I attempted to ride one of the Neuron scooters today, from a restaurant back home. It didn’t go well.

The most direct route was partly along Barnet Highway. There is a bike lane in this spot, but it’s of the “bike gutter of death” category where just a painted line is supposed to magically repel the wayward SUV whose driver is busy texting. There’s no way I’m going to take a chance on that. There’s a nicer “multi-use pathway” a few blocks down, but not in this spot. The only slightly safe option is to use the sidewalk to get to the multi-use pathway. If you try to use a Neuron scooter on a sidewalk (ignoring the bold text on the scooter admonishing you against such), the scooter will complain loudly about “sidewalk detected” or something similar and just turn off its motor.

So I thought: OK, the mall parking lot is just ahead, and the bike gutter of death transitions to a wide, separated multi-use pathway somewhere along it, so I’ll just walk the scooter to the mall parking lot (while paying for the privilege) and then ride it to the MUP. Nope: a few metres into the mall parking lot, the scooter again complained loudly — this time, that it had left its service area — and again refused to activate its motor. At this point, I was overly frustrated, so I moved the scooter the two metres back to its service area, ended the ride, deleted the app, and walked home.

I’m still not 100% certain if it is OK to just park the scooter in any random spot and walk away. None of the messaging I’ve seen from Neuron or from the city explicitly said whether it was OK to do so. By now, I’ve seen them all over the place, so I assume it is OK.

This was actually my second ride. The first, a few weeks ago, reached its destination without shutting down, but I had to ride in traffic and felt exposed and unsafe the entire time. Plus, the scooter’s limited speed, even on high-speed mode, created an annoyance for everyone behind me.

I’m very interested in sustainable transportation. I sold my car a few years before the pandemic and have lived mostly car-free since then, with Modo for the handful of times per month I need a car. I’m not sure who the scooters are for, but I don’t think they’re for me. In my opinion, the restrictions placed upon the scooters are so heavy-handed that they are neither safe nor convenient unless a trip is contained entirely within the multi-use pathways. It’s good to see the city investing in the MUPs and protected bike lanes, but we need more of those and less restrictions before the shared scooters, if they continue to exist, become more than just a novelty.