Here’s a Canadian e-scooter hit-piece. You definitely won’t find me on an e-scooter in Philadelphia, because both the outdated infrastructure and driver behavior make it much more risky than I could ever accept. But that suggests the solution: rethinking and modernizing infrastructure. E-scooters belong in the “bike lanes”, and bike lanes need to be modernized to accommodate all sorts of light personal vehicles. They need to be separated and physically protected from high-momentum vehicles designed for inter-city highway travel, and if they are combined with infrastructure for these high-momentum vehicles at all, they need their own signals at intersections so that the two are never, ever in conflict.

You need some enforcement, but we should remember that the core reason for all the traffic rules, licensing, registration, insurance, sobriety checkpoints, search and seizure, personal injury litigation, etc. is that cars are just so deadly. Yes, there are anecdotes of bikes and scooters running into each other and running into pedestrians and causing the occasional injury, but most of those are not going to be serious. So there is a question of how much we want to constrain personal freedom (as we do very significantly and appropriately with private cars) when it comes to much less dangerous forms of transportation (now, about those aggressive jogging strollers…)

I might allow autonomous golf carts traveling at low speeds (5-15 mph maybe) in the bike lanes, although today’s bike lanes are not wide enough for that. I might just ban private high-momentum human-driven vehicles from most streets and let the golf carts use them. Cities need this if forms other than cars are going to be viable forms of transportation in all kinds of weather for all kinds of people, and not just a from of recreation for the young and healthy. Of course, at this point the cyclists and e-scootists might decide they want to use the street too, and that might end up being okay. And then, especially if we don’t need so much space for parking as shared autonomous vehicles and human-powered transportation modes become more practical, we can turn part of what used to be the bike lane and sidewalk into gardens, affordable housing, or whatever a city needs. It’s a nice vision, and anything in the urban U.S. public infrastructure context has just taken much, much longer to progress than I would have thought in my youth. But I hold out some hope the breakthrough of autonomous electric vehicles, which is inevitable, could catalyze some faster change.