Scooters: It’s Not About the Technology – It’s About How They Were Rolled Out

Last week, our good friend Brett Warnke gave a “full-throated defense”  for those scooters scattered around about town. He adores them and thinks “they’re the best idea to come to San Diego in a hell of a long time,” and wants to “subsidize thousands more of the damn things in low-income neighborhoods, in addition to more bicycles.”

His rant is all about the technology and eco-friendly advance that will save us from ourselves (rising sea levels, polluted air, etc), but fears we’re about to regulate them and ourselves “backward into a political logjam,” due to our “reactionary debates disguised as ‘progressive’ or ‘safety-concerns’.

Brett does usher in some good ideas – but he misses the main point about scooters that has upset, angered and frustrated the residents of the neighborhoods where the machines were dumped.

It’s not about the technology; it’s about how the scooters were rolled out in the first place.

It’s about how thousands of them – first the e-bikes, then the scooters – were literally dumped into communities without their say-so, without public approval – and even knowledge; it’s about the undemocratic nature of the decisions by our lassez-faire political leaders that paved the road for them. (This is French for “abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market.”)

It’s also about the dangers and risks caused by these 2-wheeled vehicles for riders uneducated or learned in how they roll.

And that’s what happened. Our local government declined to set any limits or rules for the scooters when they first flowed like German beer at Oktoberfest onto our streets, sidewalks and public space. This was very lassez-faire capitalism at its finest. I know Brett is not a big supporter of out-of-control capitalism but this fact has slipped his analysis.

And again, it’s not about the technology. Scooters – under the right conditions – may very well aid us humans in getting out of our cars (and buses?), reducing the carbon, the waste, and making us happier.

Brett jokes with us as he sprinkles like confetti little quotes throughout his post, some of them made me laugh out loud. The little quotes also point out how Brett is spicing up his rant with a little satire – enough to show he knows there’s cracks in his rant.

Like, ‘But who cares about all those infrastructure problems?” and then a few lines after he says this: “We have huge basic infrastructure problems even as the world speeds up.” And “new [corral] stations that ‘take up public space’ only take up red-zones that, if needed, could be quickly plowed over my fire trucks without issue.” Then, “In terms of personal safety, in my view, you pay your money and you take your choice in life,” and for all the accidents, Brett brushes those concerns aside with, ” a lot of these injuries on scooters involve alcohol” and cites a study that states half of all scooter accidents are caused by drunk riders.

Yet, who could argue with his observation:

Historically speaking, the big boys won.  Special interests shoved their fat greedy fingers around our necks and squeezed out the road cash.  They suckered the politicians in for the long con. The oil and gas and rubber and car companies ripped out our public transportation.

And the honking suburbanites built their tacky ass homes and Jetson highways north, south, and east. The rest of us, especially the young, had little choice in paying for any of it or being forced by necessity to sit in it, day after day, burning expensive gas.

But he slides by the other concerns, the dumping, the corporate-take-over of more of our public space and the misrepresentations the bicycle and scooter companies make about their products, their business-models, and even whether they placed their machines in our neighborhoods at all.

There’s now evidence to suggest the scooters are not all that eco-friendly but I’ll save that for another day.

Let’s take on the safety issue. Brett is anti-helmet – (and maybe he is voting for Todd Gloria for mayor, as it was Gloria who co-authored Sacramento legislation that took scooter riders off the hook and made helmets optional.) Meanwhile, in just one week – about two months ago – there were three people left with skull-fractures from scooter accidents.

The response from our ranter was to sweep those concerns aside by blaming it all on drunk riders. But I can tell you with certainty that being drunk is not an excuse for having accidents. (When I practiced law, I defended hundreds of DUI defendants – and the law changed long ago to take drunk people off the hook for their crashes and injuries.) Just the other day, a young woman was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison for being so drunk one night while driving her car, she took the life of an OBcean coming home.

Injured riders and other victims are crowding our emergency rooms; there’s now more injuries from scooters than from bicycle or pedestrian accidents. Here’s a report from the OB Rag in March of this year:

In late January, a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association found scooters are more dangerous than riding a bike or walking. UCLA medical personnel looked at about 250 patients who went to L.A. area ERs during a one-year period with scooter-related injuries. They found:

• • only 4.4 percent were definitely wearing helmets and 8.4 percent weren’t even riding the scooters themselves.
  • during the same 1-year period, there were ER visits for 195 biking and 181 for walkers.
  • Roughly 30 percent of the people with scooter injuries taken to ERs came by ambulance — “an indication of the severity of their injuries.”
  • Falls were responsible for the vast majority of the injuries — around 80 percent;
  • next most common was a collision with an object, which caused 11 percent of injuries,
  • followed by “being struck by a moving vehicle such as a car, bicycle or other scooter,” which triggered 9 percent of ER visits;
  • non-riders who got hurt included walkers who tripped on a discarded scooter and people hit by someone riding a scooter.
  • Doctors judged 5 percent of the people with scooter injuries to be drunk, or to have blood alcohol content above 0.05 percent;
  • head injuries were most common, resulting in 40 percent of ER visits,
  • followed by fractures at 32 percent and cuts, bruises or sprains at 28 percent.
  • Of the 249 people brought to the L.A. ERs over the year-long period, 15 were ultimately admitted to a hospital — and two of those had to be put in intensive care, researchers said.
  • (there were another 74 possibly scooter-related ER visits kept out of the study because they “lacked sufficient documentation.”)

The costs to society with un-regulated scooters is plain to see. Okay, San Diego has passed some regulations but they don’t go far enough.  Mayor Faulconer’s rules place no limits on the numbers of scooters each company can dump and toss onto our streets, corners, sidewalks and parks.

Our ranter-in-chief says there are too many regulations already. Whether it’s done tongue-in-cheek or not, we have to look at the history of automobile use, and dangers and risks.

How many car drivers died before society learned to install stop signs or stop lights at busy intersections? How many died before speed limits were enacted and enforced? These rules are came down decades ago so how are we to know. Well, how many adults and children died before seat-belts became mandatory? This is something that happened during many of our lifetimes, the seat belt laws.

We as a society learn slowly and we only usually make safety reforms after too many have been injured. Now, it’s the same with these e-scooters. The scooter companies are supposed to educate their riders but … don’t hold your breath on that one.

The take-over of public space and causing dangers to others is a very big deal. The scooters are driven down our sidewalks by hapless riders, uneducated about how powerful the machines are. How many pedestrians had to get out of the way when one approached on the concrete path meant for feet?

And then the scooters are thrown and left in our streets and public right of way. Okay, there’s the corrals – but even the corrals pose safety risks – almost too many to mention here. With as many scooters and bikes that can be crammed into the white-painted boxes, they block street views and remove spaces where one can pull over temporarily.

Besides, that’s our public space. There’s just too much take-over of our public space by private companies and corporations where the bottom line is their main concern, not the health and safety of the neighborhoods where their machines were unleashed. The scooter companies even forced the City of San Diego to send our tax-dollar-paid employees out to paint the boxes.

One analogy; imagine if when automobiles became popular and cheap enough for common people to afford them, that instead the cars were leased by the hour; and to get one, all you had to do is walk up to one – parked in lines of cars up and down all of our streets and roads – taking up our public space for private profit. That wouldn’t have come down – but that’s what is happening with the scooters.

There’s just too much giving by the City and its residents to these companies and our metropolis is not getting anything in return. That’s one reason City councilwoman Barbara Bry has called for a moratorium on scooters, as part of her mayoral campaign.

So, again, it’s not about the technology; scooters do have a promise – but we’re not there yet. It’s about how they were rolled out in the classic neo-capitalist way: “buyer and rider beware – but hey, it’s all about the gig economy, you know, sharing ….”

Well, we’re not sharing anything yet. Perhaps some day, when the scooter companies realize they can lower the price and offer them for sale, not just for lease.