Just this week in Vantaa, Finland three 12-year-old girls piled onto one of those electric scooters you subscribe to with an app and proceeded to get run over by a car at a crossing, killing one of them

The app is supposed to have an age restriction but it’s easy to bypass and you’re not supposed to have more than one person riding on one, which people routinely ignore

I hate seeing kids and teens speeding around dangerously on those fucking things and then just leaving them laying around on high-traffic bike routes because they don’t give a shit since they treat the scooters as completely disposable

Fucking awful bazinga-brained Silicon Valley-ass idea and business model. Actually, there are also bikes you can use with an app but curiously you don’t see kids doing reckless shit with those, almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible thonk

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    The infrastructure in Vantaa (Helsinki region) is very good compared to most of the world. There are plentiful separated bike paths. Most likely these girls were doing something dumb considering it was three girls on the scooter. The police are considering charging the driver with “aggravated endangerment of road safety” which implies that they were likely doing something to make the driver upset (not that it excuses murder).

    I guess I’d have to see the exact road where it happened, but infrastructure doesn’t work if people go out of their way to use it incorrectly e.g. riding scooters on the road where only motor vehicles and bicycles should be.

    The solution to this isn’t taking away one of the only methods that children have to get places on their own.

    Bicycles still exist. Electric scooters are uniquely dangerous and stupid. They cause a lot of problems in urban centers while not adding any significant benefit over the bicycle.