Don’t Block The Street With An E-Scooter, Please

Electric scooters are a fairly recent addition to downtown. And they’re pretty useful, especially for people who really set on removing every possible opportunity for exercise from their everyday life. Why walk, when you could press ‘go’, right? And so, you’ll see people zipping across town, sunglasses gleaming and hair streaming in the breeze, finally free of the tedium of putting one meaty foot in front of the other.

However, like many blessings, the newfound convenience of e-scooters comes with a curse — and that’s where people choose to leave them. I’ve had to move several of them to get out of my front door in the morning, and they’re often to be found parked exactly in the middle of the pavement, blocking more old-school pedestrians from their lowly plodding.

This is so annoying that cities like Paris, Madrid and Melbourne have banned e-scooters completely, ordering companies to remove them from the streets. And that’s not to mention drunken e-scooter accidents and brake vandalism. Things move more slowly here in Iceland, but until the city hall folks notice something is up, there’s a Facebook group called Verst Lagða Rafskútan (Worst Parked Scooter) where 1.4k people regularly post photos of comedically badly parked scooters and vent about the dipshits who did it.

So we’ll see you in there. And to any of our valued readers who also happens to be an e-scooter parking terrorist: could you not?