SATURDAY MORNING WITH CRANKY DON JOE | We Have Sidewalks, So Naturally They Took the Scooters Onto I-35W

By Cranky Don Joe

My name is Cranky Don Joe. Cranky DJ to a lot of my neighbors.

I am not an expert. Which immediately makes me more qualified than anybody who looked at Interstate 35W and thought, "You know what this five-lane freeway needs? Me. On a rental scooter."

Now, before anybody starts writing an angry email to the editor before breakfast accusing me of being against young people, electric transportation, urban recreation, social gatherings, or technological progress, let me make something perfectly clear: I have nothing against scooters. Scooters are respectable little machines when used in places where scooters have a reasonable expectation of surviving the encounter. A city street? Fine. A dedicated bike lane? Fine. A quiet residential neighborhood? Fine. Around downtown Minneapolis on a summer evening? Have yourself a wonderful time.

Interstate 35W? Friends, we need to have a serious family meeting.

Minneapolis experienced something last weekend that I would have dismissed as a poorly written slapstick movie script if local news organizations hadn't broadcast the footage. Hundreds of people gathered for a massive late-night scooter ride through the city after invitations spread across social media. Videos showed riders filling downtown streets, circling intersections, and in a few cases, actually rolling through traffic on full-sized living room recliners balanced on electric footboards. Then, a large group turned onto the entrance ramp and took their rental Lime scooters directly onto Interstate 35W.

Lime later announced it revoked riding privileges for users who entered the highway and warned others about safety violations.

I have questions. My first question is simple: why? Not a philosophical why, not the kind of deep, existential why that requires a university professor, a leather armchair, and three graduate seminars in ethics. I mean a basic, emergency-room why.

You are riding a scooter through Minneapolis. The evening is young, your friends are around you, and everybody is having fun. Then you approach an interstate entrance ramp. There are posted signs, acceleration lanes, semi-trucks shifting gears, concrete retaining walls, and three-ton automobiles moving at sixty-five miles per hour. The entire physical environment has shifted from a casual evening stroll into a high-speed survival scenario. Every survival instinct acquired across three million years of human evolution should activate simultaneously and whisper, "This little green battery and I should probably remain over on the sidewalk."

Instead, somebody apparently looked toward Interstate 35W and concluded, "Yes. This seems like the logical next step for the group."

Friends, I don't particularly enjoy portions of 35W when I am sitting inside a car. My automobile has four doors, seat belts, crumple zones, side airbags, anti-lock brakes, power steering, climate control, halogen headlights, a horn, and three thousand pounds of solid steel wrapped around my body. I can lock the doors, roll up the windows, and turn on the radio to listen to a calm broadcast about lawn care while traffic around me behaves like the final lap at the Indianapolis 500. Even with all that steel, there are still moments on 35W when I grip the steering wheel with both hands and begin renegotiating my personal relationship with the Almighty.

These folks looked at that situation and said, "Forget the airbags, give me a set of nine-inch handlebars and a pair of sneakers."

A rental scooter has wheels roughly the size of a diner saucer plate. You stand on it. Standing! There isn't even a chair! If I am merging onto a five-lane interstate highway, I would at least like transportation that provides a place to sit down.

I mentioned this to Larry over coffee, which was my first mistake. Larry had already watched every video clip on the internet. Naturally. By the time I called him, he had apparently completed a doctorate in electric micromobility engineering.

"They're actually pretty sophisticated machines, Don," he explained. "Larry, they are motorized kick-scooters." "They have high-torque electric motors." "I understand how electricity works, Larry." "Some of them have impressive acceleration." "Larry, I don't care if the device has a nuclear reactor attached to the footboard. It is Interstate 35W."

He told me I was overreacting, of course. This is the exact same man who once spent twenty minutes standing in his driveway in a winter coat deciding whether freezing rain looked "serious enough" to justify scattering salt on his front steps. Larry will conduct a full meteorological assessment before walking to his mailbox, but apparently a standing human on a scooter entering highway traffic deserves an open mind.

I asked him point-blank whether he would ride a Lime scooter onto 35W. He paused, and that three-second pause told me everything I needed to know.

"Well, obviously I wouldn't personally do it," he muttered.

Exactly. Whenever somebody vigorously defends a public activity and then inserts the phrase "I wouldn't personally do it," the defense has officially collapsed.

Larry tried again: "I think it was mostly young people having fun."

Now that part I actually understand. Young people are supposed to have fun. They are supposed to occasionally do things that make older generations stare through their living room blinds and wonder what has happened to Western civilization. Every generation has done it. My generation did plenty of foolish things; we simply had the enormous historical advantage of doing them before every teenager carried a high-definition television broadcast studio in his pocket. If video apps had existed when I was seventeen, half the men currently complaining about neighborhood noise would be living under assumed names in deep woods Canada.

So I am not scandalized by hundreds of young people meeting downtown, laughing, riding scooters, and enjoying a warm night. In an age where we constantly complain that the younger generation stays indoors staring at screens, seeing hundreds of human beings actually leave the house to gather together is almost refreshing.

But there must still be a boundary line, and I feel reasonably confident that the high-speed entrance ramp to Interstate 35W is where that line is painted.

The most remarkable part of the story came afterward. Lime decided that human judgment required immediate digital reinforcement. Ahead of another planned gathering, the company established geofenced restriction zones in downtown Minneapolis. Red no-go zones shown inside the phone app forced the scooters to automatically power down and slow to a crawl, requiring riders to manually push them out of restricted areas. Other areas restricted top speeds to five miles per hour, while users identified on highway cameras were permanently banned.

Friends, do you realize what has occurred here? We have officially reached the stage of human civilization where the rental scooter has to act as the responsible adult in the relationship.

Think about that sequence for a moment. You unlock the scooter, you pay for the scooter, you step onto the scooter, and you tell the scooter where you intend to travel. Then the scooter analyzes your life choices, looks at the map, and says, "No."

Not a police officer, not your parents, not your high school teacher, and not your pastor. The scooter. We spent three generations inventing technology to obey human commands, and now we've made enough questionable decisions that the electric vehicles have started setting personal boundaries.

I can picture the argument on the sidewalk: "Come on, Lime." No. "Everybody else is heading down the ramp." Still no. "I paid for this ride with my credit card." I don't care. "We're heading toward the freeway." That's precisely why we are having this conversation.

According to reporting on the new rules, the geofencing caused the scooters to gradually lose power until the rider had to walk the machine out of the zone. Friends, that isn't urban transportation anymore; that is an electronic walk of shame.

Imagine your psychological state five minutes earlier: you're riding with a massive crowd, the night is young, people are filming videos, and you are at the center of the action. Then the scooter detects the highway boundary. Ten miles per hour... eight... six... three... one... shut down. Now you are manually pushing a ninety-pound dead piece of green metal along the curb. There is no dignified way to push a rental scooter that has just revoked your authority. You aren't a highway pioneer anymore; you're an entry-level employee escorting malfunctioning office equipment back to the supply closet.

When I explained this geofencing system to Larry, his eyes lit up in a way I did not care for.

"I wonder how the satellite tracking override works," he mused. "Larry, don't." "No, seriously, Don." "Larry, do not." "It's just GPS coordinates." "Larry, you spent forty-five minutes last month trying to connect your wireless printer to your home internet." "That printer has software issues, Don." "The printer has software issues?" "Yes." "Larry, the printer has known you for eight years and has finally established healthy boundaries. Learn from it."

He changed the subject immediately.

Then I learned about the permanent bans. Lime confirmed it permanently revoked account privileges for individuals who rode onto highways. Friends, imagine explaining to your future grandchildren that you became persona non grata with a two-wheeled scooter company.

I have heard of people being banned from high-stakes casinos. Airlines maintain strict no-fly lists, sports stadiums prohibit spectators who misbehave, and private clubs revoke memberships. But imagine being blacklisted by a rental footboard.

"Grandpa, can we rent scooters at the park?" "Well, you can." "What about you, Grandpa?" "There was an incident back in 2026." "Were you driving a car?" "Not exactly." "A motorcycle?" "Smaller." "An e-bike?" "Less chair."

Somewhere in Minneapolis today, a person is opening an app, staring through a window at a perfectly available green Lime scooter sitting fifteen feet away on the sidewalk, and realizing that the scooter has essentially taken out a restraining order against him. That is an extraordinary sentence to be able to write about modern transportation.

I keep imagining what previous generations would make of all this. My father understood transportation in four simple, rigid categories: if it had four wheels, you drove it; if it had two wheels and pedals, you pedaled it; if it had two wheels and a gasoline engine, your mother warned you it was dangerous; and if it had no wheels, you walked. Nobody needed software, nobody needed satellite geofencing, and nobody needed an app to determine whether the object beneath his boots had withdrawn consent to continue the journey.

Today, your scooter can power itself down because you entered a restricted zone, my refrigerator can connect to the house Wi-Fi, my television knows what programs I watched on Tuesday, and somewhere downtown, transportation software is performing the exact job once handled by a stern parent standing at the front door saying, "Absolutely not, turn around right now."

Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized there is a quiet, positive lesson underneath the comedy. The gatherings themselves tell us something worth noting. Hundreds of strangers saw a social post, showed up downtown, and experienced something together. We spend enormous amounts of energy complaining that young people live entirely online, don't know their neighbors, and never leave their bedrooms. Then hundreds of them organize a real-world event, show up in person, and we immediately begin preparing a lecture.

I am seventy-something years old, professionally cranky, and even I can see the contradiction. Go outside, meet people, laugh, ride around the city, make friends, and take ridiculous photographs that will embarrass you in twenty years. That is part of being young. But there is a massive difference between youthful enthusiasm and placing yourself where motorists traveling at freeway speeds do not expect to encounter a standing human being on a battery-powered footboard.

Have fun without requiring the Minnesota State Patrol to issue an emergency traffic advisory. There are miles of city streets, park trails, and paved paths throughout Minneapolis where a person can enjoy the sensation of standing upright on a tiny motorized platform while wondering whether the next pothole has been mapped. You do not need Interstate 35W.

I also feel a little sorry for the scooter. Nobody considers what the scooter went through. That poor machine thought it was signing up for ordinary municipal errands: pick somebody up near a coffee shop, travel six blocks, get parked near a bike rack, maybe spend a sunny afternoon near the university. Normal scooter work. Then one night somebody unlocks it and heads toward the freeway ramp. If scooters could speak, I suspect it was whispering, "Excuse me, sir, I believe we've made a wrong turn."

The rider keeps going. "Sir?" The entrance ramp opens up. "Sir!" Traffic accelerates to seventy miles per hour. "THIS WAS NOT COVERED IN THE USER AGREEMENT!"

Larry came over again yesterday, and naturally, he had downloaded the Lime app.

"I thought maybe we should try these sometime, Don." "Fine." He looked surprised. "Really?" "Contractually fine. Around the lake." "What about downtown?" "Fine." "We could ride over toward..."

I held up one finger. "Larry, if the next words out of your mouth contain a highway number, I am taking your phone."

He laughed. "I'm not stupid, Don."

Friends, whenever Larry announces that he isn't stupid without anybody first raising the question, I become extremely alert. He began explaining that he had watched three safety videos and now fully understood the throttle controls. Naturally. This is the exact same man who became an international soccer strategist after half a World Cup match, a turf-management consultant after talking to one lawn crew, a structural engineer six minutes after buying a hammock, and a thermostat detective at church. Now he is a certified micromobility consultant.

He showed me the app; I showed him the front door. But I will probably take that scooter ride around the lake with him anyway. Not on 35W, not on I-94, and not on any road whose name requires a shield-shaped sign. We'll find somewhere calm, flat, and far enough from freeway ramps that neither Larry nor the technology gets any ambitious ideas.

And if the scooter suddenly slows to five miles an hour and tells me I've entered a restricted zone, I will do something truly revolutionary: I will listen to it. Because when the rental scooter is displaying better personal judgment than the human standing on top of it, the correct response isn't to hack the software; it's time to reconsider the route.

Until next time, Cranky DJ

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