BIRD PANDEMIC AND LIME DISEASE

BIRD PANDEMIC AND LIME DISEASE

I'm not sure if your area has been hit hard by the latest wave of Bird and Lime issues, but my area of Pico/Robertson has started to get as bad as Santa Monica and Venice in terms of this deadly outbreak.

What am I talking about? The latest in lazy ride sharing mobility getting around apps. The motorized scooter. There's a couple of them that pop up and you'll recognize em all by the annoying folks zooming past stop signs and just almost hitting folks walking down the street.

One issue I have with this is folks under 18... well, no. scratch that. ANYONE is legally required to wear a helmet by CA. Law, which they don't. You can get Bird to send you a helmet via mail, but that shit doesn't really seem okay. It's like asking UBER to send you a seat belt.

Now the biggest thing to know about these scooters is that it pretty much fills up an E.R. room with accidents on the daily. On the 4th of July, there was far less burn accidents and at least three times as more Bird Scooter accidents.

The problem comes from the fact that the learning curve on these scooters is pretty damn high. You have to know how to operate it well. You are jumping on something that can go 40mph easily. On top of that, the shocks on them aren't the best. With Los Angeles having some really messed up road conditions, you can easily eat shit just hitting some bumps in the road.

On top of that, the company has really fucked themselves in terms of their use in cities. The whole concept comes from a mentality that it's easier to ask for forgiveness and pay the small fine than it is to just go through the paper work and hassle of apply and asking for permission. But that seems to be the biggest thing that is fucking them over right now. Beverly Hills has opted for an outright ban of these scooters for six months. I constantly see them littering the ground a block away from the Beverly Hills city limits. I honestly want to light them on fire some times the way they're just thrown about.

In a 4-1 vote the Beverly Hills City Council agreed to a six month ban on all motorized scooters in the city prohibiting the mobility devices from being placed in any public right-of-way area or public property. So yeah, they kind of fucked themselves on this one. Basically Lime and Bird just got their just desserts in this whole thing. Why? Because they figured the whole time it would be better to ask for forgiveness instead of actual permission on it all. Police in the area will give anyone riding any of those in the city limits some shit.

Then in Santa Monica, the place that they just ran free, there was a bit of a protest by the two companies in that they shut down all of their birds and Limes for the area because they lost the bid for the city use.

Look, I like riding a bike. I like public transportation. I also like getting less cars on the road. Uber has not been successful with that because it was never going to be successful with that mission. The biggest problem is that these scooters just bring out the worst in people. Those that assume that the whole riding process is as easy as standing and just pulling the throttle. Then you have the morons who just don't know how to ride something electric through busy streets causing even more accidents because they just don't know how to cope with NOT being a motorist.

In the end you have to realize that you are a motorist and you can cause serious injury to yourself and to others on these. And that reality doesn't set in until you basically are sitting in the E.R. because your dumb ass decided that your scooter could take that pothole like a champ.