In life, there is no reset button. I had to remember this driving an electric scooter in downtown Los Angeles, en route to E3 2019, all week. It looked exactly like a video game: I was in a sprawling, open-world city, making my way through the notoriously crowded traffic in Los Angeles and listening to snippets of dialogue from eclectic non-playable characters lining the sidewalks. her words expressed a familiar Doppler effect as she spun around rapidly. I thought to myself, "This is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas remastered for 2019." I was able to easily order my "vehicle" from the popular Bird and Lime electric scooter brands, finding them every morning on the sidewalk near my hotel. It was enough to scan a QR code through their respective apps (no GTA involved).
The good: saving time, money and the environment.
Electric scooters are a "last-mile solution" to public transportation that can't bring you to the present, according to Jeff Russakow, CEO of Boosted. His company sells this idea through electric skateboards and now electric scooters. Scooters, whether rented or rented, are exciting, profitable, and most of all, they save time. Instead of taking a 20-minute commute to E3, he was consistently able to "quickly get to the Los Angeles Convention Center" in just five minutes. This meant going on more dates and playing more (real) video games. Bonus: Bird and Lime sent a push notification when I hit a scooter, thanking me for helping save the environment. It's hard to measure how much carbon you actually prevent from being released into the atmosphere, even if we think that driving a car or taking an Uber is considerably worse for the planet.
The bad: a & # 39; video game & # 39; first generation
E3 2019 has made a believer in an electric scooter, even though that sounds a lot like a first-gen video game. It comes with bumps that are hard to ignore on the road. Paid electric scooters are easy to rent thanks to a dock-less system that allows you to pick them up on demand and leave them where you want. But he has strewn the sidewalks of Los Angeles (and sometimes the streets of Los Angeles when they fall under the effect of dominoes). Drivers aren't sure how to deal with scooters and many beginning cyclists are attracted by the €1 exit fee and €0.15 per kilometer fee. No one I saw on a scooter during E3 2019 was wearing a helmet, even though the apps repeatedly recommend it. Instead, people loved wearing AirPods in both ears (which is illegal even on a bike). All electric scooters do not follow the same path. Recommended bikes are beaten over time and to a top speed of 15 mph (24 km/h). Like the collapsible Boosted Rev., they don't have the durability or punch that sometimes felt like a flop. Electric scooters have become controversial in Los Angeles for these reasons. There are solutions to the many problems of the last mile: map favorite parking areas where pedestrians don't bump into scooters, slow areas where scooters slow to 2km/h, and parking areas where you can't block the scooter. . The Los Angeles Convention Center, home of E3, is one of those no-parking zones. But I found a small problem very similar to the video game: lag. Since my phone's GPS was behind it, I was able to park my first scooter in a geographically prohibited parking area, without my knowledge, and other people too. Worse yet, when I tried to park the scooter properly on the street, I couldn't lock it until the GPS cooperated and I realized I was out of the no-go zone. . So I just had to... spend a few minutes. Great.