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pjgh said:
I'm genuinely interested to hear a bit more about this (as opposed to appearing to be fishing for an argument) ...

eScooters are illegal in the UK for use on public roads by privately owned equipment. Commercial eScooters, from what I can see, are no more or less good/bad than, say, commercial eBike hire like TFL's Santander Cycles. They are insured and folks are required to follow rules of the road, advised to wear helmets and encouraged to read more about how to ride them more safety and efficiently.

Who are they a pain to?

I'm from parochial West Yorkshire and we don't have a great culture of anything other than private car transport in our cities, despite what I would say is an excellent bus service in the county.

I saw the centre of Bradford being changed considerably to accomodate a cycle throughway from the south of the city to the north (Aire Valley and beyond), not to mention to dedicated busways through. I also observed from our city center office that this was almost entirely unused. I did think that eScooters could fit that gap between folks (like me community less than 10 miles) wanting to avoid sitting in traffic for an hour or more each way but didn't want to fork out for an eBikes ... and then read they're illegal.

I don't think the use-case for home to work would work out for many cities as homes tend to be out of the cities, but for big cities like London or Manchester or Birmingham or Liverpool (yes, seen 'em in Liverpool) to simply get around, I don't see why it's not a damn good thing?

Again, no worse/better than eBikes.

Thing is, the times they are indeed changing ...

Bradford, using my my example, has just instituted a Clean Air Zone and I can only see this getting more and more stringent over the coming years to the point that everyone will pay something to own/use a car on a daily basis (a subscription to drive) and less polluting alternatives should be considered. Electric cars are a dream beyond most folks in, say, West Yorkshire ... let alone a new car of any description. Cars pollute directly - crap air in cities is because of fossil fuel powered cars. Yes, I'm not dumb about the production of electricity or the environmental effect of producing new cars versus using an already produced car for a decade or more. I blind-bet a colleague whose new Toyota when it turned three years old and had its first MOT versus my (then) 20+ year old SAAB 900 on hydrocarbons and beat him hands-down. That's an aside ... a little chuckle. Old cars are not necessarily more polluting and especially when the carbon cost of production is factored in, running an old car is maybe not a bad thing.

Anyway ...

I'm sitting here in Malta watching these eScooters fly past in the bus lanes, on the (okay, wide) footpaths and everyone just seems to be getting on with it. It works.

For cities that are making it very costly, if not impossible to drive in ... surely, this (along with eBikes) is a good thing?

I did wonder how they got recharged and so on, but I'm literally just watching a van turn up and restock a rental point
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Again, absolutely not picking an argument ... just open-minded and asking why they're a pain? and to whom? and why moreso than, say, eBikes? Is it more that it's down to illegal use or some perception that you can behave differently to, say, riding a bike? I guess Paris has not banned cycles.
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They were all over Berlin when I was there in 2019, not lined up neatly like your photo though people use them and leave them where they finish up. I think the idea is that someone will come along and use it and it continues until it runs out of charge. There were some employees who would round up the strays in the evening. The trouble I found with this idea was that they were just lying about the streets, somebody 'parks' them up after using but they inevitably fall over, and you find yourself walking around them quite often. The same thing happened in Twickenham when I was living there, some scheme for ebikes but they were just dumped everywhere. I like the idea of it but like most things, the human element is what causes the problems :D
 
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