Opinion: LA should ban e-scooters to protect pedestrians

In the city of Los Angeles, e-scooters should not be allowed.

In the NPR article “As E-Scooters Roll into American Cities, So Do Safety Concerns,” a woman says that one of her friends almost got ran over because the break light on her scooter didn’t work. There currently is no way to monitor the condition of each scooter, so there is no way to tell if each scooter is safe or even able to operate correctly enough for people to be safe on it.

According to the LA Times article “Bird scooters — so much fun, so damn dangerous,” people have been in accidents by scooter users not paying attention and hurting them while they are just walking on the sidewalk. The e-scooter sharing program relies too much on trust that their riders will obey the rules and pay attention to others, but most people are being careless by not wearing helmets or by not listening to their surroundings.

A CNN article “That electric scooter might be fun. It also might be deadly” writes that there have been people that have lost consciousness while falling off the e-scooter. Riders are not followings the terms and agreements that they have agreed to by downloading the app and are endangering themselves and others.

The scooter program is a good idea, but people are being too careless with them since there is not any supervision, so the best choice is to shut down the program to protect pedestrians on the streets and the scooter riders.