04-20-2023, 08:20 PM
Some scooters happened to be parked right outside of an appointment I left today, and since I got followed by a shouting tweaker who was punching the walls behind me on my walk to the appointment, I thought I would try it out to get home. Despite having my own scooter and ebike, it would be nice to have quality rentals too so I don't have to worry about theft or carrying a scooter around.
The good: Renting a scooter was dead simple. Scan the QR code and you are off.
Some minor annoyances: First, they seem limited to 20km/h, while I believe the limit for privately owned scooters is 32km/h (this might have already been mentioned here before), and you can feel it braking hard while going downhill. It also has a loud voice shouting at you when you unlock the scooter, when you change speed settings, and if it detects you on a sidewalk, which I'm not a fan of. It also struggled to get up the Cedar St hill, going ~8km/h by the time I made it to the top (btw, the Cedar St bike lanes are unprotected south of King, annoying...) - probably not unusual for a scooter though.
My major annoyance was when it came to parking. I noticed parking at the old Charles St terminal before my trip, so I went there to park. When I got there a bunch of scooters were lined up at the bike racks (i.e. blocking some of the bike racks from being used), so I went there and pressed end trip. The app asked me to point my camera around so it could determine where I was, and it said I was not in a valid parking area each time. Eventually I pulled the map back up, and noticed that the parking area was actually a bit away from where they had set the scooters, and was also 80% on the road and ION tracks. I headed over to the small sliver of sidewalk that was inside of the parking area, ended my trip, and then pushed it back over to where the rest were parked. As I was walking it back, the scooter loudly shouted at me to not do anything illegal! xD.
Ultimately 1/3 of my trip time was spent trying to park it, and the rental was not worth the $5 I spent.
You can see in this photo the poorly placed parking zone relative to where the scooters are. The no riding zone is the ION tracks.
![[Image: zOzTnGs.png]](https://i.imgur.com/zOzTnGs.png)
The good: Renting a scooter was dead simple. Scan the QR code and you are off.
Some minor annoyances: First, they seem limited to 20km/h, while I believe the limit for privately owned scooters is 32km/h (this might have already been mentioned here before), and you can feel it braking hard while going downhill. It also has a loud voice shouting at you when you unlock the scooter, when you change speed settings, and if it detects you on a sidewalk, which I'm not a fan of. It also struggled to get up the Cedar St hill, going ~8km/h by the time I made it to the top (btw, the Cedar St bike lanes are unprotected south of King, annoying...) - probably not unusual for a scooter though.
My major annoyance was when it came to parking. I noticed parking at the old Charles St terminal before my trip, so I went there to park. When I got there a bunch of scooters were lined up at the bike racks (i.e. blocking some of the bike racks from being used), so I went there and pressed end trip. The app asked me to point my camera around so it could determine where I was, and it said I was not in a valid parking area each time. Eventually I pulled the map back up, and noticed that the parking area was actually a bit away from where they had set the scooters, and was also 80% on the road and ION tracks. I headed over to the small sliver of sidewalk that was inside of the parking area, ended my trip, and then pushed it back over to where the rest were parked. As I was walking it back, the scooter loudly shouted at me to not do anything illegal! xD.
Ultimately 1/3 of my trip time was spent trying to park it, and the rental was not worth the $5 I spent.
You can see in this photo the poorly placed parking zone relative to where the scooters are. The no riding zone is the ION tracks.