In the way and dangerous
Parisians will be invited to vote on whether to allow electric scooter rental services to continue operating in the French capital as authorities weigh banning the controversial for-hire vehicles, the city’s mayor has said.
Do it. Those things are a nightmare. People zoom silently down the sidewalk [pavement] on them, risking the lives of all pedestrians.
The issue is “extremely divisive”, Anne Hidalgo told the weekend edition of Le Parisien newspaper, with critics saying riders show only cursory respect for the rules of the road.
Cursory meaning zero.
They often defy bans on riding on pavements, or park without consideration, while some abandon the scooters in parks or even toss them into the Seine river.
…
David Belliard, Hidalgo’s deputy in charge of urban transport, still said a cost-benefit analysis did not favour the rental schemes. “They are in the way and they are dangerous,” he said, saying he favoured a ban to “pacify our streets and pavements”.
There was “too much negative feedback” from citizens about the scooters, he said.
Get rid of them. Set an example.
I’ve seen them left on sidewalks, including one left in the middle of a curbcut.
I moved them out of the way.
They could perhaps do with the shopping trolley approach: chained together when not in use in a special area with bars to which the whole lot are in turn chained, and legally banned from being ridden in pedestrian-only areas. Though my sources tell me that shopping trolleys are routinely chucked off bridges, most probably by youthful enthusiasts who love the splashes they make, get some healthy exercise in this pursuit, and have a carefree attitude to the $1.00 deposit left in the coin slot. To be discovered only when sea or lake levels change.
Perhaps only operable after a credit card has been inserted and secured in a slot?
Wow. You chain shopping carts? (Sorry, trolleys. Be gentle with me; I’ve spent my entire life in the US.)
We have them just sitting free in the grocery store; you want one, you grab it. Ideally you return it to the cart corral when you’re done, but lazy people do leave them in the parking lot where they threaten cars. Our local stores have so many well placed cart corrals, you have to be very lazy to leave it in the lot. For the most part, they do well here, not like when I was in Oklahoma, when half the parking spaces were occupied by carts just left by whoever used it.
I’ve never seen one in the river, though I have seen tires and toilets in the river.
In Seattle they get stolen a lot. Some supermarkets have signs warning that the carts will lock if taken past the parking lot or garage.
I have seen shopping carts in a river.
Most local stores here have free access carts. Aldi requires a deposit of a quarter to unlock a cart from a corral, and you can remove the quarter when you lock the cart back in the corral.
Re the scooters, I don’t like that people misuse them, but I wish there were a way to get people to use them properly rather than simply taking the service away entirely.
I divide my time between my home here in Canberra and the great Australian Outback, blogging all the while. Canberra was designed by the American architects Walter Burley-Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony-Griffin, who in turn were disciples of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, hailed by some as the greatest America has ever produced. It is IMHO an excellent example of town planning, and features a fairly spectacular artificial lake, named Lake Burley-Griffin. They were both also very good friends with my paternal grandmother.
Such was the skill of Walter and Marion that the city was pretty-well politician-proof and philistine*-proof for about 50 years.
The bottom of the lake, I believe, is festooned with the aforementioned shopping trolleys.
Sydney, where I was born, was originally a penal colony (like Devils’ Island) and was allowed to just grow like Topsy. The modern traffic schemozzle there is world-class, and pretty-well 24/7; all because of the harbour and the numerous rivers that run through the Sydney Basin, the bridging of which creates Sydney’s hellish traffic bottlenecks.
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* My apologies to Palestinian readers, the original occupants of ‘Felastin:’ the ‘Promised Land’ of the Bible.
Footpath!
Adelaide’s CBD electric scooter system seems to be doing well. I haven’t really looked into it, but using the scooters requires a membership with one of the operating companies who then have your billing information, and the account tracking will let the company know who used each one and when. I haven’t noticed any problems with them in any interaction with pedestrians, but then again the CBS streets are known for having generous space relative to the traffic.
The river running alongside the CBD has wiers at both ends of that section, and is regularly allowed to completely drain so that it may be cleared of rubbish. Shopping trolleys are always present.
Seattle has many bridge choke points too, partly because it’s sliced in half by a combination of canals and a largish lake. That slice has locks at the Puget Sound end and [pause to count] six bridges, four of which can and do open to let tall vessels through. There are other bridges in other parts of the city, to span ravines and the harbor and yadda yadda. Engineers must love it.
My former town of employment has many lost souls who love shopping carts to cart around their possessions. Until they are abandoned in the middle of the street or in parks or on sidewalks. The city was actually fining grocery stores that didn’t control their fleets of carts. This, alas, was one of my “projects”. Thank FSM I am now retired from this nonsense.
I hate scooters. Have been buzzed by the infernal machines more than once. It’s all part of the insipid campaign by younger generations to not have to engage in any physical activity at all. Need to travel two miles to the corner store? Why walk or ride a bike? An electric bicycle or scooter is so much hipper!