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

  • And also the fact that these companies hold no responsibility for them results in all the injuries being treated in public healthcare with tax payer money so all the cost is offloaded to whatever country the tech company drops these in. Due to my work I have some info on how much these tend to busy up the ER on weekends when folks get hurt most and it isn’t hyperbole, it certaintly isn’t the same as bike accidents. It’s often facial injuries and stuff like losing teeth, things that could be completely mitigated with mandatory helmets.

    Also they tend to make pedestrian lanes inaccessible to disabled people. Around where I live people leave them wherever, a person on a wheelchair is not going to get around with these things littered everywhere.

    They need to be city/state run.