E-scooters between shitty there-ness, technical affordance, social acceleration
a final set of hinges bringing us to where we can reflect on an elusive mature politics
In this post – which I’m determined will be the penultimate in this series – I want to focus on the hinge between the affordance of the e-scooters, especially some particulars that arise from the particularities of its vehicular design, and social acceleration.
This will enable the final post to look squarely at path dependence and momentum (the way we become committed to a vehicle that’s not committed to our wellbeing), an the elusiveness of a mature politics in all this, which is the broader point I want to dwell on, as a collective action problem. In other words, given that e-scooters did arise in a very precise bouquet of conjunctural contingencies, what might that mean – for us, from here?
In this post, this is about thinking of e-scooters as a social fact, powered by cultural uses of a socio-technical ‘deployment’ (full of details about technology and materials and design, that matter) and that is always-also political and value laden. Here, e-scooters aren’t just a jama, they are a stubborn something that pushes back against better means and modes; they resist solving when we try.
Indicatively, when you try to move an e-scooter, it gets alarmed, and threatens you with the police.
Emergence commits, this is kind of the systems theoretical point to get to with this post. The emergence of e-scooters kinda commits us to e-scooters, or inflicts them on us, in the same way that the emergence of the internal combustion engine – via the paradigm-setting model of the Model T – committed the world to the system of automobility from the 1920s, or the way that the success of VHS over Beta committed those (who could afford video players) to larger cassettes and slightly inferior quality, until DVD came along, until streaming came along. As points of emergence that then ‘win’ and are pervasively deployed, formats create standards, so they’re commitments that constrain: they shape what’s possible, canalise possibilities into narrower paths, and cut off other alternatives.
For every scooter ride, there’s a walk not taken, maybe a voided pathway.
Having e-scooters also prevents us from not having them. This is an interesting counterthought.
Let’s open toward this by thinking about the e-scooter as an affordance.
The e-scooter as affordance: their supposed ‘value add’ as a design unlike other existing vehicle designs, and some collective issues arising from committing to the inherent constraints of this design choice, at scale, as system we live with
Individuals might be getting taken for a ride by the platforms. This was 1:1 true with O-Bike. Individuals might also be able to take the platforms for a ride; this appears to be happening in NYC right now.
And I’ve argued that, in sheer mass-volume terms, e-scooters are a nullity as a transport system; they move almost nothing, nearly no one.
Consider gridlock at urban scale, because this is the problem of problems in a distrubutional system governed by the imperative of circulation.
Consider what a train system moves to alleviate gridlock, the heft it moves.
Staying with heftiness, consider what containerised shipping shifts around the whole world.
E-scooters don’t deal in heft. As ‘mass’ transit, they’re piddly widdlies you blast around on. They’re the tiny bicycles in Nathan Barley (I will return to this!)
However, let’s follow Husserl’s injunction, and go to the things themselves for a sec. If one considers the base, banal urban phenomenology of e-scooter platforms in many cities right now, let’s notice: they’re there. Just as, for Kraftwerk, radioactivity was ‘in the air, for you and me’, e-scooters are there – for all of us. They are ‘in our vision’, as Gary Numan might sing.
If you let the platforms ride you for your data while charging you money, you do get a ride in return for their being there: you get somewhere, you get something. Paraphrasing our ex PM: if you have a go, you get a go.
So in one sense (and stick with me for a second), e-scooters are a circuit because they circulate; e-scooters are only possible because many e-scooters are (here and) there. People then ride them, on this basis, in the same way that Edmund Hillary justified climbing Everest – because it was there.
It’s this kind of ‘because you’re basic’ shitty Dasein of the e-scooter1 I notice of a Friday evening when two young men dink past me at speed the wrong way down a footpath. It’s the deep dumb in the stupid of it all, and (which I’ll turn to shortly) the contrast between the marvel of what technology affords, and the incredibly pointless things we often do with such marvels.
As a platform deployed here, there, and everywhere around town, I argued that e-scooter has a jama-scale Da-sein, more strewn than thrown about town, more clustering nullity than a Being-toward-death, but very much there. Say what you will; they’re around2.
In urban space, then is what co-characterises e-scooters and dockless schemes that were there before it: the stubborn, manic foisting of supply on urban space, in the absence of anything beyond niche demand.
Want e-scooters? Too bad, you got them!
As I argued, this contributes to their futility. They are so very there, and typically very under-utilised, relative to the space they take up and the nuisance their riding-riders generate as ‘joy exhaust’. Remember: most people don’t ride e-scooters; many ordinary bodies cannot ride e-scooters. In that sense, they’re antisocial.
Yet in another sense they’re hypersocial, for the same reasons, seen in a different way: – we are coaxed, nudged or collided into intercourse with them, whenever we’re out in public. E-scooters are foisted upon us; we have to step around them, we have to ‘negotiate’ with them. Is this intercourse inflicted, or enthusiastically given? Just depends if you’re a Swisher or a Musk, a child or older person for whom such ‘choices’ are moot, or an accident and emergency doctor dealing with the new patterns of injury they have, relative to other modes.
This redounds to their broader ‘tamagotchi’ owners: paramedics have care-ful and attentive intercourse with e-scooters and their riders, whether they like it or not, because of the ‘choice’ to have e-scooters. This is a choice we’ve let the platforms have for us, on our behalf, without a discussion (a choice we’ve been had by the platforms?).
At the same time, who can blame the Swisher/Blaster/Blart niche cohort of Dinkers3 who sees the allure in riding them? After all, given that they are there and that you can ride them, riders are only expressing a culturally sanctioned, individually rational, psycho-logical response to what is on offer. They are freely there; we can hire them. We can buy vapes and ride around on e-scooters. I dink you, you dink me, let’s get dunk. Let’s do it, let’s be Dinkers. Because we can4.
This means e-scooters are an affordance that resonates where the preference set of willing-able bodies who have this style of intentionality meshes with what is being offered by the platforms – and not denied by the regulators. There’s a big emmeshment here between groups, all of whom are co-enabling one another and operating at our collective expense.
In the clutch of this set of conditions, we’ve learned over the past 5-8 years that they best serve the kinds of young men who want to dink and blast around on them. Arguably – this is the politics of it – this cohort (young men) is being served at our expense, just as the platforms (young men) are – arguably – operating at our expense. Tech bros in California and local bros dinking in Melbourne are here ‘holding hands’ and benefiting together.
To date, the fact that the platforms and many riders are operating at social-public expense here has been mostly rendered moot: first by the hype for disruption, then by social license, then by law, regulation, habit, and custom – see back to my Uber post for how this played out.
But eventually, in spite and because of all this, ‘we’ expect them to be there, and their cohort of riders are unhappy and aggrieved when they are not5.
So by 2024, e-scooters have expressed-and-embodied a deployed understanding of ‘there it is’ and ‘well, what’s stopping you?’. E-scooters have been on offer; they have been a ‘valid preference’, an available, possible, accessible, legal, ready-to-hand affordance that appears-to-be the most rational choice (for Swishers and Dinkers), in that moment.
We can broaden this to its 3S points, because this base and brutal logic is behind a lot of collective scourges (and collective action problems) we face:
e-scooters are available (so I ride them),
my phone does make video calls (so I make them on public transport),
I can fly to Kyoto when I please, (so I go to Japan on holiday).
I have a camera, so I take photos;
I have a phone that takes videos, so I take videos and make video calls.
All the time.
In other words, and to distill before moving on, many of the collective action problems we have emerge for the simplest of reasons: this is what’s on offer, so people do it.
Here’s the blaster; blast away.
Honestly, if the platforms offered leaf blowers for hire in the city, some people would pay to blow them. They would.
e-scooter between novel affordance and particular design choice: convergence and convenience trap.
E scooters became a possible blaster we can blast away on, in part, because of their novel affordance. E-scooters were represented as newly offering a special crisp ‘something that wasn’t quite technically possible until recently’ shown in the ‘fresh coming together’ of e-motors, batteries, and a light enough aluminium chassis to carry it all – and available-keen riders (Swishers and Dinkers). This means we need to think about the perceived value in the novelty of the affordance, the idea that e-scooters were a new kind of transport ‘solution’ that could be brought to bear on specific issues of micromobility (the so-called ‘final mile problem’).
As a vehicular design type, e-scooters are about convergence – analogous to the smartphone. Convergence devices consist in a confluence of stacked technologies in a durable ‘frame’. Fusing Foucault and Ben Bratton on this a bit, power/knowledge effects are emergent properties of assemblages of different things, brought together ‘as one’ in one sturdy frame – that can be manufactured at industrial scale and deployed (and then graveyarded in ways that produce aesthetic pathos for Guardian readers).
Roughly speaking, as a ‘novel’ affordance, e-scooters are a convergence of the following:
the incredible torque and durability of electric motors (technically possible since roughly 1820).
the ubiquity of ‘enough’ batteries: small enough, light enough, holding charge enough, commercially available enough, to give range enough to prevent a deployed fleet of e-scooters from being what they would have twenty years ago – not good enough (unwieldy, too heavy, no range, too expensive &c). Contemporary batteries: you are enough (a 2010s fact)
the confluence of cellular mobile and wireless internet networks,
tiny transmitters and receivers (not small enough until late 00s)
Q codes, app-enabled, credit payment (co-emerging by mid 2010s)
smartphone ubiquity (theee 2010s emergent social fact)
and
the yoking of ‘all of the above’ to surveillance capitalist platforms (with enough organisation, chutzpah, and a huge ton of venture capital, to make it work, or seem to be working for long enough to get more funding) who can try and make a go of it (post GFC social fact)
Notice that so many different time-sensitive factors had to click into place – in one frame – before e-scooters could be the designs the platforms are working as a fleet of rolling stock.
Then think back to the jama-ness of the platforms that emerged with platformisation, in considering novel affordance. A deployed fleet of ‘dockless’ scooters strewn, with punctuated and planned patterning, across urban footpaths, or hiding-waiting-lurking, flashing silently beneath trees on the edges of parks like green white or orange nonces, would not have been a viable business model without operating and business models they have tended to have. These are new business models, in turn improbable without enough VC to start up, fund and deploy them. This relied-relies on a culture of Silicon Valley start-up BD energy, and the social license created by Uber and disruption wave in the early 2010s.
So pause and notice: so many things had to co-happen for e-scooters to appear – as a novel, appealing affordance – as and when they did. They’re goofy amazing (next point); they’re also improbable.
This is a broader point about the things which festoon our lives. We do not give enough wonder to how contingent contingency is; we tend to totally take for granted the most wondrous improbabilities we now banally live with and suffer through.
Mord on the e-scooter as novel affordance, based on its technical and design aspects: a dignity-lacking misuse of an amazing set of technics co-operating
Now that I’ve buried e-scooters a fair bit, allow me to praise them – a little.
For what it’s worth, to my mind the e-scooter represents (a dignity-lacking misuse of) the amazing technical affordance introduced just above: the tying of electric motors to good-enough batteries to lightweight aluminium frames. You can do a lot with this confluence; e-bikes and e-scooters show two vehicle types with significant potential as complementary transport systems.
Consider first of all the (often stubbornly background) factor of aluminium here. Bicycles, even in the pro peleton, were usually made of steel until 1994 (the year Indurain won on a gorgeous Pinarello). Lightweight aluminium bikes functioned as a vanishing mediator between steel and carbon fibre for only a few years, between 1998–2003 (CAAD 7 era). This availability of light, strong and cheap aluminium is a relatively recent (postwar) emergence. Alongside its world-changing role in postwar aerospace, we need to give a moment to this material, which has amazing qualities. Its manufacture is also very carbon intensive, in both the mining and the smelting. We do not see this when we see the e-scooter there. This is also important.
We should also immediately connect it to a style or pattern of human behaviour this wonder enables. Think a lot about the very obvious nuisance factors of Kyrgios-style Dinker uses of e-scooters.
As news fodder, we look at Kyrgios, and maybe we think ‘dickhead’ (or hero), but we tend to see him. We do not tend to notice how amazing it is that a tennis player weighing 85kg can dink his missus on one. That’s probably 150kg right there. They don’t break, they withstand that: and I routinely see big bros weighing 90kg or so dinking one another. That’s 180kg. That’s amazing durability.
Imagine if it could be put to sensible uses.
Metal was Henry Ford’s true innovation with the Model T. Vanadium steel meant that Ford could deliver an automobile weighing half most competitors in 1908 (when most cars were heavy, had powerful motors, and were designed as luxury goods for the 1%), yet still as strong (and also costing less6).
As I’ve argued, even with such amazing novel technical capabilities as this strength ‘baked in’ to the affordance, e-scooters are gadgets. I’ve argued that this shows why the design is just a bad choice as a transport system: they’re inherently unsafe and inaccessible for many ordinary body types. I also followed Baudrillard and said their gadget-ness also means they’re a gratuitous waste of resources camouflaged as something useful and helpful (a stupidity that hides its stupidity in a way that has pulled the wool over the eyes of so many people).
The fundamental political problem arising from ‘all of the above’, both in the design, and in the choice of this design as the one to be deployed at scale, is that it commits us to it, in the same way that a motorbike will always be an inherently dangerous design for the speeds it can run7 (relative to contemporary car designs), in the same way that, as Ralph Nader wrote, the VW Beetle was unsafe at any speed.
So as a deployed affordance that stays there and is still available, we have become collectively-relatively commited to this use of this innovative tech, and these uses of scarce resources in highly contested, congested space8.
E-scooters are bringing us all this incredibly innovative tech, and wasting it on something that is basically good-for-nothing, but for the niche peoples who benefit (Silicon Valley platform owners, and bros).
In this sense, e-scooters are the jet skis of urban environments9.
Whether for scooters or biycles, e-motors and batteries remain the ‘killer app’ in this space: it’s what’s enabled e-bikes to become incredibly useful (as above). This remains the case with e-scooters, which can do exactly what a motor scooter would (up to 80km/h), but without the horrendous noise and pollution of a two-stroke internal combustion. They are quiet, with no exhaust polluting the air of densely trafficked urban areas.
So as we can see: the problem here is not the affordance, the problem is not the tech, which is amazing; it’s the Paul-Blart-meets-Swisher (and no one else is happy) of this particular design. It’s limited in what it can do well; what it does very, very well is Dinkblasting, and this has no collective benefit, and huge collective costs.
We have seen their potential, this is it. Is it good? I submit it is not.
As of writing, the only probal innovation here that could affect them is better batteries. We have seen what this did to mobile phones, but e-scooters need to remain of a certain size and shape, and given the wheels and motors, this is kinda it.
what would they and we have realised, and where would we be in urban transport-existential terms? Not very far, I submit.
What problems do they create? They create many.
They’re not worth it. They’re silly. They’re stupid.
Social acceleration into path dependence and momentum – in the face of enigmatic insolvency
At this point, we need to pivot from considering e-scooters as an affordance to thinking causally about the societal context in which they make sense enough to most people not to seem as stupid and futile as they actually are.
Who are we, if we have thought e-scooters are a good enough idea? What is the society in which this makes passable sense? Remember, e-scooters are about living together somehow in a community of fate. This means they’re about us as what we value, what we like, what we are prepared to keep on collaborating or colluding with, although we collide or conflict with them. They have been having intercourse with us; even if this is unchosen, it has happened, and keeps happening.
In my work around O Bike, I tried to reflect: what is a society in which the ‘final mile problem’ is a problem, of the kind that dockless could defensibly purport to solve?
What I said there was as follows:
In the absence of a hopeful alternative horizon, post ’08 society came to be about the quick and dirty, fly in, fly out. For those with the capital and networks, it was about the big grift: the larger and more elaborate and plausible the scam, and the faster the operation, the more profit and profile accrued to the entrepreneur (Carreyrou, 2018, Zeitlin, 2019). Keep running and don’t look back: those who pause, reflect, or take care and responsibility will be damned. Shi Yi was a man of this time, and O Bike was his kind of scheme (but see the characterisation of Li Gang in Treloar, 2019).
In the moment of capitalism’s development proper to the 2010s, disruption and the sharing economy appealed as shortcuts: wanting to gain a temporary benefit now, with less effort, less energy, fewer resources, because there is not enough time. Bicycles without ‘the burden of ownership’; public transport without the burden of regulation; relief from gridlock without policy makers and politicians needing to engage in conflict with the cloud and organisation of the fossil fuels, car manufacturing, and infrastructure construction lobbies.
In the low growth, high debt, high inequality society Streeck describes as our own (Streeck, 2014, 36-7), there are large and growing urban populations with phones and credit cards, propping up demand for cheaper, more convenient services that require lower levels of responsibility than owning and looking after an item or service, like convenient transport, that we might not have cash for, but need now, and so pay to access. Reciprocally, there is a large, growing population of precarious residents in formerly wealthy OECD countries who need money now, and will labour for a platform and provide services in exchange for the ability to keep living (Heller, 2017). O Bike’s street-level appeal as part of the resurgence of the gig economy (Heller, 2017; Stanford, 2017) appeared at just such a societal moment: a platform-delivered service, the passable semblance of bicycles waiting at the door of our apartment blocks and train stations, accessible to commuters in a hurry, populations not rich enough to hail a limousine or car, but with smartphones, credit cards, a shift or job interview starting in 25 min, and a disrupted train service. This was the societal context in which O Bike seemed to make sense. It’s not about bikes, it’s not about sharing, and it’s not about naughty Australians or ‘why we can’t have nice things’, it’s about an historical cultural moment of capitalism, what life’s like for growing numbers of precarious though still employed people in the world’s wealthier cities”.
This assessment remains broadly true for e-scooters. I back myself here (lol). For them to need-to-stay-present, for us-to-want-to-keep them, in spite of the jama aspects, ‘we’ would have to be in enough of a hurry, like riding e scooters enough, ‘can’t be fucked walking’ enough for this whole malarkey to seem like a value proposition.
In the earlier post on e-scooter I introduced some individual-level White Rabbit reasons why that could be the case: you’re late, you’re late, for a very important date.
But at a collective-societal level, we can land this post by using Hartmut Rosa, and think more broadly about social acceleration, because I think this adds something with a more general and deeper point about what we are ‘in’.
In the simplest metaphorical terms, Rosa’s conception of social acceleration can be captured by the idea of having to keep walking up a down escalator that gets a little bit faster each year. This is his idea of metastability: not only that one has to maintain stability through forward movement (as in the case of a bicycle, or e-scooter), but the idea that, per the acceleration bit, it just keeps getting faster. Faster pussycat, kill kill.
Social acceleration is a social fact: it’s a force we’re all differentially subject(ed) to. It’s ramping up. It’s in the air, for you and me. It’s why we have no time to ourselves, no time to wait, no time to rest. It’s an important part of why we rush, why we’re in such a hurry, why we pump and dump and constantly look for shortcuts and lifehacks. We intuit this as an issue, and we experience it in our burnouts and via our anxiety, but we’re unable to reckon with it politically – social acceleration is among the great collective action problems of modernity, because it makes everything harder to do, while giving less and less time to do it. Every year there’s more to do; all of it has to be done faster; legacy commitments (the past) then begin to appear as obstacles, to which only aggression (aggressing, moving forward) and control appear as sensible responses.
At some point, this creates a rampy rat race, in which we’re all zooming around, or trapped in gridlock, and unable to exit.
Then, at some point, when the positive feedback loop gets out of control and a threshold is passed, it involutes catastrophically, while annulling the many other ways of being – all of which take more time, are less profitable, and ask more of us. It creates overburdened people, who, unable to give enough of themselves, then ask more of their environments and the people around them. By the time we’re all collectively ‘tailgating at life’, all it takes is a flash storm and one huntsman crawling over the steering wheel, and you have a pile up. Then the hackers attack, then there’s a global pandemic, etc etc.
The eventual-collective carnage of this eventually unsupportable ramping up of social acceleration meets a a subjective inability many – and seemingly growing numbers of – people have to allow enough time to transition smoothly and make appointments in a calm and unhurried way. So many of us are in the habit of tailgating at life: often for very good reasons to do with our total pattern of life, and mostly by relying blindly on technical systems and logistics not failing on us. The scooter won’t collapse under us; the flight is on time; the pilot is not Andreas Lubitz; we just make it to our interview at 11a, and feel stoked. We look fantastic.
In a society in which we become habituated to control objects ‘just working’ without us having to care for them (did Kyrgios do anything for the scooter he was atop? Did he feel any need to?), many of us chronically underestimate how long things take (if we want to do them calmly); or we ‘forget’ (and just keep forgetting) how bad it feels to be anxious, late, harried, sweaty – or crash, or run over someone’s child. However, we feel the strain, yet the general trend has been for many people to respond to the ramping up by winging it and railing it – and dealing with the consequences later. Pump the accelerator, and kick the can down the road.
Behind this, Rosa points to the – mostly tacit –mantra of modern life under the aegis of social acceleration. This mantra ‘says’:
“[o]ur life will be better if we manage to bring more world within our reach”(11).
This ties to Rosa’s categorial imperative of late modernity:
“[a]lways act in such a way that your share of the world is increased: (11).
The plafoorms have continued to intuit the societal mantra and the imperative it entails, in the same way Red Bull intuited the demand for ‘energy’ and created a whole new drink category that society duly slurped up, or the way Lululemon intuited both the pervasion of yoga and Pilates among groups of people who feel unwell and desire wellness, and the glad willingness to pay so much more more for better quality thigh-hugging tights.
In the samsaric swirl generated by social acceleration and its mantra and imperative, we are compelled to grab at the world while shooting fish in a barrel – in a way that ‘somehow’ is gonna keep working out for us by keeping it within reach and under control, in same way that a Swisher has to grip the handlebars of their moving e scooter, or a Dinkee (Kyrgios’ girlfriend) has to grip the torso of a Dinker (Kyrgios). We just keep blasting away, and mostly the scooter doesn’t collapse under us, mostly the vape doesn’t explode in our face.
For Rosa, this gripped, forward-moving aggress-ing modus is a point of aggression toward the world, and it causes the world to fall silent, or, at least, as silent as a Swisher swooshing by, in Paul Blart raptures.
But it continues.
For Kara Swisher, “I do it all the time, I look fantastic”.
For the rest of us: a city clogged with jama, and a real difficulty in grappling with this in a mature and political way.
I put it to you that this is a serious dilemma, and a very deep case of stupid, stubborn, surreal.
I get that Heidegger reckoned only we humans have/are Dasein, which autocorrect wants to turn into casein, but you take my rough point.
Scrambling two Obi Wan quotes from a New Hope: they might not be the droids we’re looking for, but, like the sand people, they will return, and in greater numbers.
Reflecting more on this: Swisher is much more the folding scooter type, or maybe even the subset of massively overpowered and totally illegal 55km/h blasting scooter type. More common than the Swisher, where the platforms are concerned, are the Dinker: Kyrgios and GF, two bros with vapes no helmet, this kind.
This is really Chris Hobson’s point, and I thank him for it. The more I think about it, the more I think this is an important factor. This also shows that sometimes the cleverest factors aren’t the most causally efficacious, while sometimes things are really there, following Musil, ‘for no good reason’.
Consider how fine we all were in the 90s and 00s without the phones we can now supposedly not dream of living without. All these particular choices, so of their time, so contingent, so clung to, so ultimately peculiar and unnecessary.
This is the rare miracle in engineering. As Greg Lemond later said of bike frames: stronger, lighter, cheaper – pick two.
I was once told by a pretty senior patents lawyer that the motorcycle would never get up if it were proposed as a contemporary design: in other words, it only exists cos it already exists. It should never have been built that way. In Victoria, according to one stat, you are 34 times more likely to be killed or injured on a motorcycle, vis all other modes of transport.
We need to contrast this to more efficient types of lightweight vehicles, whose design choices make them more useful for a fuller spectrum of bodies and purposes, while being less inherently unsafe. A modestly priced road bike that can carry a person up to 140kg can now easily weigh 8kg. At that weight, there can’t be pannier bags or mud guards. The trade off is that it’s active transport, and can cruise at an average speed of 25km/h (faster than a car’s average speed in most urban areas, because cars generate congestion when used as an urban transport system). A utility e bike weighing 33kg is slower than a road bike, but it integrates racks and mudguards and lights, and, with already deployed designs, can carry people and objects up to 200kg. Utility e-bikes that haven’t been artificially ‘handbraked’ by laws in different jurisdictions can travel up to 45km/h in ways still safe for the design and road conditions. Consider that then: a road bike can carry 17 times its own weight, safely and at speed, without requiring further propulsion or any additional fossil fuelling. A robust e-bike can carry nearly 6 times its own weight, without taking up significantly more road or parking space than a bicycle, and can carry heavy parcels and children safely. A big SUV like a Ford Ranger Rapter weighs 2.5-3 tonnes, and can tow 2500kg loads, while carrying four people. Its gross combined weight of 5.3 tonnes is only slightly more than double its own weight. As soon as you need to tow heavy things long distances (a horse float through the country) this makes sense; in urban environments, once you factor in emissions, congestion, pedestrian an cyclist safety, and the wear and tear on roads, its transport system madness. So vehicle design choice, it really matters, it should be thoughtful, but is almost always what you might call haphazardous.
I was imagining what would happen if Uber offered jet skis between Many and Circular Quay… a percentage… yep, they would be into it.