As I bike to an Oakland town hall meeting about scooters on Monday, I see two young men riding electric scooters. They both look to be about 15 and neither are wearing helmets. One is with me, on the street. The other is on the sidewalk. We all ride beside each other — though I am slower than either boy, since I do not generally bike at 15 miles per hour down city streets — until I pull over at Frank Ogawa Plaza to park my bike.

At the scooter community town hall, representatives from Lime, Bird, and Skip make a point of telling Oaklanders that teens on scooters definitely aren’t the scooter companies’ fault. “To some degree, this is a parent issue,” says Marlo Sandler, the senior manager of government relations at Bird. Skip requires riders be at least 18 years of age, “so if someone underage is riding, an adult had to provide an ID and a credit card, so certainly parenting issues are part of it,” says Muriel MacDonald, Skip’s director of public affairs. EV Ellington of Lime wisely said nothing about parenting strategies, instead noting the company had implemented no-parking zones around schools.

“To some degree, this is a parent issue.”

Scooters on sidewalks? A failure of education, according to the scooter companies. Riders without helmets? Well, more outreach will solve it. The companies’ excuses for abuse aren’t much different from Facebook or Twitter’s: they designed their scooter systems in good faith, so bad actors must be someone else’s problem. You should wear a helmet when riding a scooter, so really riders are responsible for not wearing helmets that aren’t provided with the scooters. (Why anyone would walk around with a spare helmet is left unexplored by Ellington, MacDonald, and Sandler.) And perhaps the city is at fault, too! After all, if scooter riders are on sidewalks, maybe they just don’t feel safe on the streets — you can’t blame the scooter companies for poor infrastructure.

Sandler, Ellington, and MacDonald’s positions might be more understandable if they had bothered to license their scooters with Oakland before their impromptu trial. Instead, their companies chucked motorized scooters on the city sidewalks, without the city’s permission, and then pretended to be shocked when children rode them.

Sandler, who was so concerned about parenting issues when it came to scooters, first introduced herself to city council members after beginning Bird’s pilot program in June. When city council member Abel Guillén asked Bird to “refrain from encroaching on the public right of way until you are permitted,” and noted, “you have no permits for these in the city and they are causing many complaints,” Bird ignored the request, according to Oakland Magazine.

An impromptu trial program in Oakland began with Lime in March, around the same time that the company dropped its scooters in San Francisco, just across the bay. While San Francisco banned the scooters until a permitting system came into play, Oakland let them ride. Overall, about 2,000 to 3,000 people ride scooters in Oakland daily, says Kerby Olsen, the shared mobility coordinator of the Oakland Department of Transportation. So far the city has received 45 complaints about scooters to its 311 line — though that low number may be because plenty of citizens, including me, didn’t know they could complain about scooters there in the first place.

While San Francisco banned the scooters until a permitting system came into play, Oakland let them ride.

“What is an e-scooter?” says Olsen. “I probably would not have been able to answer this question last March.”

Because the scooters caught Oakland’s DOT by surprise, the agency is understaffed to deal with the new transit mode. To cope with the scooters, the DOT will need to hire a number of positions: community liaisons to organize meetings and respond to complaints, field inspectors to issue fees for improper parking and confiscate illegally parked scooters, and a program manager to oversee the scooter program.

To help staff up, the DOT plans to charge scooter companies $30,000 a year to operate in Oakland, as well as $64 per scooter per year, and 10 cents to park in metered areas. That will be achieved through a permitting program. Applications for scooter companies to operate in Oakland will be accepted in December, and the applications will be reviewed in February.

Because the companies didn’t coordinate with the city, information that might matter for the DOT’s ability to safely regulate scooters simply isn’t being collected. For instance, there is no tracking of scooter-related accidents or injuries, as the data simply doesn’t exist, says Ryan Russo, director of the Oakland Department of Transportation. Nor is there any way to know whether most of the people who have scooter accidents are wearing helmets. Nor does the city know what the most-likely injuries are for scooter riders — something that might prove useful for emergency departments and first responders.

We all are reduced to anecdata; very well, as a resident of Oakland, here’s mine. I have never seen a scooter rider wear a helmet. This is probably because the choice to get on a scooter is impromptu. After all, how can you plan to ride a scooter if you don’t have a reliable idea of where the scooter will be when you need it? Passing out helmets — Sandler, Ellington, and MacDonald’s presentations all touted this as part of their community outreach — isn’t helpful if the helmets aren’t available when people want to ride. This is why a lot of cyclists lock our helmets to our bikes; you can’t accidentally leave your bike helmet somewhere, rendering yourself helmetless, if it’s locked to your bike.

Dropping scooters on the streets but placing the burden for safety on users is ridiculous

Similarly, if the promise of dockless scooters is that riders can use them spontaneously, helmets should be provided with the scooters themselves. Dropping scooters on the streets but placing the burden for safety on users is ridiculous.

I’m not the only person who thinks so. Bird and Lime currently face a class-action lawsuit filed in Los Angeles that accuses the companies — along with two others — of “gross negligence” related to injuries both riders and pedestrians received by nine people. The companies were accused of ”aiding and abetting assaults,” and the filing says the companies are liable because the scooters themselves are unsafe. There are inadequate instructions on the scooters’ use, but inadequate warnings about the scooters’ risks.

And while the scooter companies want to promote themselves as carless solutions, Sandler said the average length of Bird’s scooter trips is slightly over a mile. That suggests those scooters aren’t replacing driving — it’s more likely that they’re replacing walking. Walking, it should be said, is not only better for the environment than dredging up rare Earth minerals to make scooter batteries, it also provides gentle cardio activity. Riding a scooter doesn’t.

I do think there’s a place for scooters in Oakland; but the inability of MacDonald, Sandler, Ellington, and the companies they represent to take responsibility for the problems they’ve created suggests that Bird, Lime, and Skip have no place here. It’s nice that they’re fishing drowned scooters out of Lake Merritt, but if the scooter roll-out had taken place with the community’s involvement, I suspect that fewer frustrated citizens would have tossed them in the lake to begin with.

if you rush to build a platform and get as many users as possible, you may not understand how your platform will be used

One thing we’ve learned from Facebook and Twitter is if you rush to build a platform and get as many users as possible, you may not understand how your platform will be used. On Facebook and Twitter, that’s meant Nazis, genocides, and the possible destruction of democracy. What will come of the scooter companies’ similarly laissez-faire approach?