SANTA MONICA, Calif. — I wanted to hate the scooters. I really did.

Before going to the Los Angeles region last week for work, I had heard about the area’s invasion by dockless, rent-by-the-minute electric scooters. I saw their sudden arrival described as a plague of two-wheeled terrors that had crowded sidewalks and endangered pedestrians, and I knew that some cities had issued cease-and-desist orders and passed emergency ordinances to get them off the streets.

I also knew that Los Angeles’s leading e-scooter company, Bird — which reportedly just raised $150 million at a valuation north of $1 billion — was run by Travis VanderZanden, a former executive of Uber and Lyft. His new venture seemed to be an unholy mix of the former’s lawless arrogance and the latter’s saccharine branding. (A group of people riding Bird scooters is called a “flock,” Mr. VanderZanden has insisted.)

Tech hubris on wheels — what’s not to loathe?

But I wanted to experience the scooter craze for myself. So for a week, I used shared e-scooters as my primary mode of transportation. I rode them to meetings, ran errands across town and went for long joy rides on the Venice Beach boardwalk. In all, I took more than a dozen scooter rides, from just a few blocks to several miles.

And here’s my verdict: E-scooters might look and feel kind of dorky, but they aren’t an urban menace or a harbinger of the apocalypse. In fact — sigh — they’re pretty great.