The New Yorker:

Let’s get one thing out of the way: battery-powered scooters, which, in recent months, have littered the sidewalks of American cities, are fantastically ugly. Though the tires are a little thicker, and there’s wiring and, usually, a digital speedometer, they’re modelled after the flimsy kick scooters often ridden by children. The companies that offer them have made few efforts to disguise this, and what efforts they have made are occasionally bizarre. Lime, which also offers a dockless bike-share service, paints its scooters in an eye-repelling lacquer of green and white. Skip slathers them in bright yellow and blue. Bird’s scooter force is the least offensive-looking: it employs a skinny black pole, emblazoned with a white stripe.

Less bulky than Segways, the scooters entered the world to serve a function similar to that of Google Glass: a way of organizing one’s experience that nobody really asked for. Unlike that technology, however, the scooters appear to be popular among users, powering hundreds of thousands of rides in a select number of cities over a few months of use. A few writers have recently penned odes to the scooter: put off by their initial dorkiness, they grew to adore them over days of continuous use. They are popular among investors, too: Bird is now valued at two billion dollars; Lime and Skip are valued at a billion dollars and a hundred million dollars, respectively.

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