'Bird Scooters Are Ruining Venice' (latimes.com) 375
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.
Venice (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
Re: Venice (Score:3, Funny)
You could read the article before making an inane post like you just did.
Re: Venice (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like a shitty entitled asshat complaining about others expressing their right to drive a scooter, and he doesn't like them.
His assertion about phones in hand is just put me off as well. The scooter drivers have a right to be on the road. If they don't follow local laws (cell phone driving laws) then ththey police will deal with it. You don't get to decide what others use. So yeah, used to it.
If I'm wrong, let me know and I will RTFA.
Re: Venice (Score:5, Informative)
His assertion about phones in hand is just put me off as well. The scooter drivers have a right to be on the road. If they don't follow local laws (cell phone driving laws) then ththey police will deal with it. You don't get to decide what others use. So yeah, used to it.
The problem is not Bird itself. I think it's a great idea. But I live in Bird territory, and I can tell you that a good portion of the time, 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 (2 people riding on a Bird at the same time) at 15 MPH. There have been several collisions with pedestrians that I've read about (read Nextdoor in a Bird neighborhood). In the last week, there was a Bird collision with another car, as well as one that happened a few months ago.
The police are *sort of* dealing with the problem, but they're pretty busy handling many other issues.
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and general other fuckery (2 people riding on a Bird at the same time) at 15 MPH.
While I'm all for creative positions, that doesn't sound very safe and surely must run afoul of some decency laws.
Re: Venice (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Hell, we have the same problem here, but with normal scooters/mopeds. I live near a university, so there are a ton of these rental scooters being driven by college kids. And they're regularly riding two to a scooter, sometimes three to a scooter. Maybe one in ten of them are using the provided helmets. They run red lights or stop signs. They drive on the sidewalks.
And yeah, they get in accidents. I've seen, several times in the last year, some idiot scooter driver being loaded into the back of an ambulance
Re: rental scooters (Score:3)
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
Real Venice, Real Birds (Score:3)
The problem is not Bird itself.
I think the real Venice would disagree: they clearly have a real bird [nbcnews.com] problem.
Re: Venice (Score:5, Informative)
Since this is modded up as "Interesting", I'm going to assume that the parent is not making a joke and point out that it's the wrong Venice. Nothing to do with Italians, and that's why it's in the LA Times.
Re: Venice (Score:5, Informative)
The scooter drivers have a right to be on the road.
They're on the sidewalk.
This is really a problem with LA traffic law & culture since it's legal to ride bicycles, skateboards and other "exclusively human-powered" vehicles on the sidewalk [wordpress.com]. This has led to the public perception that anything goes on the sidewalks.
Technically, scooters are powered and thus aren't allowed on the sidewalk, but LA cops aren't keen to wade into this so they just ignore the entire issue -- like they pretty much ignore anything that happens off the roadway. Scooters, electric-assist bicycles, etc rule the sidewalks.
Re: Venice (Score:5, Funny)
Make it legal to clothesline anyone riding a powered vehicle on the sidewalk.
Problem should sort itself out soon enough.
=Smidge=
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Make it legal to clothesline anyone riding a powered vehicle on the sidewalk.
Problem should sort itself out soon enough. =Smidge=
You read my mind.
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I drive a low sports car. One day, when a friend was riding with me, a guy on a road bike was in the middle of the road riding at a moderate speed - but well under the speed limit. There was a bike lane that he was supposed to be riding in, but even when I honked at him he refused to pull over. So my friend said to pull up beside him when the oncoming traffic cleared and to hold my speed. I thought he was going to yell at him, but instead when I pulled up beside him my friend gently squeezed the bikers ass
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Venice? Not Venice, Italy. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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Venice is not a town, it is a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles.
Re:Venice? Not Venice, Italy. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen this before when a larger/non-regional publication (like Slashdot, or a national news website) takes a more regional story (this is from the LA Times, and people there are at least as likely to think when they hear 'Venice' the neighborhood they live in as they are a city in Italy). The regional assumptions and understandings are lost, and it's really the job of the editor to add additional context to the story summary if it goes to a wider audience. I'm not even sure if the editor knew that the Venice referred to here was Venice Beach.
Also, I might be getting curmudgeonly in my older age, but just taking someone's quote and turning that into the story title seems like bad form. Click-baity and non-journalistic.
Re:Venice? Not Venice, Italy. (Score:5, Informative)
I am aware of the existence of Venice, CA., but that is not what I think of first when I read "Venice".
Re: Venice (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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Hell my first thought when reading the headline was "how would they use scooters in Venice".
They're water scooters.
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I was thinking "They have homeless in Italy too?" Isnt that a purely American problem?
Re: Venice (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Hell my first thought when reading the headline was "how would they use scooters in Venice".
Same here. Venice, Italy (the islands in the lagoon that everyone thinks of when you say "Venice", as opposed to mainland Venice where people locals live and work and tourists stay in hotels) is beautiful, but incredibly crowded during the day. There's no way you'd be able to ride a scooter of this sort more than a few meters at a time, so it puzzled me how it could have ever become the nuisance they were suggesting it is in the summary.
During the evening the story is quite different, since the islands empt
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We're talking more about the summary and slashdot version of the headline.
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It's true though, that place fucking stinks.
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It's true though, that place fucking stinks.
Which one?
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Venice.
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The reference to Santa Monica though was a pretty good clue.
I can't have been the only one (Score:5, Insightful)
who read the title and pictured pigeons wheeling around the Piazza San Marco.
Re:I can't have been the only one (Score:4, Interesting)
Me too...
In Venice it's forbidden to feed pigeons, as they shit everywhere and their excrements corrode the historical buildings.
While scooters (called vespas in Italy) are nowhere to be found, as they aren't watertight - you use gondolas to travel around.
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called vespas in Italy
The genericized trademark council thanks you for your service.
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"vespa" means wasp. You can trademark the logo but not an insects name. :-)
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Even pulling trolleys ist forbidden, as they make too much noise on the cobble stone pavement.
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Nope, I pictured an old guy on a typewriter, sitting at an outside cafe, shaking his cane at anyone whizzing by on these newfangled scooters, writing the article.
I used to commute by train and my place of work was almost exactly one mile from the station. I used a bike that I locked up at the station but others used basic scooters. This would be been even nicer and quicker so I think it does help solve the last mile problem with mass transit.
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I was thinking, how on earth do those scooters even work with the terrible brick work everywhere in Venice sidewalks, not to mention the flooding?
Then it slowly dawned, CA... those CA people sure do assume everyone knows everything about CA!
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I actually initially thought it was some sort of loud, powered single-person aquatic vehicle for use in the canals used as a means of trying to scare off birds for some reason. I fully expected to start reading an abstract detailing how these vehicles using a new technology were having an unintended consequence of increasing bird defecation dramatically in tourist-heavy areas or something. After getting a few sentences in, I decided I would have preferred reading that article instead of the real one, so I
I am sick of California (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I am sick of California (Score:4, Funny)
They're in California. Home planet found.
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Well, Austin just passed new rules for scooters & ride share bikes because they were literally dropped in the middle of the sidewalk. With that new tech, no need for racks. Drop it ANYWHERE. The authors point is true, it may start in LA/SF, but if the test marketing proves out, it is dispatched everywhere. See Uber & AV testing as just 2 examples.
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This may come as a shock to a 4M uid user, but slashdot is not a bay area blog.
Re:I am sick of California (Score:5, Informative)
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 [slashdot.org] 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.
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People think, it is cool to have one, because nobody else does, and it will be "good for me". The problem isn't the scooter being a bad idea, because it isn't. The problem is, when the number of scooters increases to the point of becoming a problem. And there is an entitled mentality to the people that buy them, expecting wide open roads/sidewalks and avoiding all the hassles of walking and other more mundane forms of getting from one place to another. When that doesn't happen, they get all pissy about ever
You do understand the concept of click-bait (Score:2)
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It's Venice Beach, California, so pretty much in LA/SF. Also, SF seems to be outlawing the scooters.
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These things are in other cities as well, from both Bird and a handful of other vendors. They cost about $500 to buy, and you can pretty easily get $20/day in rental fees out of them, so it is a pretty simple business. Just need to gather them up and charge them to keep them generating revenue, so expect to see more...
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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?
I can confirm that there are plenty of Bird riding dumb asses in my locale and I’m not on the Best Coast at all. But there are a lot of bicyclist assholes that do the exact same things the Bird riders do, and are just as guilty of breaking the laws surrounding their conveyance as the bird operators.
Is it because all the homeless (Score:2)
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.
Re: Is it because all the homeless (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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You're spot on. These are rental scooters so a homeless person can drop $5 on a scooter to get them across town more quickly. I know in my city most the homeless tend to group near the homeless shelter. With these they can scoot across town where they will likely be able to panhandle for more then the cost of the rental scooter.
Re: Is it because all the homeless (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What in the world is a bird scooter? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [www.bird.co]
Rude summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Because Bird scooters are rented using a mobile app, homeless people are unlikely to be able to rent them
I don't know about that. Lime bikes are pretty popular in the Seattle hobo camps. What the homeless will have trouble with is charging them.
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What the homeless will have trouble with is charging them.
Actually, that's not a problem. The user does not charge a Bird scooter. I believe that the scooters are picked up every night and charged overnight, then put back on the streets the next morning with a full charge. It's part of what you are paying for when you pay something like $2 to travel a bit over a mile.
(The scooters cost about $500 on Amazon, and can travel about 15 miles on a charge. I can imagine a scooter racking up over $25 of rental
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payback period could be less than three weeks
Only if you ignore the ongoing costs of electricity, the workers needed to maintain them, and all the other bits that eat into the "payback period".
My guess is at $2 rental, it is still a loss. But they will make it up with Volume!
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My memory says I paid about $2 to travel about a mile. I can easily imagine people renting these to travel further than a mile, and spending more. Also, if you want to use a scooter for a round trip, you might keep it much longer than I did, and the cost meter would keep running while you kept it.
I was their worst case: a short, one-way trip.
In short I don't really know how much they gross per scooter per day.
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I don't know about that. Lime bikes are pretty popular in the Seattle hobo camps.
Seattle's homeless have likely figured out how to defeat the locking mechanism.
Re:Rude summary (Score:4, Informative)
I guess Westside means the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, which he just calls "Venice" in this article.
It actually is called just "Venice" [wikipedia.org], as that is the name of this neighborhood of Los Angeles. Venice Beach is the actual beach, not the name of the neighborhood.
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Re:Rude summary (Score:5, Funny)
I just skimmed your summery and my IQ dropped with 7 whole points. I can not imagine what the whole articlke would do to me. Well not after reading your summery anyway.
I read the whole thing.
My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it.
Daisy, daisy, give me your answer true...
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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.
A lot of the homeless in my area have smart phones but they probably could not rent a bird scooter anyway for lack of driver’s license and credit card required to create an account
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Homeless may not be able to rent them, but they're just a lead pipe swing away from having one.
If they're as haphazardly discarded as TFS implies I wonder how resistant they are to being taken apart. Some enterprising homeless could be on to a goldmine.
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I wonder how resistant they are to being taken apart. Some enterprising homeless could be on to a goldmine.
Bird scooters are constantly phoning home with their location, and likely have been modified with tampering sensors. A determined person could outfit a van with a Faraday cage and steal the scooters for disassembly at leisure, but an actually homeless person might be interrupted during the disassembly by people looking for the device at its last reported location.
The scooters themselves are relatively
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still in business.
How many more rounds of investment before it turns a profit?
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Given how much bike share is used in Dallas, Seattle etc, which are outside the initial deployment zones, I would guess that this picks up critical momentum in the next 12-18 months. The thing is, the bikes are so cheap to build and maintain, you can create a bike share startup for less than $10 million and you're very nearly break even from day one so your run rate is very, very long. $10 million to aquire a lock on last-mile transit for the life of the city (forever) is super super cheap which is why ever
I'm ok with the scooters... (Score:2)
Street or sidewalk? (Score:5, Informative)
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
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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.
Just a few years ago I had some guy yell at me for NOT riding my bike on the sidewalk (this was in a suburban street with few cars). He was quite upset I was riding on the street, and not the sidewalk where it was "safe". In this case the street was perfectly fine, and the sidewalk was a problem because drivers tend not to see you when you cross the street at the sidewalk.
Rad Rides (Score:3)
Stopped a guy recently to talk to him about his Onewheel [radrides.ca]. 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.
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One thing to me is it seems like Bird or Segway are way too easy to just let the thing go in a mostly straight line and ignore the world around you (as the summary complains about). Something like a Onewheel seems like you have to pay attention to what you are doing or end up doing a face plant.
Also speed is kind of a thing. Segway is faster than walking but hardly enough to be worth the bother. The Onewheel looks like it moves at a good enough pace to be worthwhile. All in all though, I still like regu
It's a problem when you need to get to work (Score:3)
It's not the scooters. (Score:4, Insightful)
This happens with technology quite frequently. It's not the technologies fault, it's the people's fault.
More Birds than cars (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] as shown in The Caves of Steel [wikipedia.org].
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Bike lanes can be plowed. Montreal does it.
Don’t worry about bike lanes. In my experience, Bird riders just use the sidewalk and weave in and out of pedestrians illegally anyway. And we all know the sidewalks will get shoveled.
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I'm curious. In winter do you see people on electric scooters, with studded 8.5-inch (21.6 cm) scooter tyres?
I wonder about electric battery performance on a really cold day. These are simple scooters with no thermal management in the battery pack, so if a cold temperature causes poor battery performance, nothing would mitigate it. The battery pack is thin and not insulated.
"First and last mile" (Score:4, Interesting)
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, [slashdot.org] so yeah maybe it's a problem.
O-M-G! (Score:4, Funny)
Self-absorbed assholes... in Los Angeles?!? Say it ain't so!
How do Bird scooters work during acqua alta? (Score:2)
How do Bird scooters work during acqua alta? Aren't they dangerous in water?
Oops, nevermind. Wrong Venice.
Bird scooters are great (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, this time I'll ask the question... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Yes there is a last mile problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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It's one thing to walk a mile for pleasure, when you have time to dedicate to it. It's a vastly different thing to walk to a mile when you only have a 45 minute lunch break, or you are expected to attend meetings at a multi-site company.
I just got back from a 2 week trip to Pune, India (Score:4, Informative)
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.
False (Score:3, Interesting)
Do what I do... (Score:2)
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 t
Headline needs clarification (Score:2)
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”.
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Yeah, the only thing that gave me enough context to know it was California is that it was about idiot drivers and a tech startup.
Pretty Shit Viral Marketing (Score:2)
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FWIW to anyone, when I read the headline (followed immediately by the entire story) I saw the word scooter as a verb and not a noun; don't ask me what the verb people were doing to Venetian birds, though. xD
Re:You forgot just one thing (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Redirect from Scoter (bird) (Score:2)
Asking Wikipedia for bird scooter got me this [wikipedia.org]
Seems to have dropped an "o", though.
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Or worse, spend a night in the Paris Hilton.
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Something about flocks and hatching, just to make it more confusing.
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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?
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