It's going to be really difficult to not come off as the bad guy in this article. On paper, these electric scooters are nothing but a benefit to the university! However, there are certain problems that arise when you have 50 some electric scooters on a college campus. I love scooters as much as everyone else, and I love electric scooters even more, but there are good reasons why we shouldn't have them on campus.
Ohio University made the idea to purchase electric scooters from the brand Spin. I believe there are good intentions behind this purchase. OU is a big campus with loads of verticality to it. Being a person that has to walk across campus every day this should seem like an obvious victory, but there's one fault. We as students should not be trusted with cheap electric scooters, because incidents happen.
These scooters have existed for less than a week on campus grounds and I have seen them littered everywhere: sidewalks, obscure alleys, and places where absolutely no one would genuinely be using them. This falls on everyone involved including the students, the school, and Spin. We as students obviously shouldn't be leaving them anywhere we want but there also isn't one designated place to put them. There are no charging stations either, so there's just a bunch of dead electric scooters riddling the streets that no one can use. The obvious fix is to build charging stations around campus and force students to dock their scooters in these stations so there isn't an insane amount of useless scooters blocking everyone's path.
The other problem, which falls primarily on students, is stupidity. I've already seen people trying to skate all the way down Jeff hill with these scooters and falling off and damaging both themselves and the scooters. There's also the possibility of people getting DUIs from trying to drive these things while intoxicated. There isn't really another way to fix this problem other than to hope students understand that e-scooters cost money and aren't cheap to replace.
All in all, I think with the right resources and a common consensus on how to use a scooter safely this could be a win-win for everyone involved. However, until both these problems receive a solution, I'm still gonna have to swim through 15 dead scooters on my way to Stocker.