Long Beach scooter reviews: ‘I crashed so you don’t have to’

The crash hurt my pride more than anything else, thanks to my trusty helmet. But at least it was a crash in the name of journalism.

If you happened to be out and about near Pacific Avenue and First Street on Thursday morning, you know what I’m talking about. You were among the many who bore witness to the collision between my body and the sidewalk, as I flew off the Bird electric scooter I had rented.

See, I was on a mission — a mission to push the limits of every type of electric scooter in the city, as any overzealous rider may. It was my duty, to alert the public to what it can expect when someone tries to rent a Razor, a Lime, a Bird, a Uscooter, a Skip or a Spin.

But before we get to the reviews, let’s harp on my dalliance with humiliation for one more moment. I was zipping too fast away from the drop zones at City Hall when my scooter caught the lip where the brick walkway meets pavement, and I went sailing. We can draw a few lessons from this, which mostly just reinforce the rules Long Beach already has in place:

• Wear a helmet!
• Don’t ride on the sidewalk.
• Ride at a reasonable speed. Scooters are still fun, even if you’re not trying to win a drag race with a roadrunner (which, for what it’s worth, some of these scooters could beat).

OK, now that we’ve absolved ourselves of any and all liability from here on out, we’ll use the app experience, the ride experience, and in the name of following Long Beach’s own rules, the speed, to see how these scooters stack up.

Each of those three categories will be rated on a five-point scale, for a total of 15 possible points. The app experience will focus on how easy it is to find the scooter, rent it and end the ride. The ride experience will evaluate how well the scooter equipment works. Speed gets its own category because it’s a fundamental reason why people want to use them, and also because Long Beach requires the scooter companies to limit their products to hitting 15 mph max.

For the speed section, I wanted to see if they abided by Long Beach’s rule without sacrificing the fun of it. So I did my best to go as fast as they would let me (crash imminent, anyone?) and tested their speeds with the Speedometer app, which boasts “98 percent accuracy.”

Razor

• 

  App experience: The app was easy to use and pointed me to the right location. However, since this was my first ride on an electric scooter, it wasn’t clear to me that you have to get a bit of a running start before the throttle would work. The app had instructions for riding, but they didn’t include that. Another downside was the app didn’t give me the option to put the scooter on hold while I went about my business, like most of the others do. 3/5

• Ride experience: The first thing I noticed hopping on a Razor compared to other brands was that my feet had a bit more room. While most other scooters are around six inches wide, the Razor is more like eight inches, which feels sturdier. But that doesn’t quite outweigh another difference from other scooters: the brakes. While most other scooters have a pressure-sensitive button to match the throttle, the Razor brakes are more like bicycle brakes, and mine were too sensitive to be smooth. 3/5
• Speed: While other scooters have speedometers, Razors do not, so I’ll take the app reading for what it’s worth. During my Razor ride, the app said I hit a maximum speed of 18 mph. It broke Long Beach’s limit, but to be honest, it wasn’t so fast that I felt unsafe. 4/5
• Overall: 10/15

Lime

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  App experience: At the outset, I had no complaints about the app experience. It was easy to find the scooters and see how much battery life they had, and scanning them was a breeze. However, once I was done and I ended the ride in the app, the clock on the ride kept running, implying the process hadn’t worked. I hit the button to end the ride again and got an error. I rode Lime twice for this review and had the same issue both times. I alerted Lime’s support team, and to its credit, I got a quick response. But the ideal ride doesn’t require any communication with an app support team. 3/5

• Ride experience: The ride was good. Everything was smooth, although I will say the brakes might be too smooth. When I was gliding at top speed and saw a red light, I braked as hard as I could, and it felt like it took a second or two too long to come to a complete stop. Other than that, everything seemed to operate correctly, including the speedometer, which offered some proof that Lime scooters aren’t abiding by the 15 mph limit, but that’s for another section of the review… 4/5
• Speed: One thing I will say about the speedometers on all of these scooters is that their placement on the handlebars makes them pretty dangerous to check when you’re going, you know, any speed above zero. However, given my duty to serve the public, I did my darned best to see what it registered when I felt I was going my fastest. On the Lime, it said 17 mph. Later, my app told me my max speed was 18 mph. We’ll call it close enough. Either way, it’s going too fast and the scooter clearly knows it. (It was still fun though.) 4/5
• Overall: 11/15

Bird

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  App experience: I have no complaints about the app. It showed me where a Bird was, it scanned easily and got the scooter running, and it closed out the ride with no issues. 5/5

• Ride experience: It seems fair to say that my ride experience on the Bird was tainted by my intimate pavement contact. But that was an error I made all on my own, so I will try to be impartial. The Bird ride felt nearly indistinguishable from the Lime ride, right down to the brakes with no sense of urgency. 4/5
• Speed: Maybe the Bird lied to me, maybe I was too terrified to look when I was actually going my fastest. All I know is the highest speed I noticed the Bird register was 15 mph, which should theoretically be the cutoff in Long Beach. After the ride, my app told me my highest speed was actually 18 mph. 4/5
• Overall: 13/15

Uscooter

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  App experience: The Uscooter app is great. On top of functioning correctly, it was also the only one of the apps to have a clear section for “helmet request.” Long Beach requires all scooter companies to provide helmets to any rider who asks, so it was nice to see that Uscooter made it so easy. 5/5

• Ride experience: The first thing I noticed was that the kickstand absolutely sucks. Try as I might, I could not flip it down with my foot. I had to get on the ground and pull it up with my hand — which was still pretty difficult! But, once I got that out of the way, the ride itself was great. I felt like the brakes were the best of all of the scooters. They were smooth but still had enough power to stop really quickly from top speed in the case of an emergency. Thankfully, I had no emergency, so I never even needed to use the brakes’ full force. 4.5/5
• Speed: This thing can fly! Or so it tells you. The top speed I saw on the scooter’s speedometer was a whopping 22 mph. When I finished, my app said I only hit 20 mph, but that’s still a full 25 percent faster than I should have been able to scoot. It was fun, but it still felt too fast. 3/5
• Overall: 12.5/15

Skip

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  App experience: The app shows both scooter locations and drop zone locations, unlike most of the others. But what’s a bit odd is the drop zones are much more prominent than the yellow dots where you can actually find the scooters. There was also some lag with registering my driver’s license and accepting Long Beach’s terms and conditions. Regardless, the app does what it needs to do without too much hassle.  3/5

• Ride experience: Like the Razors, the base of the scooter is closer to eight inches, so my feet had some breathing room. But after kicking off, I noticed a couple issues: 1) The speedometer didn’t work; 2) It was pretty difficult to brake. The throttle didn’t require much pressure at all, but I had to use two fingers on Skip’s bike-style brakes to feel any type of slowdown. The discrepancy felt especially noticeable as I approached a red light and found myself needing to use all four fingers to come to a full stop before entering the intersection. Not great! 3/5
• Speed: Since the speedometer didn’t work, I basically had to gut-check how fast I felt like I was going during the ride. It didn’t feel as fast as the others, but it felt fast enough. When I checked my app after ending the ride, it notified me that my max speed had been 16 mph. That felt sufficient, and close enough to the Long Beach limit that I’ll give it to them. 5/5
• Overall: 11/15

Spin

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  App experience: The app did its job, and the scooter locations are clear. The map doesn’t allow you to zoom out much, which is kind of a pain if you want to see if there are scooters in a particular location that’s not in your immediate vicinity. But a bigger annoyance was that it was difficult to get the app to recognize the barcode on the scooter, which was not upward facing, meaning you have to bend down to make sure you’re getting it right. It took some finagling to finally get that to work. 2/5

• Ride experience: The first thing I noticed off the bat was that the scooter’s speedometer didn’t work — good thing I had my own! Not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but if you’re going to add a feature like that, it should work. Other than that, the ride was smooth. The throttle and brakes were easy to operate, and it felt sturdy. 4/5
• Speed: The most distinguishing factor of the Spin ride was: It. Was. So. Slow. I appreciate the safety, but it seemed like overkill and made the ride a lot less fun. Because the speedometer didn’t work, I had to wait until the ride was over to check the app — which registered my top speed at 14 mph, just below the legal limit. It wasn’t that much slower than the Skip, but when you’re under the 20 mph mark, a couple miles per hour makes a big difference, and I’ve got to be real. Once you’ve had a taste of that sweet, sweet speed, you just can’t come back from it. 3/5
• Overall: 9/15

If we’re going by numbers, it appears Bird is the winner. So it’s good that we are using numbers, because if I weren’t trying to be quite so even-handed about it, I would say the Uscooter was my personal favorite. It was fun to go that fast, and I appreciated that the brakes didn’t feel so handicapped. But I would I like to think of myself as a more responsible rider than some other folks I’ve seen around town, and I still managed to crash. So I would prefer the general public have smooth brakes and slower speeds than … not.

Luckily for the riders themselves, they’re not limited to one company. So take these reviews for what they’re worth and test some for yourself. Just be sure to wear that  helmet.