What do you think of the bicycle/scooter sharing systems whereby people leave them randomly on the street such as Lime?

22 comments

1. Profits from scooters are concentrated in private hands, inconveniences are shared by whole society. This should be regulated and put in some order.

2. I don’t mind the bikes because at least in my city they’re only parked in places where you’re supposed to put bikes for the most part. The scooters are left all over so those are more annoying.

   The bikes are super convenient for me to. My own bike got stolen ages ago and I bike very little so it just doesn’t make sense to get a new one. And I get 500 bike minutes included with my monthly public transportation ticket.

3. They can fuck right off.

   I don’t mind rental bikes with specific turn points of pickup. But Lime scooters and other bikes that can be left anyway, need to go away

4. Don’t get me started. Those things are a plague.

   The principle is fine, it’s just the complete fucking morons using them. Like how braindead do you have to be to think that leaving one right at the top of a staircase to a subway entrance is a good idea? A 100€ fine and a slap upside the head (optional) for each occurrence would be a good start.

5. I have my own bicycle and normally cycle into the city centre. But when it’s raining I take the bus. It’s quite convenient to be able to take an electric bike back at 2:00 am and a lot cheaper than taking a taxi.

   We had the pileups of bikes but they regulated it and it’s much better now. Wheelchair users can use the sidewalks again.

6. It turned out to be a very bad idea. It might work if users are forced to return the vehicle to a designated area near their destination (< 100m). Most cities in our country withdrew the license already and the operators stopped the services.

7. They (electric scooters) created chaotic situations when they first arrived in Oslo spring 2019. Providers and units just kept coming on the streets, being (dis)placed everywhere and people driving them like maniacs causing injuries. The city tried to make restrictions and changes over the next years after just watching it play out first. That led to fewer providers and less units. People seemed to be turned off by it and you didn’t see as many after some time. Somehow the control is now seemingly gone and we’re back to 2019 again if not worse. Lots of them, maniac drivers and injuries. In addition it has (as everything negative) been creeping outwards of the city to the suburbs, towns and finally urbanised countryside. They’ve also become quite popular privately owned and lots of teenagers are now using them around without knowing anything about traffic rules or taking any consideration of their surroundings (just like the other drivers really). Reckless cyclists were already plaguing the pedestrians, then we got this as well.

   It maybe felt like something fun and exciting this micro-mobility thing, but it was just hell on two wheels. Ban the whole thing.

8. Austria – It is a pain in Vienna, as the scooters are very often parked in the middle of the sidewalk. I think it is only a few percent of the users doing this, but in absoluten numbers it is very high. And there are some intelligence-allergic, who drive the scooters at high speed on the sidewalk endangering the pedestrians.

9. I was born in the 60’s so I should probably not answer that.

10. We used to have the problem of having them lay around everywhere, but that’s mostly fixed now that we’ve made designated spots to leave them and introduced fines for those who leave them outside of these spots.

    But the biggest problem with the scooters is the people driving them. Absolutely careless, no respect for driving laws, burning red lights, overtaking on the right, riding against the flow of traffic, riding on the pavement…

11. Most cities in Sweden have designated places to park them and you have to take a photo of the parked scooter anyway, otherwise you can get fined for improper parking.

    The erratic driving on the other hand has not been completely solved yet, but we’ve had at least a couple of fatal accidents just this summer involving senior citizens in an electric scooter with a motor vehicle. I know, it’s not the usual demographic that drives them.

12. Clearly against, precisely because of the unregulated parking. This way of shared mobility could be very desirable if it was done in a socially responsible way.

13. Get. Them. Out. I think Prague passed something to ban them in the city

14. shit we local hate, city is trying somehow fight it (so far not really successfully) but at least it is a bit into budget because there is always some retarded tourist running bicycle or scooter on a sidewalk and easy catch for police

15. Love them. I much prefer them to taking the tram or subway. The don’t work well during winter though.

16. At first I liked that because often public transportation can’t easily take you to the place you want to go and it was convenient if you didn’t had your own mean of transportation. But now it’s annoying to me, they are everywhere with no rules, children driving them are making dangerous situations on sidewalks often

17. Hate it. Sometimes I just shove them to the side if I’m walking and they are parked or lying in the middle of the path. In fairness, the situation has become a little better where I live thanks to various regulations though. Ideally, you should only be able to leave them in designated areas.

18. (electric ones) garbage they make a mess, people dont park them properly.. and people dump them everywhere , plus they are not green either instead of cycling people are using those AND the bat tries have limited charge cycles so more waste, very toxic waste too, I had a lime bike dumped on my housing estate and I had to call and get picked up , otherwise it would been there for months or years , the annoying thing is had a GPS tag , but they didn’t bother to get it unless asked , firm is goona go bankrupt if you ask me

19. The rental scooters are convenient in theory, but a nuisance in practice. People leave them all over the place, and others tip them over so they’re even more of a nuisance. I’ve had to stop my car and move a scooter to get to my parking space. Even worse, I was recently on a bus where the driver had to do the same between stops.

    The rental companies don’t remove the scooters quickly enough once snow season starts, and they get buried in the snow and end up broken by snow removal equipment.

    I’ve tried riding the scooters myself. It wasn’t to my taste. The steering is nervous. You really can’t take even one hand off the bars lest you fall over. (This may vary between scooters.) The small wheels ensure you feel every bump, seam and pebble.

    Also, because the usage is charged per minute, there’s an incentive to go as fast as possible, which is often at odds with safety.

20. It’s an interesting question as there are big differences across cities. when I lived in Hamburg, I used loan bikes (non-electric) quite a lot. I always had to drop them off at a dedicated spot. But they have many stations all over the city, even quite far from the centre, so I think their system was really great. I moved away in 2018, so I’m not sure if it changed in recent years, but I hope it hasn’t and other cities should learn from it. Also, at the time there were still no e-scooters. I still have to see a similarly well-kept loan bike system elsewhere.

    In Berlin, for example, there are some rental bikes, but they are much harder to find than e-scooters, so even though I’d prefer cycling, I use the scooters much more often. It’s also confusing that there are several different companies, so you have to register with many different apps, which also seem to change their names all the time. E-scooter rental apps like Dott (ex Tier) and Voi can be found in many German cities, whereas bike rentals are more rare and often more local (as the Hamburg one mentioned). Maybe that’s why I don’t see bikes lying around all that often. Scooters, on the other hand, are very often parked in very annoying positions or just lying on the ground. Some cities have introduced restrictions, e.g. in Braunschweig the last time I visited, there were only dedicated areas where you could park your scooters in the city centre. I also note a difference in who uses bikes vs. scooters. Most scooter users are probably nice, reasonable people, but there is fair share of youths with brocolli haircuts treating them like trash… and the way these kids treat trash is throwing it anywhere they walk. Somehow this type of person feels too cool to use their muscles outside the gym, so you never see them on bikes.

    Now I’m living in the UK and it’s a completely different story here. E-scooters are not allowed at all where I live, some people use them nonetheless, but it’s rare. Obnoxious teenagers actually use bikes quite often (mostly doing wheelies). There is an e-bike rental scheme that works with fixed bays, but they are quite concentrated in the city centre so I use them very rarely as the next bay is about a 30 minutes walk from my place. I’m glad they don’t have e-scooters here as the littering here is on another level, so I’m sure e-scooters would lie around everywhere and probably be vandalised daily.

21. Bikes are ok, but the fucking scooters should be banned since people (most of at least) can’t seem to be able to park them out of way, or use them lawfully. Once have had “accidentally” push one guy over. Adult riding on a pedestrian sidewalk and that itself is a no-no, but worse he almost hit my dog.

22. They are a pain in the ass because people, especially tourist, are very uncivic and leave them everywhere instead of in their designated parking spaces.