What cities are going to be "designed around the scooter?"

"Designed around" might be a strong word. But "adapted to" could work and get a bunch of cars off the road - in good weather at least.

I agree, this article is interesting but I wonder how much it scales to larger cities or US cities where the population is less densely situated.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...ars-pontevedra

I'd love to see city centers being car free as long as planners recognize that people still have cars that need to be parked somewhere.

How many miles do you think you can get on a scooter before it needs to be replaced? How many miles on a car?


I'm not arguing against scooters. I'm all for trying the experiment. The problem is a little more complicated than you believe it to be though. Its not going to be as environmentally friendly as you think it is, and may even be worse than some other options.

Smaller engines tend to wear out faster than larger ones. This isn't just a mechanical phenomena. In biology larger creatures tend to live longer than smaller ones. Bacteria live hours, insects live days, mice live months, larger mammals live years. If you're interested in knowing why this is true, check out this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Univers...7834895&sr=8-1

fwiw, where I live, you could get further on a scooter in an hour than in a car for at least 4 hours of every weekday. of course, using a scooter for an hour would suck, because the scooters aren't that great, but it's also crazy that it takes more than an hour to drive 5 miles during rush hour.

Since I'm a contractor it would cost me $250/month to park in my building. Instead I park on the street, which can mean up to a 15 minute walk. There are scooters everywhere and they'd actually be perfect for this situation. But I figure I can use the exercise and like I said I'm pretty sure I'd get injured.

There are no stats on this or what the impact of building a car is vs the equivalent number of scooters per mile. Until you have even back of the envelope estimates on this you're just wanking.

There is evidence that getting cars out of city centers is beneficial in some cities, enough to hope some larger cities try to find ways to follow suit.

We can already see by the demand for the things that El Lobo is obviously wrong about their usefulness in cities.

The scooters may be more disposable than cars, but that will be built into the current price, and the price is low. Moving a 30kg vehicle vs. a 2000kg vehicle is always going to take a whole lot less energy, so they would have to be far more disposable than cars to make up for that.

But that is beside the point. If we were arguing about whether to subsidize these things to help the environment, then yes it would be worth debating those two points. Instead though we (many cities around the world) are debating banning them or hindering them even though they obviously work well for a lot of people.

The problem with them is you end up with people moving at significantly different speeds on the same pavement so I don't know how well they scale. Particularly in larger cities. I definitely support limiting downtown traffic to public transit though and limiting personal vehicles to the outskirts of towns/cities.