibited from use on the sidewalk. This isn't about utility, this is about legal operation of a vehicle. Riding an electric scooter without an M2 endorsement, without a helmet, or on a sidewalk is illegal.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'm guessing porn.com could do that.
#DeleteFacebook
the Yangtze - which is responsible for 55 percent of the trash in the entire world.
That's.......so far from true I can only imagine you were drunk when you wrote it. I imagine you meant to say, "55% of the plastic that got to oceans from rivers came from the Yangtze river" but that is very far from what you actually said.
You might take it up with these folks. https://www.verdict.co.uk/yang...
Perhaps I am just parroting fake news, or perhaps I am a pathological liar that wrote the story for the verdict. Perhaps I made the crucial mistake of thinking that a reader would understand that in context - it meant the same thing, Trash plastic, Polymers of vasrious types and sources. Perhaps the Verdict people are drunk. You could ask them.
But I personally haven't been drunk since High School.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
people riding them on sidewalks and on the road ignoring traffic signals.
Because a scooter has less metal surface than a car, an induction loop in the approach to an intersection with a demand-actuated signal set might not pick it up. This has happened several times to me with my bicycle in my home town. When stuck at a red light for several minutes, what's the operator of a scooter supposed to do?
Nah, read the headline, it says: "55% of all river marine plastic pollution." I hope you can see the differences.
The website might be trying to write in a confusing way, but "55% of all river marine plastic pollution" is not the same as 55% of all trash in the entire world. It's not the same as 55% of all plastic trash. "River marine" is a fairly specific, dense set of qualifiers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We have bike lanes in Arlington, VA, but they follow the traffic on its major one-way streets.
Idiots on these scooters choose to use the sidewalks instead of the bike lanes to go the wrong way instead of scooting one block over to the street with the bike lane going in the right way.
These stupid scooters need to go away. I've been clipped more than twice on the sidewalk by idiot scooter users, and they also seem to think that the strict yield-to-pedestrians-in-crosswalk laws we have in Virginia don't apply to them. (Life Protip: They do, stupid.)
I like Lyft but they should have never entered the scooter sector.
Kriston
"the part of Republican philopsophy that believes the applicability of the law is inversely proportional to your net worth."
Unfortunately this philosophy is a bipartisan consensus. And the judiciary really very strongly agrees.
"a fairly liberal democrat who voted for Sanders in my state's primary and only reluctantly pivoted to Clinton"
You voted for Clinton. You voted for brazen corruption, racism, continuation of disastrously failed economic policies, and MOAR WAR.
But it's not too late, you can change your ways. In 2020, VOTE TRUMP FOR PEACE.
Dockless bikes cause the same problem, but they're even worse because they're heavier and harder to move than the scooters. And if people don't leave them in the middle of the sidewalk then instead they leave them on the grass between the sidewalk and the street so that the homeowner has to move them when they want to mow the grass. Yes, you can text/call the company to have them removed, but it takes a while for them to get around to doing ti and sometimes they text back moronic questions like "Do you want us to come get it?" as though I'm complaining about it but want them to leave it there.
The whole business model of these e-scooter companies is bad. Putting all these annoying e-scooters out there on sidewalks with no place to store them puts an undue burden on the people using those sidewalks. Plus, how is this not considered "littering"? No company would be allowed to dump their trash on sidewalks. One man's e-scooter is another man's garbage.
That's because our society is largely segregated, and Republicans mostly live in the white part. Yes, there is an unhealthy obsession with identity politics on the Democratic side, but talking about race is a good thing so long as we have such an unhealthy racial atmosphere in this country. And at the end of the day, it is very hard to be angry with a black person for practicing identity politics - after all, they are forced to adopt an identity whether they want to or not. Most Republicans don't have this problem and so identity politics is foreign to them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So should we change the Constitution so that the Senate's role is removed and we cannot have a repeat of the Garland fiasco?
Or in some other way, so that they can't refuse to seat someone without a reason.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In Corpus Christi, the city council plans to charge 1 dollar a day for each e-scooter. So that totals up to about 365 dollars a year for EACH e-scooter. Each vendor has about 500 units in town.
Needless to say, the vendors are up in arms over it.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I don't identify with either major party but my solution would be more along the lines of allowing citizens to claim abandoned property.
The same thing a motorcycle does? My motorcycle never triggers most traffic signals (especially the damn IR ones), so legally what you're supposed to do is make a right turn instead.
In theory, one could make a right turn, drive one block, make a U-turn at the next place a left turn is legal, drive one block, and then make another right turn. In practice, if the next signal set one block away is also demand-actuated and marked "LEFT ON ARROW ONLY", it will likewise fail to detect my vehicle waiting in the left turn lane if there isn't also a cage waiting in the same left turn lane.
Granted when this is a real problem is usually when there's nobody around because if other people are around, a car will usually pull up and trigger the light for me.
My experience agrees. The problem has occurred during times of day when there is little traffic in my direction, such as 9:20 AM for an intersection near a shopping center that opens at 10 AM weekdays. Once, it didn't even pick up a bicycle and motorcycle put together, parked on opposite sides of the crack in the asphalt where the induction loop was buried.
Other option I've done if there's significant traffic on the cross street and none on my street is I'll get off my bike and hit the cross walk.
The intersection to which I refer lacks even a crosswalk marking. Another intersection in the same city used to fail in a similar way, but the city recently put in a crosswalk to connect a city park to a trail under construction.
I can provide coordinates of the problematic intersection through email upon request.
Many people have been wondering when this would happen since California courts are notoriously friendly to ADA complaints and lawsuits.
notorious: famous or well known, typically for some bad quality or deed.
I wonder if the person who wrote that meant "famously friendly" or was editorializing about how receptive courts ought to be toward ADA suits.
I agree Trump is terrible, the economy is in decent shape only because that's what he inherited from Obama--and we're probably in a bubble.
What I don't believe is the nonsense about the unemployment rate. I didn't believe it when the same criticism was leveled at Obama.
I'm tired of these stupid scooters littering the sidewalk. I see no reason why these companies should be allowed to leave their scooters on public property. I don't get to just store my stuff on the sidewalk anywhere I please. Please help destroy, or dispose of as many scooters as possible. The only way to stop them is to make them a financial loser for the companies who offer them. Bonus points if you destroy them in a way that brings negative media attention to the scooter vendors. I suggest a legal option, but legislators are not going to end them, so the more anarchist methods are reasonable in this case.
Sounds like the same MO of the ambulance chasers that have been shaking down businesses for "ADA violations" since the ADA was instituted.
You want someone claiming rape to come out of the woodwork for every candidate at the 11th hour?
It's easy to manufacture 'reason', as we have seen quite recently.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You want someone claiming rape to come out of the woodwork for every candidate at the 11th hour?
That's not going to happen unless it's a successful strategy, and as we've seen recently, even when it's well-supported, the outcome really depends on who's controlling congress.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're the one who wanted them to have a reason, in addition to the Senate.
When was it well supported? Not in 2017.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The plastic bans in the US are there to prevent Africa and China from dumping plastic in the oceans.
No - doesn't make sense to me either.
Have you ever tried telling someone to stop doing something that you yourself is guilty of? "Do as I say, not as I do!" never really works.
Sorry the USA and the rest of the world is simply not the problem. We can't fix it. Only the countries that are dumping almost the entirety of the plasitc into the oceans can fix this. Sorry if you don't understand that.
Unless you are proposing that the US go over there and pick up all of the plastic these countries are dumping.
No
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They're coming to your country too, it's only a matter of time.
The left lost
Tell that to Kevin McCarthy, who can't go on an anti-communist crusade like his namesake because his party lost the House of Representatives.