Now that it is clear that the shared scooter will never go away, we have to find a way to learn to live with it. After storm Corrie they were all over the sidewalk, those blocks of litter. But they are indestructible, and are once again in battle order in their obtrusive rows.
The municipality of The Hague had already painted parking spaces, devised fine systems and deployed vloggers for better #ScooterSkills. In the meantime they just kept coming, one variant after another, after the Felyx came Go, and now the Check variant seems dominant. And that continues to put a lot of pressure on parking capacity.
Finally, the municipality intervenes: no more new scooter providers. At the same time, Amsterdam and Rotterdam decide to no longer allow new flash delivery warehouses. Oh, if only it was a bit more common election time. Then there may have been a stop to distribution centers, digital bus shelters and Thai bubble tea rooms.
According to TV program pointer of the forty-one municipalities where gritting scooters appeared, only twelve have drawn up rules for them. Agree, The Hague is doing something in any case, but is it in time? Only when the curve is too wild do politicians pick up a hammer. But banning new providers does not bend the graph back. You are forever prolonging the peak level that is so problematic.
What also does not help, is the passion with which municipalities have always yodeled the green blabla of the providers. This would drive the car out of the city. Let the traffic jams to the beach of Scheveningen evaporate. But if you ask users, especially young people, how they would have made their last trip differently, only 13 percent would have done so by car. The shared scooter mainly replaces: the bicycle (31 percent), the public transport (28 percent) and the walk on the legs (7 percent), according to research by the municipality of Amsterdam.
Knock on the door of the town hall: I have a top product, it drags students off their bicycles, kicks them off the trams, makes them muddy, and guarantees parking nuisance. What is your answer to that? Yes, great, you only do two thousand!
Meanwhile, the latest metropolitan craze is also welcome in the Netherlands this year: the electric scooter. I literally stumbled upon it last fall in Berlin. Google Maps forced them on you with every navigation, and on the sidewalks they skimmed right past you. With us they will soon be allowed ‘only’ 25 kilometers per hour. That promises something, on that wild west of eBikes, cargo bikes, fat bikes and skaters on our urban cycle paths.
All signs point to this variant being more pathogenic. Shall we think of something preventive to keep the numbers low? Or do we wait until the next election?
Christian Weijts writes a column every Friday in this place.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 4, 2022
#Learning #live #Felyx #Check