How the shared scooter became grit

The residents of the big cities are looking at it with sorrow and incidental visitors can’t have missed it: the proliferation of scooters in the streets. More precisely: shared scooters. Or also: ‘strew scooters’ – from the verb ‘strew’, which according to Van Dale means “throwing down scattered.” And that’s not saying too much.

The alternative ‘green’ mode of transport (‘greenwashing’, say critics) has become extremely popular, especially among people in their twenties. Ideal for short trips, to get to your final destination quickly in the busy city. You can get it to work via an app, in most cases you pay per minute. So no worries about insurance or fear of theft of your property. Freedom happiness.

However, as is often the case with innovations in traffic, the shared scooter also has a downside. As silently as the electric two-wheeler speeds past, it is parked so silently. At least, ‘parked’; left behind, in impossible places. You sometimes get the strong impression that the battery of such a scooter has suddenly died. On closer inspection, this rarely turns out to be the case.

A shared scooter lonely on a large lawn in a park. In a verge. In a ditch. Upside down in a shopping street. Half way up a flight of stairs. In the middle of a bike path just before a traffic light. At a bench in a park (without rear wheel). They are all examples of the entertaining Instagram account @strewscooters010 by Laura Nijkamp. Or take the scooter from the company Felyx, which was located right between the public transport gates at the Beurs metro station in Rotterdam. Of course they remained open. You ask what that wildly parked scooter was doing there. Did the user need to catch a subway urgently?

Everyone responsible, nobody responsible: you can safely call it an annoying side effect of the sharing economy. They can also talk about it in other European cities. Paris was first overrun by road bikes, then by scooters and finally by scooters. But there were strict rules for parking. On pain of fines for the companies if their users took ‘sprinkling’ a bit too literally.

Which brings us back to the term itself. Sprinkle? As early as 2017, planner Marco te Brömmelstroet coined the word ‘grid bike’ in an interview NRC. He denounced the “extremely aggressive approach” of the providers. According to the General Dutch Dictionary a grit bike has meanwhile become “a shared bicycle without a fixed place”.

Is ‘strewn’ the right word? Van Dale adds, in parentheses, to “distributed throwing” “often with the concomitant thought of a certain negligence.” But ‘streak scooter’ sounds like a euphemism, almost like a party. The motto of the Instagram account: “the sprinkles are at the door”. Who is sweet gets goodies.

Strictly speaking, this is wrong parking, lying around or, perhaps more appropriately: dumping. The road bikes have virtually disappeared from the streets due to strict regulations. Spread scooters, on the other hand, are up for grabs for the time being.