In my various earlier postings about e-scooters, I mentioned the fundamental problem of bikes for getting around on. Because bikes are so big and clumsy to take with you everywhere, bikers must constantly leave their bikes unattended, which means they regularly get damaged and/or stolen.
This afternoon, while out-and-about out in south-east London, I encountered and photoed a very partial answer to the bike protection problem:
I’m guessing that how this works is that you have a special key that lets you into this contraption, to insert or remove your bike.
Setting aside the sheer bother and expense of this thing, the bigger problem is that your bike problem is not typically confined to one spot. The problem follows you. Wherever you go, you may want to get shot of your bike for a while, and bam, sooner or later it gets wrecked or nicked. At least with hired bikes, there is a choice of places to abandon the bike. With this thing, you need to hire a whole new metal tend for each spot you might want to stop at. No. Comments telling me otherwise would be most welcome, but as of now, I just don’t think this works.
If, despite my grumbles, you want to investigate further, I took (see the photo on the right of the above three) a photo-note of the website to go to.
All the buildings around the area you were photographing belong to the same landlord. Even though the tenancy agreements forbade this, people with bicycles had a tendency to do things like leave their bikes in stairwells. This pissed off the other tenants. I think this was introduced as a partial solution.
It probably works okay if you are (say) cycling to work and there is bicycle parking at your workplace.
Michael:
Thanks. That makes sense.
Clearly bikes won’t vanish. For those doing exactly as you say, simply going from home to the same workplace as always, with good bike storage. But the general advantages of e-scooters strike me as likely to prevail.
Anyone not making the same predictable journey every time (and that’s a lot in the days of the gig economy), or wanting to use their machine for shopping (also unpredictable destinations), or for socialising (ditto), are going to be pushed towards e-scooters.
Maybe the big problem will be that, as another friend put it to me yesterday, “people on e-scooters look like wankers”. But I think that will fade, in response to the pressures I describe, and then the people who keep on saying that will themselves be on the receiving end of such scorn. I think I recall a time when biking was a good idea (what with there then being no electric power for such vehicles, only muscle power, but uncool. Then black teenagers started biking, and the temperature of biking then dropped.
Anyway, I look forward very much to seeing if I am right about this e-scooter thing.