Seeing how common electric scooters are in Europe makes me sad (for my own country)..

While some of you may not be fans of scooters

I was in Hamburg, Germany a few days ago (also in some smaller neighboring towns) and not only was getting around on local transportation (bus, subway) super simple, there were also tons of "micro mobility" options like local bike rental systems, and electric scooters

Not just scooters from 1 company either. There's Lime, dott, Bolt etc, all competing against each other, spread evenly throughout both downtown and the surrounding suburbs. Made the "last mile" commuting super convenient (sometimes i needed to catch a train where i would've missed if i had waited for the bus)

I'm from Utah and i remember when these scooters first came out years ago, there were actually more places that allowed them, in suburbs etc. And then a lot of American cities started banning scooters in tons of areas, particularly suburbs.

Reasons stated for bans were: scooters littered everywhere, danger to cars (?) and scooter riders themselves.

Now i can mainly only find scooters in the downtown SLC area and everywhere else is a red zone 😢 Sometimes i just went to drop by a local grocery store with a backpack to pick up something small. I don't need to drive an entire car 10min to a grocery store when I can ride a scooter. Yeah I can buy a bike and ride it there, but often there aren't any bike racks to lock it up etc.

I honestly think the "people" putting out hit pieces against electric scooters are lobbyists from Big Auto. Is seeing scooters parked on sidewalks really that big of an eyesore for most people? Yeah that one scooter rider every couple months that gets killed by a car makes headline news. But why do the thousands of people who die every month driving giant cars not make headlines?

It's just really sad to see Europe clearly makes electric scooters an integral part of their lifestyle while America moves the opposite way