Sorry, I never normally post as am only a reader really - have been VERY SLOWLY building an electric scooter and the tech carries over a lot. Been stalled for a long time while building a vertical mill as sick of not being able to machine metal well.
Some will hate me for the following as they’ll assume the van was at fault, that the kid on the skateboard must have been innocent but 1) he wasn’t and 2) even if you think he was, if you ride in a busy city it really doesn’t matter because it DOES happen constantly and you will die horribly if you don’t assume it will happen.
Anyway, was walking along Victoria street in London this morning and saw some crap riding from an e-skater. He decided to pass a bike (push), to do this he had to swerve out and round from the extreme left of his lane to the right side and he did it without a backward glance. Impressive bit of direction change and skill but horrifying lack of awareness of other road users. A van that had been doing the same, i.e. was approaching the skater & cyclist and decided to pass by moving over in his lane, was forced to avoid the skater. The timing was ‘unlucky’ but not ‘unlikely’ at all, a slower moving scooter was on the van’s outside (two lanes in each direction) and got bumped by the van. The pair stopped and the biker was fine. The cyclist heard and stopped and went back to help check the biker. The skater didn’t see a thing and carried on towards parliament square happy as Larry.
I might not ride a skateboard, but I did commute in and out of central london on a sports bike for 5 years and did see dozens of crashes, most of which were the scooter’s fault thinking they only needed to look forward, thinking that if they were in a lane they ‘owned’ it, that nothing strange would ever happen.
And now commence hateful responses… as I’m sure you all think I’m a grumpy old man who is skateboarder bashing. I’m really not as it happens, I just hope that a 20 year old somewhere reads this and maybe it will stick and maybe they will look over their shoulder some time and avoid a broken arm / neck. I genuinely think people who engineer their own electric transport system, help fund people like vedder’s tinkering, who have the ingenuity to embark on such projects are the ones who MUST also survive long enough to breed like rabbits and push their superior genes through to the next generation, really I do. E-skaters rock, but one in london (at least and I suspect far more) should probably be made to get bike licenses or watch videos of people who were ‘in the right’ getting run over until they are appropriately scared of sudden direction changes on busy roads!
The skater in question did look very cool by the way, silently blasting along.
An opposite sort of person this morning in the office I work in cursed loudly as he thought no one could see him in the kitchenette. “F*ing technology!”, he cried. He likes to swear about his computer in the hope people think he has a bad company laptop rather than is just a bit of a moron and highly unproductive. Sad thing is, the ‘technology’ that was failing him so much that he swore at it wasn’t his laptop, not a poorly made vesc or li-ion battery, he wasn’t swearing at the microwave nor coffee machine even. The ‘technology’ was the fridge door and the very slight vacuum in there was apparently besting his pathetic skinny physique. He quietly gave up and skulked off to his desk thinking no one had seen (minus whatever crap he was going to eat, probably crisps going by the age and lack of upper body musculature).