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Scooters. Tiny electric scooters.  

No doubt you’ve heard how dockless, shareable scooters have been destroying cities like a swarm of mechanical locusts. They first started making national news in spring 2018 after a backlash in San Francisco, where residents claimed that people on scooters were commandeering the bike lanes, littering the sidewalks with abandoned steeds, and menacing children and old people with their scofflaw behavior. San Francisco subsequently banned the scooters pending the implementation of a new permitting process; one critic even called them “a plot of the young people to kill off all us old farts so they can have our rent-controlled apartments.”    

As a cyclist and car skeptic, I found myself scoffing: to me, whining about people on electric scooters in a country that sees 40,000 road deaths per year seemed like complaining about in-flight entertainment while the cockpit’s on fire. At the same time, as a New Yorker, I had no firsthand experience with shared scooters (our City Council is currently drafting a bill to allow them but who knows if or when they’ll actually arrive), so I couldn’t discount the possibility that maybe I had no idea what I was talking about. Maybe they really were a menace.