It’s time to ban centaurs from our cities. You know them. The guys buzzing across urban centers on those embarrassing Duck Dodgers contraptions—them riders of electric scooters. The finance bros and the ecowarrior hipsters united under the banner of vacuous modernity in their rush to nowhere important. Look at them hurrying on their machines, pretending to care about the planet while devouring electricity instead of walking with their trotters, risking the lives of everyone and their own. I just saw one in the subway. In the SUBWAY!
Look at them go, I say, those arrogant wannabe horses with their smug mugs, their oversized iPhones with all LinkedIn notifications always turned on, their Starbucks cups, and their fleece vests, riding those ridiculous skateboards designed for people who can’t ride real skateboards. Look at them racing against their Google Maps’ estimated arrival time without caring about vehicles or pedestrians, believing they are the Wheeled Victory of Samothrace. They are only the victory of 21st-century indolence, each of them a breathing waste of oxygen moved by a waste of watts that powers a waste of plastic and lithium and cobalt attached to a waste of rubber.
The reckless centaurs took over our streets. They conquered our sidewalks. They’ve killed kids, the elderly, and sausage dogs. They parked wherever they wanted to frustrate stroller-pushing parents and disabled people in wheelchairs. For four years, it’s been a veni vidi rolling vici of rudeness and incivility on the worst transportation ever designed since Elon Musk built his car tunnel in Las Vegas. In fact, electric scooters are such a useless and dumb solution to nobody’s problem that one may think that Musk himself invented them as a flatulent afterthought when he was ideating his failed choo choo train in a tube. That’s right, electric scooters are Hyperloop’s wind. And, like the Hyperloop itself, they should be buried forever.
Since it went from annoying kid toys to Silicon Valley’s startup fad, the electric scooter problem has only grown at every level imaginable. Take their safety record, for example. According to a report by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, between 2017 and 2021 there were 117,600 people injured in electric scooter incidents, including 68 dead. In 2021, New York city officials told The New York Times that electric scooters were a serious problem, and it’s only gotten nastier.
And it’s not only a mess in the U.S. Almost every country in the world has been suffering a plague of deaths and serious injuries that is going from grim to dismal, with the U.K. multiplying casualties by a factor of 10 from 2020 to 2021, and triplicating e-scooter collisions. All thanks to companies like Bird, Lime, Skip, Bolt or Spin, which, coincidentally, are the names of all the protagonists of a long-forgotten TV series pilot from the ’80s titled “The Cretins.” True story.
Their invasion of our public spaces has now peaked with their occupation of the transit system. It wasn’t enough for all of us to endure the occasional bike in the subway. No, now these feeble conquistadores of public spaces are flooding platforms and subway cars with these allegedly small vehicles that—in the tight close quarters of a train, bus, or subway car—feel as compact as a Cadillac SUV.
Consider that image for a minute: a subway car packed with people going to the office and a couple of dudes with their scooters, looking at their smartphone screens. Think about that for a while and then figure out how many shades of sociopath somebody must be to think that it is “a-okay” to smash his e-scooter against another passenger’s nose, arms, or crotch? Which kind of selfish subhuman is that person? Nine out of 10 scientists believe the egotistical level goes off the Richter scale of Karens and Kens. The tenth scientist is a twit who rides on e-scooters.
The problem of e-scooters in the public transit system, however, goes beyond a lack of basic human empathy, manners, and common sense. The fact is that these vehicles are also dangerous because their lithium-ion batteries can violently catch fire and explode after a hard impact, some wear, or seemingly at random. This is not a theoretical problem: New York’s Fire Department says that, as of last week, there have been around 200 battery fires on e-bikes and e-scooters so far in 2022. In August, the numbers were 121 fires, five deaths, and 66 injured. The total number of fires was 104 for all of 2021.
In fact, while no electric fires have happened yet in the subway, bus, or train systems, the MTA—New York’s transit authority—is scared enough about the possibility that it is considering establishing an obligatory permit to take any electrical vehicle into the subway. According to the NY digital newspaper The City, “MTA officials acknowledged at the agency’s July board meeting that they are conducting a hazard study on e-bikes and e-scooters for the entire system, including the commuter railroads” before making a decision. I honestly fail to see what else there is to consider so I have a better solution: ban these creatures from the public transit system right now.
Just kidding. Zeus should destroy them all.
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