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Depending on who you ask, they’re a scourge, invading the streets of decent cities around the country, or they’re a transportation revolution removing the “last mile” hurdle to using public transit and taking polluting cars off the road.

E-scooters have caused rage in San Francisco (which only recently allowed them back on the roads) and a legal tiff in Santa Monica. Now they’re set to hit the streets of Sacramento.

No matter how you feel about scooters, they often look a lot like lawsuits waiting to happen: People whizzing down the street in the opposite direction of traffic without helmets, jolting over potholes, sometimes thudding up onto the sidewalks and back down again.

I asked Thom Rickert, an emerging risks specialist with Trident Public Solutions, which insures governments and other public entities, for his thoughts. Electronic scooters, he said, are part of an emerging realm of the share economy: the complicated liability economy.

“It’s somewhat based on the individual responsibility, the responsibility of the vendor and also the manufacturer,” Mr. Rickert said. “Everybody has to assume responsibility for those shared assets.”

Sure, you have to scroll through a pages-long waiver on your phone before you can unlock a scooter, which in theory means anything that happens to you while you’re riding is all your responsibility.

But, Mr. Rickert said, “there can always be exceptions.”

If a business leaves debris in the street and you scoot into it and fall, whose fault is it? Another crucial question is whether there is a financial backstop if home, auto or health insurance don’t cover the accident costs.

If, say, you hit a pothole, could a city be liable? Mr. Rickert said that varied widely by jurisdiction.

In any case, he said, people like him are keeping a close eye on a growing market for trip insurance — where you might pay a few cents to cover your liability for every mile.

He said part of the solution would come from more information about how, when and under what circumstances e-scooters are being used. Plus, you know, a lot of data about injuries.

“To see how society adapts to the sharing economy,” he said, “we need data.”

Here’s the news we’re following today

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• President Trump urged bipartisan cooperation in his State of the Union address but he also painted a dire picture of the border. Here’s a fact-check of what he said. [The New York Times]

• “The idea of declaring a nonexistent state of emergency on the border, in order to justify robbing funds that belong to the victims of fires, floods, hurricanes and droughts, to pay for the wall is not only immoral, it is illegal,” Attorney General Xavier Becerra of California said in his Spanish-language rebuttal to Mr. Trump. He threatened more legal action. [The Sacramento Bee]

• Want to know more about what life on the border is really like? The Times is starting a limited-run weekly newsletter, “Crossing the Border.” [The New York Times]

• An F.B.I. investigation is unfolding at Los Angeles City Hall. It’s just one of several corruption scandals playing out in major cities across the country. Here’s why. [The New York Times]

• The pilot of a plane that crashed into a home in Yorba Linda was initially identified as a former Chicago police officer. But Chicago officials said he never worked for the department. It added to the mystery of the crash, which killed four people in addition to the pilot. [The Los Angeles Times]

• San Francisco’s overdose prevention strategies have helped the city sidestep an epidemic of deaths caused by the synthetic opioid fentanyl. [Stateline]

• A disaster assistance center in Oroville that has been open since the devastating Camp Fire will close, though ones in Chico and Paradise will stay open. [The Chico Enterprise-Record]

• And a map circulated on social media shows where Camp Fire survivors have ended up: Spread across 29 states and more than 245 communities, and counting. [The Chico Enterprise-Record]

More California stories

• Piglets in gold sweaters, a rainbow of lion dancers and Mayor London Breed calling out, “Gung hay fat choy,” to the crowd: It was Lunar New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

• Better luck next year? The Super Bowl got lower TV ratings in Los Angeles than in the U.S. as a whole — and the game’s viewership was its smallest since 2008. [NBC Sports]

• “You’ve got to have young guys. Otherwise, guys like me are going to play Hall & Oates or something,” Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors said, explaining why he lets other people control the team’s practice playlist. Instead, they bump E-40, Too $hort and Aretha Franklin. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

And Finally …

The tourism commercials love to point out that you can get from the snowy mountains to the sunny beach, all without leaving the great state of California.

But there’s something magical about a cityscape blanketed in white, hushed by the cold. That might bring to mind Chicago, Boston or New York, but yesterday, much of the Bay Area, which hasn’t seen notable snowfall since 2011, got a rare wintry display.

And The San Francisco Chronicle compiled this very cool project of photos of neighborhoods covered with snow from a surprise storm on Feb. 5, 1976.

California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: [email protected].

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, went to school at U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

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