‘Scooters behaving badly’ all over San Francisco

It’s been a tough week for electric scooters in San Francisco, as locals liken the two-wheeled contraptions to the vehicular equivalent of an invasive species.

The problem is not necessarily the scooters themselves—which have evidently become popular with riders—but the fact that people keep leaving their rented decks lying pell-mell wherever they like when they’re finished with them. The city impounded 66 of the penny-farthing nuisances on Friday for obstructing sidewalks.

In fact, stray scooters congregating on sidewalks in their off hours have become such a common sight in San Francisco in the last two weeks that pedestrian lobbying group Walk SF created a Facebook album inviting users to contribute photos of obstructive scooters in the wild titled “Scooters Behaving Badly.”

(Which, given the news from Washington DC lately, may have been an accidentally prescient turn of phrase.)

Judging from the response it seems it’s not hard to spot the mobile hazards where they don’t belong. It also appears that the most likely place to find discarded scoots other than sidewalks is in the bay.

• Everything About Electric Scooter Takeover of SF [Curbed Sf]
• City Impounds Scooters [SF Chronicle]
• Scooters Behaving Badly [Facebook]