Michael Here in the city and further south in Silicon Valley, not only is the number of Tesla drivers steadily increasing, but more and more muscle-enhancing electric vehicles for short distances are now visibly zipping through the streets, mostly driven by so-called Millennials, or Internet lemmings, as I like to call them.

In Rundbrief 08/2017 I have previously reported on the city bike program "Ford GoBike," which rents out traditional pedal bikes that must be returned to one of the many docking stations in the city after half an hour. The next step was so-called Jump Bikes which you can simply leave anywhere after use, as they automatically report back to the central system and transmit their location via a GPS receiver, so the next customer can book them right away.

Another advantage of the Jump-Bikes: They are equipped with an electric motor that provides powerful assistance while pedaling, allowing the rider to effortlessly zoom up the hills of San Francisco and feel like Superman. But be careful: The bikes accelerate so quickly at green lights that there have reportedly been several accidents because drivers, as is common in San Francisco, tried to quickly run through the intersection on a very late red light.

Recently, Ford GoBike, with whom I purchased an annual membership last September, has also started offering so-called "Plus" bikes, whose electric motor provides powerful assistance while pedaling. While I usually had to shift into first gear and pedal hard on the last stretch up to our apartment on Chattanooga Street with an 8% incline to avoid coming to a complete stop, with the eBike, I zoomed up at lightning speed, as you can see in my

Video: video

. I've also tried going up the very steep Hill St in our neighborhood, but the eBike gave up after 50 feet, seems to me like the motor isn't designed for such inclines.

The latest trend is electric scooters that can go up to 20 mph, with which young people sometimes speed along the city's sidewalks.

The New York Times had an article recently on Travis VanderZanden, founder of the rental scooter company "Bird" in Los Angeles, who similar to rideshare companies like Uber or Lyft operated under the motto "execute first, get permssion later". It distributed their scooters all over the sidewalks in San Francisco, to be rented happily by millennials on their phones.

The union bosses and top bureaucratic bigwigs of the "San Francisco Public Works" department confiscated dozens of scooters parked all over the sidewalks. Interestingly, the same department seems to be in a deep office slumber while tent cities are forming on the sidewalks, where drug addicts hoard their stolen bicycles, openly inject heroin, and then, to the delight of the residents, simply discard the needles (Rundbrief 02/2016). Taking away scooters from a wealthy company is just less controversial.

With electric skateboards (Rundbrief 10/2016), opinions are divided. Their owners praise the driving pleasure in the highest terms, but car drivers are annoyed by the additional traffic on the bike lanes, and long-time skateboarders despise the young, wealthy speedsters as lazy and conceited.

As always, when something new comes along, the factions of NIMBYs and the bold trendsetters are now clashing in San Francisco. NIMBY stands for "Not in My Backyard" and refers to the long-time residents who would prefer nothing to change, to keep everything as it was in 1985, and wish the newcomers to hell. The newcomers want to build more ugly residential towers and squeeze more people into the already bursting-at-the-seams infrastructure. In the above-cited New York Times article, an old woman even suspects that the newcomers want to run over the "old farts" with their scooters on the sidewalk to get their rent-controlled apartments. Will this tug-of-war ever end?

• More topics you might be interested in:

  	Dogs on the plane
  	Santa Fe, New Mexico, in @inter
  	Ginger Beer
  	San Francisco Views: Liberty Hill
  	Nail Valley

  
  

• More topics you might be interested in:

  	Dogs on the plane
  	Santa Fe, New Mexico, in @inter
  	Ginger Beer
  	San Francisco Views: Liberty Hill
  	Nail Valley