If they haven’t come to a street near you, don’t worry; they’ll show up soon. Just like Uber, Lyft and those insidious racks of blue bicycles.
Electric Scooters. The NEW Urban Plague.
They popped up in San Francisco about a year ago. Parked innocently at the edge of the sidewalk. The black ones were “Bird”; the green/white ones were “Lime” (clever that). You started one up for a buck using an app on your smartphone, and 15 cents per minute there after. Or….you could have unlimited rides for $30 a month. And sooo convenient. Just grab the scooter, ride to your destination and and leave it for the next guy. What could be easier?
Anyone who thought that it would go smoothly in Poop City, U.S.A. has never dealt with the entitlement clowns with their “climate change” superiority in the Bay Area. It was no accident that the “South Park” episode dealing with hybrids brought Kyle’s parents and their smugmobile to San Francisco and depicted the residents as enjoying the smell of their own farts alongside a nice merlot. Case in point. BART trains leaving San Francisco are crowded from about 3:30 to 6:30. BART used to have a rule that bikes could not be brought on trains in San Francisco between 4:30 and 6:00 p.m. Then it “relaxed” the rule, allowing bikes but cautioning that bikes should not be brought on crowded trains. Well, apparently bike riders are in dire need of a dictionary, because I’ve seen these idiots attempt to ram their bikes into a car packed to the gills and then gripe because people are standing in the “bike space.” There’s barely people space, dude. They’re even obnoxious on uncrowded trains, sitting in the “senior” seats with their bike in front of them, blocking two seats at one time. Unless, you know, the bike bought a ticket.
So why anyone thought these electric scooter riders would be more mindful than bike riders had to have been smoking that cool legal weed we got going here in the Golden State. In anything it’s worse. Bike riders at least park their bikes and lock them at one of the myriad bike racks the City leaves out. THIS is how the electric scooter crowd defines “parking”.
If it weren’t bad enough that they dropped them all off in front of a fire hydrant, that white line on the left is a crosswalk. That yellow square next to the fire hydrant? Wheelchair ramp. In fact, they were dropping them anywhere and everywhere; it got so bad that the usually tolerant City government banned them. That’s right. BANNED. Can’t keep Market Street from smelling like an open air sewer or the Civic Center subway station from being a La Salle de Shooting Heroin, but those scooters have got to go. And for awhile the streets were safe.
Safe from idiots careening down the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour with minimal control over the device. I came around a corner in San Francisco and almost got mowed down by a kid who was not paying attention or realizing that he was not visible to, well, anyone coming from the other direction. I saw one idiot, about 12, literally smack into a lamp post trying to avoid a pedestrian. He popped off the scooter and straight into a parked car. Cue the ambulance. I imagine ER and triage physicians are making a killing these days, no pun intended.
Since I work in Oakland, I thought I was safe; then, a couple of months ago, a row of green/white slime was parked at the curb, in front of a parking space, in such a way as to prevent anyone sitting in the passenger seat from exiting a car. It’s the rule in Oakland that buildings who have improved sidewalks and take care of their maintenance get to make the rules regarding use of those sidewalks. They cannot prevent you from walking on them for sure, but they can wiggle finger you if you want to turn their sidewalk into scooterama.  They repeatedly told them not to, they repeatedly ignored. They’ve given up. However, it turns out this sidewalk rule also applies in Los Angeles, The building owners at my friend’s downtown structure also told Lime to knock it off. Lime refused and kept lining up the scooters. Finally having had enough, the building purchased several cord bike locks, wove them in and around the parked Lime scooters and locked them. No one could ride them. When Lime came to pick them up (they track them via GPS), they found them on the other side of the parking garage gate, neatly chained together. They had to go through the building retrieve them. The building informed them that they were prepared to do this every day. Lime left and took up annoying a different building.
However, someone in my area had a more enterprising solution. Sick of the green menace, they utilized Lake Merritt to come up with their own enterprising solution:
By the way, if you try to move the scooter without “paying” for it, it starts chirping “notifying police, notifying police.”
Yeah right…..I’m sure Oakland P.D. will get right on that.
