Kevin Roose: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Electric Scooters’

Kevin Roose, writing for The New York Times:

Tech hubris on wheels — what’s not to loathe?

But I wanted to experience the scooter craze for myself. So for a week, I used shared e-scooters as my primary mode of transportation. I rode them to meetings, ran errands across town and went for long joy rides on the Venice Beach boardwalk. In all, I took more than a dozen scooter rides, from just a few blocks to several miles.

And here’s my verdict: E-scooters might look and feel kind of dorky, but they aren’t an urban menace or a harbinger of the apocalypse. In fact — sigh — they’re pretty great.

That’s pretty much the consensus here in San Jose from fellow WWDC attendees. We didn’t want to like these scooters but we do. The big problem is parking them — it’s just wrong that people abandon them anywhere and everywhere. The other problem is people who ride them on sidewalks rather than in the street where they belong.

Wednesday, 6 June 2018