The other night on my pilgrimage from Skoglund back to New Hall, I made the rookie mistake of putting my AirPods on noise cancellation mode, deafly stumbling along, unaware of the new lurking menace that haunts the four miles of streets and 11 miles of sidewalks at St. Olaf. Sure enough, as I stepped onto St. Olaf Ave., a black blur whirred toward me out of the dark intersection, nearly running over all of my toes before vanishing again into the murk. The mystery predator in question? Scooters.
Every time I walk outside past sunset, I feel as if I’ve been unwillingly cast as a baby gazelle in some “Blue Planet” horror story who’s about to get mauled in 4K Ultra HD by some absolute unit of a lion while David Attenborough calmly narrates. Except, in my case, it’s not a lion, but rather an eight foot tall linebacker sailing across campus at “Top Gun” speeds on a dead silent headlight-less electric scooter.
People step on these scooters and suddenly all basic vehicle etiquette evaporates from their minds. “On your left” and “excuse me” become foreign, unthinkable concepts, the crosswalks and lane lines blur into meaningless scribbles, and the errant pedestrian becomes a mere speed bump as they seek their ultimate goal of going from point A to point B as blisteringly fast as possible. They ride these things like they are in creative mode.
Fascinatingly, scooters seem to attract the bizarre combo of varsity student athletes and a number of my old philosophy professors, who bear no similarities beyond their newfound need to decimate walkers with their technological terrors. One would imagine a varsity athlete wouldn’t particularly struggle with the whopping 500 steps from Tomson to Buntrock. As for the philosophy professors, I can only imagine their obsession is some sick manifestation of the trolley problem, where the measly pedestrians are fodder for some scooter-born thought experiment. Who knows?
Recently, the scooterers have begun hunting in packs, riding in larger groups like a Temu version of the Hells Angels, causing mild inconvenience and slight annoyance wherever they ride. They ride three or four wide, taking up entire sidewalks, confining silly walkers to the grass in order to avoid certain doom.
If scooters are in fact here to stay, there need to be some major design overhauls, but luckily I’ve got that figured out. I think that they should maintain their two wheeled design, but instead, the user should sit down for a more comfortable ride. And rather than using batteries and motors, they should feature human-powered pedals, gears, and big wheels with spokes to be more efficient. Finally, the new-and-improved scooters could be mounted on an aluminum frame for more stability and better shock absorption. They could look something like, oh I don’t know, a bike.
