The latest menace terrorizing the streets of American cities is the electric scooter
Welcome to Plain English for Thursday, May 17, 2018. I’m Jeff and you are listening to the podcast that goes at just the right speed for English learners. On today’s episode, electric scooters have started appearing on the streets of American cities. You can rent them for a dollar and leave them wherever you like. But not everyone loves this new form of urban transportation. In the second half of the program, we’ll talk about how to use the English phrasal verb “roll out.”
Today is Episode 47, so that means you can find the transcript of the program online at PlainEnglish.com/47. Every week, JR and I highlight the words and phrases that we think are most difficult and we have them translated from English to Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and French. So, if you speak any of those languages, you can use the interactive transcripts to help build your vocabulary. Remember, you can read those transcripts at PlainEnglish.com/47
Newest menace in American cities is the electric scooter
American cities are being invaded by an army of electric scooters—and it’s causing quite a controversy.
If you’ve traveled to big cities, you’ve probably seen the city bike rentals. The concept was popularized in Paris and quickly spread to London, New York, Mexico City, Chicago, and many other cities around the world. But now companies like Lime, Bird, and Spin are taking the concept of city bike rentals to a new level. Instead of renting bikes from docks around the city, they’re renting electric scooters. And you can leave them wherever you want.
Just to be clear, I’m talking about the really thin scooters that you stand on and steer with handlebars—not the miniature motorcycles that we sometimes call scooters. These little electric scooters are lightweight, safe, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. When using one, you don’t have to get stuck in traffic and they look fun to ride. The idea is considered so promising that investors have given over $250 million to companies to roll out electric scooter programs in cities as diverse as San Francisco, Dallas, Nashville, Austin, Charlotte, and Santa Monica, California.
The problem electric scooters solve is that public transportation in many places takes you from your house to the center of a city, but sometimes leaves you with a long walk before you can get to your office or destination. City planners have often called this the “last-mile” problem with public transit: it can get most people most of the way there, but without a comprehensive system like they have in New York or London, it’s hard for public transit to take people right to their destination.
City bike rentals were supposed to address this last-mile problem, and for many people they do. But electric scooters are easier to ride, and you don’t have to break a sweat to use them. They’re also cheap. In most places, you pay just $1, plus 10 to 15 cents per minute. They go up to 15 miles per hour, or about 24 kilometers per hour. And then, you just leave it wherever you like. Overnight, the company pays people between $5 and $20 per scooter to collect them and charge them back up. Since the scooters can only be operated after scanning a code, they’re not in much danger of being stolen.
Sounds great, right? Well, not if you’re the mayor of a city and now you have hundreds of electric scooters lying around in the sidewalk, in front of doorways, on wheelchair ramps, in public parks—really anywhere. An attorney in San Francisco said it was “a free for all.” A city councilor there said of the startups, “These people are out of their minds.” Another city official in San Francisco said of the scooters, “They just appeared. I don’t know who comes up with these ideas or where these people come from.”
Ironically, the people who come up with these ideas are often in San Francisco itself, or at least in Silicon Valley, not too far away. And they are taking a page from the playbook of another Silicon Valley company, Uber, which started operating in cities without permission and often in direct violation of the law. The way Uber saw it, they should do what they like first, and then try to get the city laws changed to allow them later. That proved infuriating to many city governments, and especially taxi cartels, but ultimately proved successful.
Will the same happen with electric scooters? City governments are scrambling to adapt their local laws and regulations to get the scooters under control. One thing that particularly bothers them is that there are no docks, like there are for city bikes, so people can leave the scooters anywhere. They also say it’s dangerous to have people zooming around on sidewalks at 15 miles per hour and they are particularly worried about collisions with elderly people or the disabled. I read a review from one person who said that the scooters didn’t have brakes strong enough to stop them going down the steep San Francisco hills. That could be a problem.
I’d like to say hi to Masaharu from Japan. He’s studying English and said that his teacher always says they should try to express themselves using plain English, instead of trying to use complicated words when simple, clear and direct ones will do. I totally agree. I think the point of speaking and writing is to be understood and to let your ideas shine; if you try to complicate things too much, it can distract from your ideas. That is part of the reason why I named this program Plain English. Masaharu—thanks for being in the audience and for sending me that note.
If you would like to get in touch with the program, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter by searching for the user name PlainEnglishPod. You can also send me a note directly to jeff [at] plainenglish.com.
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