Bikes are in a no-mans land because of speed differences -- they're too slow to go on the road, and too fast to safely mix with pedestrians on sidewalks.
I personally prefer dockless bikes over scooters, but I will admit that scooters are safer because of their lower top speed. This makes it reasonable to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided that the sidewalk is wide enough.
The key to making bike/scooter-sharing work is to make the infrastructure cheap, incremental, and easy. Google ran into the same problems with GBikes blocking ADA ramps and front doors that cities are seeing with scooters. One big thing that helped was converting a few parking spaces into bike parking (literally just green paint and a few signs), and putting friendly "don't block ADA parking or ramps" signs up.
If you want to prevent "deaths from drivers", the highest impact thing would be to work on self-driving cars (join the great engineers at Waymo, Cruise, or even Uber).
> This makes it reasonable to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided that the sidewalk is wide enough.
Respectfully, please no no no no no. People were riding scooters on the sidewalk all over San Francisco and it definitely did not feel safe to be a pedestrian. In my opinion (no data, just individual experience), no city that I've ever visited has typical sidewalks that are wide enough to mix walking traffic with ~10mph, not very maneuverable, wheeled vehicles.
I personally prefer dockless bikes over scooters, but I will admit that scooters are safer because of their lower top speed. This makes it reasonable to mix scooters with pedestrian traffic provided that the sidewalk is wide enough.
The key to making bike/scooter-sharing work is to make the infrastructure cheap, incremental, and easy. Google ran into the same problems with GBikes blocking ADA ramps and front doors that cities are seeing with scooters. One big thing that helped was converting a few parking spaces into bike parking (literally just green paint and a few signs), and putting friendly "don't block ADA parking or ramps" signs up.
If you want to prevent "deaths from drivers", the highest impact thing would be to work on self-driving cars (join the great engineers at Waymo, Cruise, or even Uber).