So many people consider this a menace when in many ways it's closer to utopia. For decades cities have tried to get commuters to switch to bikes and public transportation, but nothing has really stuck in the states due to the convenience of cars. Now that it's happening, some people aren't happy.
The situation is basically that 20% of the population of some cities has switched to an ideal form of transportation within months, and our infrastructure isn't built for it. Imagine the number of bike commuters increased 1000% in three months. That's the situation were in. The irony of people complaining about it isn't lost on me.
People love bikes, and you never really hear complaints about people riding them just about anywhere. Bikers have been "violating" road and sidewalk laws for longer than cars have existed. These scooters are slower and smaller than bikes, and follow regulations better (reflectors, headlights, sometimes brake lights) . They're basically as carbon friendly as you can get for a motorized vehicle. And they're cheap and fairly durable. I bought one ~6 months ago and no problems for 500+ miles, it's practically taken my car off the road permenantly.
We should be embracing these scooter with open arms. They're drastically reducing road congestion at least in my city. Even displacing rideshare to the point that I've had many drivers tell me that nobody gets picked up downtown anymore.
But I guess the "get off my road/sidewalk" backlash is inevitable because people don't like change.
I agree with the general vibe of your post, but have some objections as a commuter cyclist who tried one of the e-scooters (Lime) last week.
>These scooters are slower and smaller than bikes, and follow regulations better
These things aren't slower than bikes: mine clocked at over 15MPH (I checked with a sports tracker app). Yes, bikes can go faster. But commuter bikes usually don't (with traffic lights and obstacles peppered along your commute, you aren't riding at your top speed all the time).
More importantly, these things accelerate faster than most casual cyclists.
Now, these things might have brake lights, but they don't have turn signals. And they are way more unstable than bicycles; it's pretty hard to indicate turns with one hand off the handlebars (and both hands off handlebars = fall, unlike on a bike).
Its small size is a disadvantage when it comes to visibility. And small wheels aren't good when it comes to potholes or curbs. And it's not obvious how to jump off that thing at speed (you can't let go of handlebars!).
So, we have an unstable (compared to a bike) platform that can suddenly, unpredictably (to others) accelerate to 15MPH.
Is this the future? Weather permitting, looks like it. But we definitely don't have infrastructure for it yet.
We need roads for traffic like that which aren't for either cars or pedestrians. And narrow bike lanes which cars can get into simply won't do.
They are slower generally. I know this because most bikes pass me on my daily commute. Maybe 10% of cyclists ride slower, my old bike used to have a speedometer and I averaged 18-22 mph over long distances.
Also keep in mind that the motors are voltage limited at ~15mph. Near that speed, acceleration is basically zero, whereas a bike can accelerate further rather easily.
Acceleration is definitely slower than a bike. Maybe half as much. The scooters are usually 250w but only ~170 makes it to the wheels. Bike riders average 200-300w output and when they first get moving people tend to put in more effort, maybe 400-500 watts. The low speed efficiency of the motors is also terrible, probably less than 100 watts to the ground below 7 mph. I get passed by bikes in straights and between lights every day, and pass only a few bikers a week myself.
Lack of turn signals does suck, I hope they fix this. They should be required. I also agree about visibility and smaller wheels.
I disagree about stability, the center of gravity of the vehicle is much lower, and having your body totally unconstraind with feet inches off the ground makes it far easier to bail. I've flown over the handlebars on a bike more than once because the high CG and large wheels, got severely injured once. Bailing on a scooter is easy and I don't expect anyone in decent shape to get injured because you basically hop off into a brisk run, you can't really do that on a bike.
I've been riding scooters much more than most, close to 5 miles a day, and to me taking one hand off the handlebars is fairly easy. It also feels slower than a bike to me, and sometimes I'll give it a kick start for the first couple seconds. A lot of the reason they feel fast and unstable is because hardly anyone has ridden them much IMO
Most cyclists can't maintain a speed of 18mph or a power output of 200w for very long. People who are in good shape and train for cycling can do it, but the average rider out on the street is probably putting out 150w or less. Check the estimated power numbers on some popular urban Strava segments.
(if anything, I find my pace closer to 10mph when I'm riding to work)
Either way, these bikes are on a bike path which is a safe space for them and they're moving closer to the speed of cars. Most scooters, in Denver at least, are operated on the side walk, so you have pedestrians sharing space with 15mph SILENT scooters.
Maybe the scooters can accelerate a little faster with less effort, but I don't think it's really that big of a difference. As for average commuting speed, I've ridden them on a bike path and I pass some slower bikes and some faster bikes pass me. Feels like it's right in the middle of the pack on speed. And there's a lot of variance in the scooters from one unit to the next, as the battery gets below 50% and as the alignment of the wheels starts to need adjusting they definitely slow down.
You also obviously don't have to ride the scooter at top speed all the time, any more than you have to ride your bike at top speed or drive your car at 80mph on every road you drive on. And scooters are a little lighter at least than a casual bike (probably about the same or maybe a little heavier than a good road bike?), and they have a slightly smaller footprint.
Overall I don't see any argument that these things will require a brand new kind of road infrastructure we haven't conceived of yet. They should just be allowed anywhere a bike is allowed, and any of the efforts that are already underway to expand protected bike lanes will benefit these scooters as well.
I disagree with the general vibe of your post although you do make some valid points.
They do accelerate faster than bikes, because they have a lower mass (or due to gearing). This lower mass is very important when you have a collision - force x time = momentum. You can very quickly take the force out of an impending collision with a scooter, compared to a bike.
Due to this fact, it makes turn indicating much less important, but I agree it is a slight problem. For comparison though, pedestrians don't give turn signals, and scooters here are in an uncanny valley. You can in fact hold your scooter by the middle of the handle bar and ride one handed, but I wouldn't recommend this. I however can quite easily drink a can of drink while riding my scooter - but this is not a novice behaviour for sure. My feeling is, indicating is a nice to have, but won't be forthcoming, and it is upon the rider to be aware and give way to all other vehicles and pedestrians. Due to speed and agility, scooters are at the bottom of the right of way totem pole, and that's ok.
Visibility is pretty well catered for on an ES2 with lights all over it, and most scooters now have some lighting front and back. This is a non-issue really as they are about equivalent to a pedestrian even when accounting for speed (which again should be moderated by the rider).
Small wheels are not good for potholes, and also, they have pretty horrible traction in the wet. That said, this is a rider safety issue more than third party. Some wheel bases are getting a little bigger to cater for this, with suspension as well. This is not so bad as to be prohibitive. It is prohibitive for wet weather, but not at other times. The great advantage is that quickly jumping off and breaking with your feet on the ground and just running is a perfectky fine stopping mechanism.
Average human sprinting speed is 15.9mph and top speed (Usain Bolt) is 28mph. These are effectively just like having people sprinting everywhere. This also leads me to think that a helmet is not required, however there should be a strong push to bring their weight down (which is difficult due to durability/ cost). Most durable decent long distance scooters are about 12kgs with the lighter side short range coming in at around 7kgs. This puts the average adult riding a heavy one at 15mph at a total weight of 74kgs.
For comparison, a scooter has a stopping distance of Braking distance 3.9m on dry asphalt from 12.4 mph and 165 (74kg) pound person. (Shorter if you jump off). By comparison, a bike which has a fast commuter speed of 30mph has a stopping distance of 10.4m. Average commuter speed for a bike is 20mph, with a stopping distance 4.62m (http://www.exploratorium.edu/cycling/brakes2.html).
I agree we don't quite have the infrastructure, but I wouldn't let perfect get in the way of good enough as we transition there. Footpaths in most cases are good enough, in some cases roads should be used, and in some cases it should be bike paths. The sensible choice is always clear to me, but maybe not to everyone, similarly, the etiquette is not set yet.
I think for now, more effort should be done on establishing laws - no helmet is ok, lighting back and front is required, bike paths when available, footpaths when car traffic is high, side of road when pedestrian traffic far exceeds car traffic so long as car traffic is under 35km/h in high density areas. Passing pedestrians should aims for at least 1.5m and not be travelling in excess of 8km/h while passing. Pedestrians always given right of way.
Cyclists routinely overtake me when I'm on my scooter, so it is just false that they don't go faster on average (and stats bear this out) 20mph vs 15mph. The main difference is gearing. Going up a hill a scooter will often be faster (up to a point where the scooter won't go up the hill. Flat or down hill a scooter will generally be a bit or a lot slower respectively.
Thats kind of my initial thoughts, but I'm sure you could do better.
I don't agree they have lower mass. My Xootr push scooter is only a few pounds lighter than my Xootr folding bike (which is not particularly light for a bike), but it is easily 15 lbs lighter than a Lime electric scooter.
I also don't agree "You can very quickly take the force out of an impending collision with a scooter, compared to a bike". At least, all the scooters I have ridden have worse braking than a bike and really hard braking is destabilizing as you have to push on the bars to resist tilting forwards.
Your numbers regarding average speeds for bikes "a bike which has a fast commuter speed of 30mph" and "Average commuter speed for a bike is 20mph" are fanciful. 30 mph is a high speed for racing cyclists in a pace line. 20 mph is a high speed for a very fit cyclist in a hurry. Typical cyclists average under 15 mph. I'd imagine commuters trying not to arrive all sweaty at work restrain themselves even from this.
So I suspect your down votes are earned.
For what it's worth, I think the scooters will be great once we figure out how to accommodate them. I personally think bikes are more sensible overall, but people like the scooters and anything that gets people out of cars is a win.
I stand corrected on the speed, I think the chart I referenced I mixed mph ad kmh. Anyway, we can agree roughly similar speeds, and anecdotally I will add bikes are faster in the aforementioned conditions but can go much faster.
I have no problem with downvotes, I just feel that initially a comment is warranted.
As for the weights, I will concede here a little as well. The lime scooter is a Xioami which weighs 26.9 lbs (12kgs) (which I stated), and your average bike is probably 18lbs (8kgs). I'll also give you that the braking on a bike front and back may be better than regen + back braking (at least for some control). However, I ride a much lighter, less rugged e-micro at 7.5kgs and find the agility and manoeuvrability gives much more control than stopping on a bike where you can't just put your feet down and lift.
We can agree to disagree on which is more sensible, but we should definitely work to accommodate them.
>We can agree to disagree on which is more sensible, but we should definitely work to accommodate them.
Indeed, my point was that these devices make sense for a lot of people, but we aren't accommodating the needs of the users by throwing them either into the roadways, bike lanes, or sidewalks.
Also, a lot of my stability/maneuverability/acceleration points likely don't apply to your e-micro. The Lime-S I tried weighs a ton, and has a battery in the stem, pushing the center of mass way up. And I think that this kind of scooters (larger, heavier) , rather than micros, will be the ones we'll see most, since they provide more range.
All the more arguments to build out e-scooter paths. Or better yet, close streets to car traffic, and let the scooters roam free.
Yikes! I'm in Australia, so did not know this. Ultimately I think we should aim for lighter personal ownership rather than heavy, rugged sharing. And in those cases, use docks, and not dockless.
"What Henry Ford did in the century for rural America is what this device will do for city-dwellers all over this country and all over the planet. We have a solution, and it's a cost-effective, energy-effective solution, and that's a really big deal."
Perhaps the missing ingredient is that we have all have smartphones, so we can rent scooters whenever and wherever. It also probably helps that scooters are cheaper than Segways.
Most bicycles do avoid sidewalks, from what I've observed - I've seen many cyclists on the road and few riding on sidewalks.
I don't think there's much point in drawing a distinction between scooters and bicycles. They will have similar traffic considerations and both are a menace on the sidewalk. It'd be great if we could cater to both, but the answer isn't to bring scooters (or cyclists) onto the sidewalks.
Yeah, my experience is different. I mean, I had the same mentality, shaving off 20-30 minutes of commute daily with 0 carbon footprint, just a smooth cool ride into the sunset (or sunrise). On paper many scooters looked fine for my use case (100kg allowance, 25kmh max speed, 25-30km reach). Since its a new technology, I didn't went for the most expensive trendy ones, rather something much cheaper, in case it turns out not-there-yet.
Well, it turned out not-there-at-all. Brand is called V-Max, not sure how popular they are. First one lasted 3 months, then broke down. Mail back to eshop, got another brand new in a week. This one lasted 2 weeks, suddenly battery started giving maybe 50% of the power, it became uselessly slow. Next round trip to eshop, brand new one lasted like 4 days. It just stopped responding to power button unless plugged in. Another round trip, now it works, unless its below +10 degrees Celsius, then it randomly shuts down after 2-3 mins.
You can say, buy something 5x as expensive (meaning good brand). Well, I am not going to shell that amount of cash on just a scooter. For me its a nice to have, nothing more. These things are fragile (imagine cheap electric bike ridden hard). Pavements are often not in good shape (in Switzerland!), so ride is bumpy. Manufacturers lie like hell on real range - its probably 25-30% in real world, on normal +-flat sidewalks. I've seen complaints about this all over internet. With modest uphill, many will crawl slower than walking pace.
One thing I noticed - it is properly dangerous to ride it. My gut feeling says much more than regular bike. People love to just pop out from behind the cars into sidewalks, even small dirt can throw you off balance easily. Breaking distance is way too long. You have to have both hands on steering all the time, if you get a fly into your eye, or sneeze, you need to stop. You don't need to drive fast to make it dangerous - people just don't expect you. Driving on the road is forbidden here, and this is frankly not something that belongs on the roads (apart from regulatory requirements).
Overall, cool idea, one day maybe, unless they will be regulated to hell beforehand.
In typical Java fashion, there is a project, Quasar, the adds true green thread support to the language. Done by instrumenting bytecode rather than JVM support, but the benchmarks are still excellent. I'm very curious whether the Java or Go implementation is faster. Java does have fast async support which is all you need to add green threads on a library level
Also in Java fashion, the support isn't perfect, and requires some fiddling with JVM parameters (and annotations, obivously). It's still really solid from my experience however, and a shame that it isn't more widely known.
A partner project Comsat provides fairly comprehensive library support for databases and such. I've used it before with Vert.X and the performance was insane. Possibly faster than Go.
Another aside, there's an active research project to add greaan threads to Javas core as well. Project Loom
>Also in Java fashion, the support isn't perfect, and requires some fiddling with JVM parameters (and annotations, obivously). It's still really solid from my experience however, and a shame that it isn't more widely known.
I could, but my laziness prevents me from doing so. The documentation is fairly good for Quasar, hard part is getting the code instrumentation up. If you use Maven, there's a plug-in to do much of it for you
Microservices move tranasactional concerns out of the database and between service boundaries. If you ever need to transactionally write data to two different microservices, you need to roll your own rollbacks. And unless you store this rollback state in a reliable datastore, there's no going back. The tooling to do this properly, as far as my research goes, does not currently exist.
I much prefer horizontally scaling a big old monolith backed by a sharding database like CockroachDb or Cassandra. Same scalability and you get to keep some ACID semantics.
Concerns about code size are overblown. Facebook's mobile app is utterly massive and it still runs mostly okay even on weak devices. The maximum practical code size for a monolithic server side app will probably never be reached. We're talking maybe 100 million LoC before you run into real problems, especially if you use a VM lanuage like Java or C# where hot and cold code can be dynamically swapped out and code is stored in a very space-efficient fashion
When you reach the scale where the codebase size is an issue you've probably already several rewrites to deal with such massive traffic volume.
Facebook's mobile app is utterly massive and it still runs mostly okay even on weak devices.
I agree with your comments but this is a bad example. The Facebook app is horrible to use on high end devices. The mobile website is much more performant and has most of the core functionality.
The app is actually worse in one way - they chose to use the iOS WebView that doesn’t support the native ad blocking framework. So when you click on an external page, it’s usually horrible - bacause modern web.
Yes. That's why I'm amazed there isn't some Zookeeper ish system out there for supporting microservices.
The fact is that microservice tooling is in it's infancy, and shouldn't be used in production unless you're willing to roll your own everything. I worked at a place that tried to use microservices+event sourcing+CQRS, predictably a massive disaster.
I still think the monolith+distributed database will win out . I've never heard of a time when horizontal scaling was a problem not related to the databse
I hardly ever post comments and never articles, so I just create an account when it seems worthwhile. The mods don't seem bothered by this as long as such comments aren't flamey
> "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to."
As recently as a week ago, 'dang had this to say about throwaways:
> "HN can't be a community without members. Disembodied comments are not community members. No one is required to use their real name here, but users need to have some consistent identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no community at all."
They also don't see or act on everything they see, so in that sense, I think you could say they "don't seem bothered." That said, I think it's fair to say it's preferred that you maintain some sort of identity.
I definitely dont create them routinely. Maybe 4 times a year. Consistency isn't worth much if nobody knows who you are because you never post.
The desire to create a community chafes against the zero verfication HN does for new accounts. If you want to create a community it should be harder to create a new account than login, but it's actually the opposite. To create a new account I don't need to remember my password, I just need a username and keyspam.
This probably isn't what Dang wants but it's how the site currently works. If it's easier to create an account a couple times a year than remember my login, especially when nobody is gonna remember someone who posts 4 times a year, what is the point of maintaining an account. Just being logical here.
The situation is basically that 20% of the population of some cities has switched to an ideal form of transportation within months, and our infrastructure isn't built for it. Imagine the number of bike commuters increased 1000% in three months. That's the situation were in. The irony of people complaining about it isn't lost on me.
People love bikes, and you never really hear complaints about people riding them just about anywhere. Bikers have been "violating" road and sidewalk laws for longer than cars have existed. These scooters are slower and smaller than bikes, and follow regulations better (reflectors, headlights, sometimes brake lights) . They're basically as carbon friendly as you can get for a motorized vehicle. And they're cheap and fairly durable. I bought one ~6 months ago and no problems for 500+ miles, it's practically taken my car off the road permenantly.
We should be embracing these scooter with open arms. They're drastically reducing road congestion at least in my city. Even displacing rideshare to the point that I've had many drivers tell me that nobody gets picked up downtown anymore.
But I guess the "get off my road/sidewalk" backlash is inevitable because people don't like change.