Scoot!
John Seabrook’s article on the arrival of electric scooters in New York City points out that many riders are shifting to scooters from public transit, not from cars (“Scooter City,” April 26th & May 3rd). This may be the case, but it doesn’t cast a negative light on the new e-vehicles. Scooters offer better doorstep-to-doorstep travel than bus and rail lines, and they are available at a moment’s notice, rather than on a specific schedule. Discouraging the use of scooters because they result in a “mode shift” away from mass transit would be the wrong approach. Instead, New York should take advantage of its late entry on the scooter scene by adopting best practices its peers have learned: require docking devices to avoid sidewalk clutter; remove at least one car-parking spot on each block, to provide bike and scooter areas; and move forward with the creation of bike lanes, which make riding less perilous and therefore more accessible to people diverse in age, gender, and ethnicity.
Marcel Moran
Dept. of City and Regional Planning
Ph.D. candidate, U.C. Berkeley
San Francisco, Calif.
Seabrook’s piece on e-scooters raised my blood pressure. I am a third-generation New Yorker, which surely entitles me to kvetch about the city’s changing modes of transportation. When I have visited friends and family in San Francisco, Paris, and Copenhagen, I have run into, tripped over, swerved around, and generally been harassed by e-scooters. When the 6 train runs late or breaks down, it’s an inconvenience but not a hazard. I am not a Luddite, and I have faith that micro-mobility in the form of scooters can help to solve the “last-mile problem”; the prospect of reducing vehicle-miles travelled and carbon emissions is genuinely exciting. But New York is not Silicon Valley—our ethos is not “Move fast and break things.” Broken things piss us off, and we move fast without e-scooters. If the city and the state want to allow New York to be the next battlefield in the scooter wars, the mayor had better regulate them with a firm hand.
Paul Castaybert
Larchmont, N.Y.
Portrait of a Daughter
I appreciate that Hilton Als, in his review of the Alice Neel retrospective at the Met, highlights motherhood’s complicated role in Neel’s life and in her paintings (The Art World, April 26th & May 3rd). When I was in art school in New York City, I was told by a female faculty member—who had the best intentions—that the secret to having a career as a female artist was not to have kids. It was routine among the childless artists I looked up to at the time to refer pejoratively to younger artists who decided to have children as “breeders.” Als has graciously set an example by exploring the rich and complex identity of an artist who is also a mother; we all deserve an art world that celebrates such work.
Emily Davis Adams
El Cerrito, Calif.
What’s for Dinner?
Thanks to Roz Chast for the delightful Sketchpad about the many terms people use for making a meal out of odds and ends around the kitchen (The Talk of the Town, April 26th & May 3rd). In Chast’s household, it’s called “fending”; in ours, it’s “spinmastering”—spinning whatever is in the refrigerator into a new and totally different take on what it was. In other words, the art of re-creation.
John Paoli
Missoula, Mont.
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