These Things Suck. Here’s why:

Flashy and high-tech, these scooters promise to be a radical new method of reliable transportation. Or do they? (Photo courtesy of City of Knoxville) 

In major cities all over the country, a new craze in personal transportation is sweeping the streets. Sporting bright colors and flashy names like Spin, Veoride, Byrd, or Lime, the electric scooters have taken over your local boulevards. Even companies like Lyft and Uber have capitalized on the hype, introducing their own scooter services in some cities.

Complete with nifty LED displays and lighting systems, these scooters are easily unlockable with almost any smartphone. And it is obvious that these new gadgets are quite popular. In big cities like Washington D.C., trying to snag one of these scooters is near impossible during rush hour, unless you reserve one.

But for all their coolness and initial appeal, these scooters are in reality not as practical as they portend to be. There are several issues that I see with trying to rely on these scooters for daily commutes, which I will outline here.

Expensive

It may seem pointless to even refer these scooters as method of daily commute. However, the this is how companies operating these scooters are marketing them. Especially in bigger cities like DC, the push has been towards selling these scooter services as something which will complement existing transportation.

With that being said, it is important to look at how scooters stack up compared to existing methods of commuting. How each company charges for its scooters differs, and its hard to calculate average pricing due to sales taxes and other pernicious details. But let’s consider Uber’s Jump scooter service.

For a 30-minute trip, the typical rate in DC is $4.50. That’s like a trip from a hotel, say the Georgetown Marriott, to the Washington Monument, if you time it well. Now lets look at the same trip with the Metro. Here is that trip on google maps. 

By taking the train, the trip is around the same length since you still have to walk a ways. But the typical fare is $2.25. That means you are paying around 7 cents per minute on the metro, as opposed to 15 cents per minute by scooter. In Knoxville, the fare for a bus is 50 cents, which means for a thirty-minute trip you less than 2 cents per minute! (and of course, the trolley is free)

Now of course, this is not a perfect comparison, and there are some variables I have not considered. There are additional fares which can pop up for all these services, especially in Washington where prices vary wildly during rush hour. It is also undeniable that mass transit in America is not that reliable, though it is getting better.

The point here is that there is a significant price disparity between scooters and mass transit. It is also important to note that scooters in Knoxville are similarly priced and so the cost is not significantly cheaper than in bigger cities. 

And unfortunately, scooters don’t stack up well in reliability either.

Unreliable

It may be hard to tell, but I was actually quite excited when these scooters came out and was even elated when I found that they had come to Knoxville. But after riding them at least fifteen times, I came to be quite annoyed by how unreliable these things were.

In at least a quarter of all the instances I used these scooters, the scooter broke down or malfunctioned. In more than once instance, the scooter simply refused to go and left me stranded under the scorching Tennessee sun. In others, the scooters began to go very slow regardless of terrain.

It is quite possible that I was simply incredibly unlucky with these scooters. I assume most of this had to do with them overheating. And to the credit of the operators, I was usually reimbursed for these incidents.

However, I also noticed that the software for these scooters was slow, clunky and not very precise.

For instance, some parts of town are mapped off with red zones where scooters are not allowed to go. Obviously, this is a good thing, as allowing scooters on Market Square for instance wouldn’t be the safest move.

But I often found my scooter stalling out in traffic because I had gone past the border of one of these red zones, even though I hadn’t actually crossed into the red zone. In another instance, the scooter stalled because I went under an Interstate overpass. The app couldn’t tell apparently whether I was going on the Interstate or under it, so it disabled the scooter, again in traffic.

Honestly, these problems aren’t such a big deal, and some competent trouble shooting could fix them. The bigger issue in my mind is safety.

Unsafe

Admiring the Knoxville skyline while you ride is nice and all, but best to keep your eyes on the road!

Thankfully, some measures have been taken to make scooters safer. In Knoxville, it is now required that you have a drivers license to ride, and apps for the service won’t even let you unlock a scooter without first scanning your license.

Some effort has also been made to keep the scooters off sidewalks, to the benefit of pedestrians. However, the idea of having scooters share the road with 2-ton SUVs and 15-ton Trolleys isn’t the safest sounding proposition either. Most people that ride these scooters don’t even wear a helmet but are expected to ride with other motorized traffic.

In addition, most scooters are limited to 15-17 miles per hour for ‘safety’, even though this speed is below the lowest speed limits on most roads downtown. Even bicycles go faster than this. This isn’t safe, as ideally you want to keep up with traffic and reduce interference, not cause slowdowns.

Worse still is that scooters are hard to see when you’re behind the wheel. Your average A-pillar will easily obscure them. The fact that they are electric means you definitely won’t hear them. At night this only becomes more problematic because the tiny LED headlamps of these scooters are hard to discern in the sea of lights on main drags like Gay Street.

Another significant issue is found on models with electric braking. I found that the brakes on these models are very weak and slow to stop the vehicle, especially when going downhill. They must be applied very early to actually stop the scooter, making emergency stops near impossible. I could see this being a big problem if you are heading towards an intersection with traffic moving through it.

And these concerns are not unfounded, as I already know of a few people who have become badly injured in accidents with cars while riding these scooters.

All in all, I think the main attraction for these scooters is basically novelty. It is undeniable that it is a cool and entertaining way to get around. That is indeed why I found them initially to be quite an attractive mode of transport. But scooters are pretty far from being actually practical in fiscal terms, reliability, or safety. Ideally, they should be a lot cheaper, and more should be done to properly integrate them onto city roads so that interaction with other motorists in minimized (using bike paths for instance).