Portland Electric Scooters

Portland Electric Scooters

Driving in downtown Portland is like driving in a parking lot at a big mall. It requires a completely different mind set than driving on the freeway. Driving on the freeway is a piece of cake. Objectively, it is more dangerous, the freeway is full of large, heavy machines hurtling along at breakneck speeds, just inches away from disaster, but we manage to negotiate it with few problems.

Driving in the city is like playing anti Whack-A-Mole, where the object of the game is to avoid all of the mole people who are constantly popping up in your path.

While a fender bender on the freeway can be an annoyance and a minor financial disaster, a fender bender with a pedestrian could very well ruin your life, not to mention ruining the pedestrian's life as well.

Portland has a program to provide electric scooters for people to use to get around downtown. They might be fun to ride, and they might actually be useful, but when you are driving they are a new form of mole people you have to learn to avoid. Riders stand up straight, so at first glance they might look like pedestrians, but they can also move as fast as bicycles, so you need to give them a wider berth.

I'm pretty sure the aim of the City Council is to discourage anyone who doesn't live downtown from coming there. It seems like half of the on-street parking has been preempted by construction, outdoor drinking areas in front of bars, loading zones, bus stops and places where the sidewalk bulges out into the street because reasons. And we won't talk about all the traffic lanes reserved for trolleys and buses. It just looks like Portland doesn't want any visitors.

Anyway, I noticed a couple of these electric scooters while we were downtown yesterday and I thought that they would be a good source for a battery for your home made electric bike. An electric bike seems like a much more useful device than one of these scooters (I almost said stupid scooters, but I managed to refrain myself). Someone who is trying to build an electric bike on the cheap might look around and spying one of these scooters say 'aha!, free battery'.  While there are some people who have the technical skills and the drive to build their own electric bike, there are a minority, and those who also have larceny in their heart are an even smaller percentage, so while we might get a few battery thefts, it might be a small enough number that is just gets written off as another 'cost of doing business'.