Automobile supremacy: "The machine that is the established “American Way” can commit countless legal and moral errors and be excused as an individual mistake."

"We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law."

But seriously, I won't bug you; go back to complaining about the traffic on State Street, all the while accepting the underlying premise that "mobility" requires each of us to drive a vehicle, generally all alone, for just about any trip.

We've Gotta Be Perfect, by Arian Horbovetz (Strong Towns)

... The truth is, there is almost no situation in American culture where 40,000 lives are lost each year without a serious debate about whether or not the context of these deaths should lead to drastic changes. Except when it comes to cars.

If electric scooter crashes caused by negligent piloting led to the death of the elderly pedestrian and the hospitalization of two young children in my community, the public would likely call for the end of these machines. But since negligent driving was the cause of both, we see these incidents as “tragic” but ultimately accept them as normalcy. In reality, if these pedestrians and children were hit by electric scooters, bikes, or skateboarders instead of cars and trucks, they would likely still all be alive and relatively healthy. The hypocrisy in the face of potential loss of life is staggering, and shows just how addicted to our cars, trucks and SUVs we truly are.

Some may believe that addiction is too harsh a term. But when we look at the terrors of addiction, we see the unquenchable need to repeatedly engage in an activity, even if the end result can easily be dangerous or deadly. We accept the risk based on an addiction to the high. We defend its potential to ruin our lives and the lives of others around us, especially our loved ones.

A friend and fellow bike commuter recently said something that stuck with me:

“We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law.”

Indeed, it’s a double standard with maddening predictability. In general, If it’s a car crash, we blame the negligent driver. If it’s a bike, scooter or skateboard, we often blame the machine itself, or the “culture” associated with said machine. For example, if there is a rash of car accidents on the news, one might say “people drive like idiots here!” But if there are a rash of electric scooter crashes, the reaction is typically an urgent call for these machines to be banned or limited ...

"The real story here is that scooters are actually exposing decades of terrible, dangerous, inflexible, car-centric road design."

This fellow gets it, and the same point applies to bicyclists on the sidewalk.

Why are scooters on sidewalks? Cuz 90% of our public right-of-way goes to car movement and storage. And why not on streets? Cuz we allow cars to travel at speeds that we know are deadly. The issue isn’t scooters. The issue is our obeisance to cars.

The reason why "something must be done, damn it" about lower-impact wheeled conveyances on sidewalks is that it's seldom truly safe for these devices to be on a SHARED street where they obviously should be -- because drivers of automobiles are perhaps the most coddled of privileged classes in America, allowed to dictate the terms of engagement for all of us.

Why is that?

BURYING THE REAL STORY ABOUT SCOOTER CAPS AND PERMITS (Have A Go)

Cities have started coming out with micromobility provider rankings, announcing which companies can operate on their streets and setting caps and handing out restrictive permits ...

I concede to having skimmed over most of the headlines cited by the author. Scooters aren't my personal choice of transit, but this is irrelevant. Here's an extended closing excerpt.

Cities have for decades handed over our public streets to big auto and big oil. They have used taxpayer money to pave over all city streets to help millions of automobiles, which kill tens of thousands of people every year, pollute the air, and heat up the planet, monopolize our roads.

Some cities even ignored their own plans for diversifying roadways with bicycle networks.

Then a new micromobility model appears: the dockless bike and scooter, placing few hundred or a few thousand scooters on city streets. Some riders end up riding on the sidewalks for legitimate safety concerns (since riding next to 4000lb cars piloted by distracted drivers isn’t ideal). Some scooters end up blocking the sidewalk because there are no real parking spaces for them.

And cities (and some annoyed residents) start complaining, citing scooters’ “alarming” safety concerns.

If city streets can handle millions of cars, yet can’t accommodate a few thousand scooters, the obvious real question that must be asked is “why not?”

The real story here isn’t scooter problems. Nor is it the “winners and losers” of scooter turf wars.

The real story here is that scooters are actually exposing decades of terrible, dangerous, inflexible, car-centric road design.

And the other real story here is the extreme mobility and safety double standard of cities.

Yes, shared scooters do cause injuries, as do private scooters, bicycles, skateboards, roller blades, etc.

However thousands of people DIE from car crashes, every month.

When thousands dying is considered normal while a few dozen getting bruised up is somehow considered an extreme safety hazard, so much so that cities MUST do something like restrict, cap, and permit, the real safety story should be the stunning levels of automobile deaths on our roads and the utter lack of perspective that city officials and traffic engineers seem to have regarding road safety.

For those readers who've always been puzzled by my hostility to entities like the Board of Works, it's precisely this. Bad streets are a social justice issue, but all too often the same people who are impeccably versed about more obvious social justice issues wax imperialistically when it comes to their cars.

All I'm asking is for a wee little bit of consistency.