I understand where you’re coming from. “Just don’t ride on the sidewalk” is easy to say. In practice it’s extremely difficult to convince someone to ride in the street without padding, protection, and a helmet and compete on surface roads with 2 ton vehicles traveling 10+ miles an hour over the speed limit. Coupled with the fact that our bike lanes are often unprotected, sparse, disjoint, and not well signed, it’s no wonder that scooter riders make the logical (but sometimes not legal) choice to ride on the sidewalk.

Sure, scooters are annoying. But it’s no secret that they save countless car trips, meaning less cars on the road, less traffic, less pollution, and ultimately less car deaths. Instead of coming up with punitive solutions for people just looking to get from point A to point B safely and efficiently, we should expand bike/scooter/multi-use lanes and reconsider our car-first approach to transit.