The secret life of the outlaws of teen scooters

Angelica looked nervously at the policeman questioning the boy. It was a wet Wednesday in Los Angeles, and even though she did not know the boy, she heard that he was also 17 and had been arrested for driving an electric scooter without a helmet and minor – exactly what she had just done, on the way back a pair of Warby Parker glasses to Santa Monica. That earned him a $ 500 bill and a date of hearing that his parents had to attend. Angelica was next online.

"I've been working too hard this summer to pay $ 500 for that stupid shit," she remembers, thinking of an interview with The edge. Fortunately, she had a plan. In turn, she handed the officer a one-year ID card in Spain with her birthday written day-month-year. The trick worked, the officer was convinced that she was 18 and only wrote her a ticket to ride without a helmet.

Bird's headquarters is in Santa Monica, but he rents electric scooters in 41 cities in the United States, as well as in Paris and Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, other companies have placed tens of thousands of scooters in cities like Washington, DC, Portland and Los Angeles. Scooters began appearing in cities a year ago, with exponential growth thanks to the millions of dollars that investors like Uber and Google have set up in companies such as Lime, Scoot, Jump and Skip. Vehicles, which look like Razor scooters, cost $ 1 to unlock, 15 cents per minute of driving and can reach 15 mph.

Scooters have become very popular among adult riders – Lime claims to have accumulated 6 million trips between June 2017 and July 2018. Last June, Lime and Bird received respective assessments of $ 1 billion and $ 2 billion. protests against rap songs.

Although scooters are supposed to be used only by adults over 18 with a valid driver's license, they have become incredibly popular with teenagers, with young people like Angelica taking them to work, to the movies , shopping. and pretty much everywhere teens go these days. The edge interviewed ten high school students, seven of whom had traveled to minors, to better understand the growing trend. Most said they ignore the rules of using scooters by necessity or going out with friends.

Photo of Mario Tama / Getty Images

Angelica, for example, said she did not want to pay for car insurance or sit in the notorious LA traffic by going to the waitress at a seafood restaurant on Santa Monica Pier. If she had a bike, she was too scared to get stolen. Instead, she preferred to commute on a scooter every day to work this summer, and when Bird turned off her service at night, she returned home on a Lime scooter. She also traveled to the movies or with friends to get tacos, accumulating 250 races on Bird and 150 on Lime this summer alone.

"We're out of our cars, they're a lot cheaper than Ubers, and you're pretty cool," said Angelica, who only wanted to use her first name.

Shooting underage children is not just about LA. Teens from San Francisco to Washington, DC, including 17-year-old Ashton, illegally declared that he would sometimes return home after school, but mostly with friends. "It's a quick way to navigate the city," he said. "You can say that people are watching you, but you feel different."

Max Gorman, 17, also rides in Washington. The last time he made a few blocks up the bank, but on another occasion he traveled four miles across the city to see a friend. He boasts of pushing the scooters beyond their planned speed limits to descend hills, which Lime warns. "You can get up to 25," said Gorman. "You get a major adrenaline rush. Whether you can go as fast as a car on the road is an exhilarating sensation, "Ashton said.

Of course, this joie de vivre can turn around or lead to questionable decisions. "I saw a child crossing an intersection with cars about to leave," Ashton said. "I thought," It's so stupid. "

All adolescents interviewed by The edge said that they refused to wear a helmet, although companies and cities where they operate usually need a helmet. (In California, Governor Jerry Brown's office bill may lift the helmet requirement for runners 18 years and older.) Most services provide helmets to runners who request them.

Angelica said that she was helmet-free on the way to the appointment because she did not want to ruin herself – but she also said that wearing a helmet compromised her "aesthetic". "I only break a law and it's the law on the helmet," she said. (In reality, Angelica also violates the law on the condition of age).

Photo of Mario Tama / Getty Images

Other runners surveyed said they had seen minor friends climb two at a time or jump and rotate the scooters in the air. Some even crashed, like 15-year-old Max Wix, who fell from a Skip scooter in Washington DC leaning on a hill. Wix lost three hooks from his device and chipped a tooth. "I was in shock and surprise and pain," said Wix, whose 13-year-old sister, Ruthie, introduced him to the scooters. "I went home after that."

"We were laughing until we realized he was hurt," said Ashton, who rode alongside Wix. "He was inches away from losing his teeth."

Wix avoided a trip to the emergency room, only going to the orthodontist – although the Washington Post Recently, hospitals across the country have seen a sharp increase in scooter injuries. The Nethercutt Emergency Center at the University of California at Los Angeles treated 18 serious injuries in the last two weeks of July. Last week in Dallas, a man died after losing a lime in what would be the first death related to a scooter.

To be fair, the condition of age is easy to ignore. To drive, you must first enter a phone number and a payment method in the application of each service before searching for a scooter on a map. Scooters unlock after scanning a QR code, usually found on the handlebars. On Lime, there is no age verification from the moment a user certifies that he has signed a contract with a user – just a reminder 18 years and older and a message in the app.

"By taking the scooter, you recognize that you are over 18," said Emma Green, Lime spokeswoman. "We hope to test different things to ensure safety."

Lime promised to check age by scanning the bar codes of motorcycle drivers' licenses in its successful bid to operate in Santa Monica, a centerpiece of the city's administrative regulations for scooter operators. If a license indicates that the user is a minor, the application prevents them from rolling.

But Lime does not analyze licenses elsewhere. At the end of August, when the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency granted scooters licenses, lime was not licensed. The San Mateo-based company is the only one that has not promised the digitization of licenses – a decision in June citing concerns about "data privacy and security issues" and discouraging the "immigrant community of constituency". the concerns of the company regarding the data in an email to The edge.

Photo of Mario Tama / Getty Images

Lime also does not check age in DC beyond the contract of use, and his warnings did not stop Gorman. "They did not really have the means to prove that I was under 18 years old. I was just like, "I will be responsible," he said. "I will not let a little sign stop me."

"It's like a Google account," said Wix. "All you have to say is" I am that age, "and they say," Well, we believe you. "They really made you check, they would lose business."

Skip, meanwhile, was licensed in San Francisco, partly on the promise to check the riders' age. Darren Weingard, Skip's general advisor, said the company is already scanning licenses across California, although it does not operate DC, one of its other markets. Weingard cautioned the minor passengers to interpret the lack of application as an encouragement. "We are not targeting our service to children," said Weingard. "There are many ways to consider age compliance and all are under study."

In an email, Weingard later stated that licensing analysis could pose problems for cities in terms of data and "discrimination against those without a government ID."

Bird scans the licenses nationwide, but Angelica said that she was using a fake ID made in China that shows her, at age 21, originally from Arkansas (different of the one she had given the policeman) to open access to Bird. She also has friends who scanned siblings and parents' licenses – which Bird said he wanted to suppress in his proposal to operate in Santa Monica. As scooters proliferate, licensing analysis is unlikely to pick up, said Catherine Lerer, Santa Monica's personal injury lawyer. "If you need a license, you're limiting your motorcycle population," she said.

Angelica said that other services adding license analysis would probably not change much. "I think everyone manipulates the system so much with Bird that it's not going to make any difference," she said.

As scooter sharing moves into more cities and becomes an increasingly regulated system, more and more questions can arise about how teenagers interact with vehicles. But for now, the kids continue to ride, including Angelica and Max Wix, who have had problems with scooters.

Wix said that he had started driving again a week after his accident. Although he still does not wear a helmet, he goes slower and keeps his weight on his back foot. Angelica said nearly five of her friends had received $ 350 to $ 500 later in the summer for the miners, but she also had friends who left with warnings to ride without a helmet.

"Haha, we did not get a ticket," is the text I received from my cat in a group, "said Angelica, who returned a major's emoji in response.

Angelica's ticket then came in the mail for $ 197, which she sent and paid to the county. She said she started driving again two weeks later, but the ticket changed one thing. "As someone who now has constant paranoia about birds, I now take a helmet with me," Angelica said. "I put it in my bag."