This one is odd to me. BMW doesn't have to offer low income cars. AFAIK Uber doesnt have to cut fares for low-income folks. Walking and the bus/train is the low income plan.
Perhaps some of the scooter companies are arguing that they provide a solution to overcrowded mass transit; SFMTA provides options like the Lifeline Pass (https://www.sfmta.com/fares/lifeline-pass). Additionally, they are relying upon public streets and areas to sell their services (as I understand it, you don't go to a private depot to pick up a scooter you wish to rent), whereas BMW dealerships conduct their business on private property.
Generally those are privately owned, ostensibly by those paying taxes. A better analogy would be if Enterprise left rental cars parked on public streets for customers to pick up as part of the transaction.
This makes sense if you group scooters and docking bicycle share programs into the same category. Most US city bikeshare programs include deeply discounted (like $5/mo) access for the poor.
Scooters are an urban mobility solution, one that if successful will reduce the need to utilize last mile public transportation. This potentially means transit routes will be shut down. If you want to make it easy for everyone to navigate a city, you need to make sure that they have access to meaningful transportation options.
As for automobiles I understand there are practical reasons why subsidizing them isn't cost effective, but for a while in the 20th century automobile dependency was used to make sure the poor masses couldn't make it out to the suburbs -- places rich in jobs, education and investment opportunities that entire generations missed out on.
In some regards I think this is the real story... "After billions spent, Government public transit fails to innovate effective solutions to their mission"
>As part of the pilot, up to five qualified companies could be issued permits to operate shared, motorized scooters in San Francisco
So essentially if you're not fast or well connected enough to get one of those permits then you're shit out of luck? What happens if a company scooter-sharing hurts gets one of those permits to sit on? Why did this industry need a limited pilot in the first place??
Because the scooters were already clogging sidewalks and aggravating people. The limit prevents that. Otherwise VC's will invest in ten of these companies like lemmings, kind of like how we have so many food deliver apps. At least this way we'll only have five. This doesn't seem too crazy to me but maybe that's just me.
Generally pilot programs have a limited scope. Presumably, one of the business advantages of being allowed in the pilot is to establish awareness and a customer base before the market is completely open. Doesn’t seem like there’s much advantage to just sitting around during that time.
> Why did this industry need a limited pilot in the first place?
"I've been having chuck steak ever since I've been on the force,' declared Alexander 'Clubber' Williams of the New York Police Department in 1876. 'Now I'm going to have a bit of tenderloin.'"
"If you're California you regulate stuff. It's what you do"
<insert car insurance sales pitch here>
Why couldn't the city couldn't just impound and auction scooters, bikes, skateboards, shopping carts that are parked illegally? They almost certainly can do this under one of the bajillion existing statutes. Don't want you crap stolen by the government, don't let your users park it in dumb places. As I understand it riding a scooter on the sidewalk is already illegal. I don't see how this is any different from bike sharing other than the form factor making them more tempting to ride on the sidewalk.
It astonishes me how rapidly San Francisco has mobilized to get the scooters off the street in comparison to how little they have been able to accomplish to get the poop, needles, and condoms off the same streets.
I know which I would choose, if I was told to pick one or the other to be removed from city streets.
Why would it astonish you? The posted article is about proposed regulations, not resources for enforcement. Is it the case that San Francisco has no laws regarding littering and public defecation?
> The posted article is about proposed regulations, not resources for enforcement.
Proposing and negotiating regulations and creating a pilot permitting regime costs money and, more expensively, attention. It is remarkable that, given the multitude of political failures currently going on in San Francisco, that this has been prioritized.
If I were a city supervisor looking to maximize the health and welfare of people walking on my city's sidewalks, I would fund getting rid of the disease threat before I spent funds on the mechanical threat.
Nobody needs to get _rid_ of the humans. We can use the enforcement money and energy on removing shared scooters to building restrooms for the homeless and having a dedicated street cleaning force to power wash streets.
The bathrooms are expensive because they need technology that prevents ppl from hanging out in them, so they automatically lock down and power wash the inside after every use.
The sidewalk cleaning is also expensive, it costs the city millions per year to power wash the civic center sidewalks every morning. And that's just a fraction of the area.
These expensive things don't make the city better they just improve the quality of life for the homeless population, which can now boom until the quality is right back where it started. Would you then add even more bathrooms and street cleaners in response or realize that cleaning the mess isn't going to solve this problem?
One is a well defined company you can sue into oblivion, the other are homeless people with almost no assets who are probably in and out of jail all the time. See also the difference in fighting a well defined country in a war (which can be won) and fighting an insurgency (which is much harder to win).
On the surface yes. But to sue a company into oblivion you have to create statutes (legislation time cost) and create a process for identifying violations (do cops do this? meter maids? city workers?) establish a legal team task force to handle those prosecutions (more money for the DA? a new team? outside counsel?), follow through those prosecutions (court costs, sheriff costs), and finally collect judgements (collection costs)
As compared to putting accessible restrooms and disposal bins around the city and cleaning them weekly.
The city government has failed. San Francisco will not improve its homelessness situation until it gets get by an economic crisis.
I think the city is done for. It will hit a growth ceiling on population and taxes, but homelessness will keep rising and property prices will be unaccessible.
As lower income people leave the city, it will devour everything.
Solving homelessness is a very high bar, and I don’t think anyone thinks that’s an easy issue to tackle.
However SF is uniquely failing to prevent feces, needles, and condoms off the streets. To prevent public daylight IV drug abuse in the densest city center. To prevent tens of thousands of car breakins from happening on organized crime scales. All while spending ever more money putting little band aids on the problem, like increased budgets for feces removal.
These aren’t problems most cities faces on that scale, why is SF struggling so much comparatively?
I think the climate has a big role in this. In NYC you see the same homeless ppl for about a year, then the hard winter weather hits and they (hopefully) head somewhere warmer. NYC citizens don't have these difficult conversations that SF citizens have looming over them, because the climate conveniently and quietly wipes the slate every year. SF on the other hand can be a forever destination with outdoor livable weather year round.
>For the first six months of the pilot, a total of 1,250 scooters may be permitted. If the first six months are successful, the total number of scooters may increase to 2,500 in months seven through 12.
While I support the city's efforts to balance the downsides, mainly the sidewalk parking issue, with the upsides of cheap, clean, and accessible mobility, I think there are two wrongheaded decisions the city is making.
1. Why limit the number of operators? Is this an effort to create a medallion system or similar? That failed tremendously as it was administered under the old Cab system. It also risks preempting new developments, e.g. at some point the scooters will be able to drive themselves to you. You do not want to give incumbents a legal mechanism to block that competitive challenge.
2. Why limit the number of scooters? It is already difficult to find one of these for a ride to / home from work. Limiting the number just creates incentives for bad behavior by users. Ever seen someone 'guarding' an inactive scooter? I saw someone hiding one under his lunch table (it was 'available' in the app), presumably so that he could ride it home when done. Artificial scarcity is likely to create many more problems than it solves.
In both cases a better public policy proposal would be marginal taxes per unit on the scooters themselves with no cap on number. The community incurs an externality in allowing these operators to enjoy free on sidewalk parking, simply set a price to balance that and let commuters decide how many units should be around. Or to put it into econospeak: Pigovian taxes are better than quotas.
> Why limit the number of operators? Is this an effort to create a medallion system or similar?
No. It's because this is a pilot program. At the end of the program, if the program is successful and a decision is made to allow this on a more permanent basis, then presumably the restrictions will be lifted.
For context, the bike share pilot programs (e.g. the Ford GoBikes and the JUMP bikes) also have similar restrictions.
Same answer goes for why limiting the number of scooters.
They may regulate it appropriately in the end, but it sets a bad framework as precedent.
Regardless, the deadweight loss from this decision is substantial. Imagine that the equilibrium number of scooters (the # the market will support, note that we are in the 'rapid adoption phase' right now) is 5000, instead of 2500. At 10 rides per day, times $3 per ride, times the duration of both levels of the quota, that's about $40M in lost economic value. You may fairly argue about those assumptions, but if the city were to propose a special $40M (or $5M or $10M) tax to pay for a study on the scooters, we would rightly be outraged. But they both have the same impact -- people in the city are $40M worse off with what, exactly, being gained in return?
Also note specifically that a big issue with the taxi medallion system was that the quotas prevented the discovery of the equilibrium # of taxis. If we do not allow a market equilibrium to be reached, it's very easy for regulators to endlessly argue over the 'right' number without ever getting close to what the market actually wants. Politics has a lot of inertia -- the medallion system perpetuated itself for generations -- so I do not think you can understate the importance of bad precedent.
Not really, this is how pilot programs generally always work. You limit the scope of the program for two reasons:
1. It keeps the program manageable, and it keeps the data more consistent. If the number of operators or scooters are constantly changing it makes it hard to actually draw any conclusions from the program.
2. The pilot program is being run because the SFMTA hasn't yet made the decision to allow this going forward (or they haven't finalized the rules governing it). Not having any restrictions on the program is basically the same thing as simply approving it, but the pilot program exists to determine if it should be approved and what rules it should be governed by.
> Regardless, the deadweight loss from this decision is substantial.
The theoretical loss under certain assumptions, true. What if it turns out that the usage of scooters actually produces a net economic drain in the city?
The pilot program limits the potential benefit, but it also limits the potential downside too.
> Also note specifically that a big issue with the taxi medallion system was that the quotas prevented the discovery of the equilibrium # of taxis. If we do not allow a market equilibrium to be reached, it's very easy for regulators to endlessly argue over the 'right' number without ever getting close to what the market actually wants. Politics has a lot of inertia -- the medallion system perpetuated itself for generations -- so I do not think you can understate the importance of bad precedent.
It sounds to me like you don't understand what a pilot program is. The pilot program only lasts a year, so these restrictions are only in place for a year. After the pilot program ends, the SFMTA will determine the new rules to use (assuming they decide to allow the scooters to continue operating at all) and the rules that governed the pilot program won't apply anymore.
Presumably the SFMTA will continue to require companies operating in this space to obtain a permit, but they'll also likely drop the "only 5 companies can participate" rule because that rule exists to limit the scope of the pilot program and keep it manageable. As for restrictions on the total number of scooters allowed, I guess that depends on the outcome of the pilot program. However, if the outcome is "2,500 scooters is better, or at least not worse, than 1,250 scooters" then the SFMTA is unlikely to put a cap on the scooters (since, as you said, they won't know what the optimal number is at that point).
> San Francisco supports transportation innovation, but it cannot come at the price of public safety,” Herrera said. “This permit program represents a thoughtful, coordinated and effective approach to ensure that San Francisco strikes the right balance. We can have innovation, but it must keep our sidewalks safe and accessible for all pedestrians.
This. Exactly. In the past week alone, I've been witness to, or victim in, 3 pedestrian safety incidents. In the first one, a dude and a lady companioned were riding the "Bird"s and turned into the sidewalk I was walking on (Fillmore Street) and crashed into me. They awkwardly apologized and were gone, didn't even bother to see if I was injured. In another incident on Market and 1st (going towards the bay bridge) a scooter "Parked" on the sidewalk was blown from the wind and had falled on the sidewalk ramp. Saw an old black lady in a wheel chair struggling to get around it to get on the sidewalk. The 3rd was a Muni driver honking at 2 riders who were bank in the middle of the road on Howard St going towards the Ferry Building. He almost crashed the bus into them.
While I'm all for innovation, it cannot come at the cost of pedestrian safety. Even if these startups meant for their scooters to be riden on the road, and not the sidewalk (It's ILLEGAL to ride a motorized vehicle on the sidewalk of San Francisco[1] ) only a small minority of the riders seem to be following it. I've seen so many riding it on the sidewalks.
My main concern walking down market street is the drug traffickers having fights for the payday loans corner, human shit, needles and sick and mentally deranged people walking about.
I wish scooters made the top 5 public safety issues.
It's actually pretty good that there are 5 spots. Bird, Lime, Spin are here now. Lyft has expressed interest. SkipScooters, from 2 of the founders of Boosted skateboards, seems like they might know how to make a great scooter. Maybe Uber/Jump would make 6?
The other interesting competition aspect is that each is limited to 250 scooters. Not enough to build a network. So you'll have to join a few of them to make it reliable. This will keep some less competitive companies alive a little longer.
Long term it would be crazy to prevent competition like this. And worth watching, cities are laughably poor at good licensing. There are supposed to be 45,000 licensed uber/lyft drivers vs 1,500 taxi medallions in SF. 30 times too few taxis! It's amazing that was the status quo for 40 years. [1]
The slow ramp is the huge bummer though. Three months of 1250, 6 months of 2500 would make more sense. Then 10-30 thousand for a couple years. You need a lot of vehicles to make a reliable network. Same goes for Jump style locking bikes.
Scooters are a little objectionable and probably need to be managed, but wow cars are so much worse. Any possible replacement for SF's 500,000 cars should get the fullest support and permissiveness from government. They take up huge amounts of space for parking, kill people, cause pollution, and sit in traffic jams. Tesla is cool but in cities cars are not the answer (go Boring company go!).
It's worth pointing out that in SF you can still buy and operate your own electric scooter or ebike. Unlike the baffling NYC situation. SF is actually ok at adapting, just really slowly.
Some numbers:
500,000 cars registered in SF [2]
20 traffic fatalities in 2017, killing
14 pedestrians
2 cyclists
4 motorcycle drivers
0 car drivers
It sounds like they were all killed by cars.[3]
57 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThis one is odd to me. BMW doesn't have to offer low income cars. AFAIK Uber doesnt have to cut fares for low-income folks. Walking and the bus/train is the low income plan.
As for automobiles I understand there are practical reasons why subsidizing them isn't cost effective, but for a while in the 20th century automobile dependency was used to make sure the poor masses couldn't make it out to the suburbs -- places rich in jobs, education and investment opportunities that entire generations missed out on.
Why is this a private industry problem? Isn't that SFMTA's charter?
So essentially if you're not fast or well connected enough to get one of those permits then you're shit out of luck? What happens if a company scooter-sharing hurts gets one of those permits to sit on? Why did this industry need a limited pilot in the first place??
"I've been having chuck steak ever since I've been on the force,' declared Alexander 'Clubber' Williams of the New York Police Department in 1876. 'Now I'm going to have a bit of tenderloin.'"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews...
<insert car insurance sales pitch here>
Why couldn't the city couldn't just impound and auction scooters, bikes, skateboards, shopping carts that are parked illegally? They almost certainly can do this under one of the bajillion existing statutes. Don't want you crap stolen by the government, don't let your users park it in dumb places. As I understand it riding a scooter on the sidewalk is already illegal. I don't see how this is any different from bike sharing other than the form factor making them more tempting to ride on the sidewalk.
I know which I would choose, if I was told to pick one or the other to be removed from city streets.
Proposing and negotiating regulations and creating a pilot permitting regime costs money and, more expensively, attention. It is remarkable that, given the multitude of political failures currently going on in San Francisco, that this has been prioritized.
/s
The bathrooms are expensive because they need technology that prevents ppl from hanging out in them, so they automatically lock down and power wash the inside after every use.
The sidewalk cleaning is also expensive, it costs the city millions per year to power wash the civic center sidewalks every morning. And that's just a fraction of the area.
These expensive things don't make the city better they just improve the quality of life for the homeless population, which can now boom until the quality is right back where it started. Would you then add even more bathrooms and street cleaners in response or realize that cleaning the mess isn't going to solve this problem?
As compared to putting accessible restrooms and disposal bins around the city and cleaning them weekly.
I think the city is done for. It will hit a growth ceiling on population and taxes, but homelessness will keep rising and property prices will be unaccessible.
As lower income people leave the city, it will devour everything.
Unfortunately they're all busy making the fourth, fifth, sixth, electric scooter company
However SF is uniquely failing to prevent feces, needles, and condoms off the streets. To prevent public daylight IV drug abuse in the densest city center. To prevent tens of thousands of car breakins from happening on organized crime scales. All while spending ever more money putting little band aids on the problem, like increased budgets for feces removal.
These aren’t problems most cities faces on that scale, why is SF struggling so much comparatively?
John Snow would disagree.
Sure, just walking through is lower risk than actually living on the street, but it's not a non-threat.
While I support the city's efforts to balance the downsides, mainly the sidewalk parking issue, with the upsides of cheap, clean, and accessible mobility, I think there are two wrongheaded decisions the city is making.
1. Why limit the number of operators? Is this an effort to create a medallion system or similar? That failed tremendously as it was administered under the old Cab system. It also risks preempting new developments, e.g. at some point the scooters will be able to drive themselves to you. You do not want to give incumbents a legal mechanism to block that competitive challenge.
2. Why limit the number of scooters? It is already difficult to find one of these for a ride to / home from work. Limiting the number just creates incentives for bad behavior by users. Ever seen someone 'guarding' an inactive scooter? I saw someone hiding one under his lunch table (it was 'available' in the app), presumably so that he could ride it home when done. Artificial scarcity is likely to create many more problems than it solves.
In both cases a better public policy proposal would be marginal taxes per unit on the scooters themselves with no cap on number. The community incurs an externality in allowing these operators to enjoy free on sidewalk parking, simply set a price to balance that and let commuters decide how many units should be around. Or to put it into econospeak: Pigovian taxes are better than quotas.
No. It's because this is a pilot program. At the end of the program, if the program is successful and a decision is made to allow this on a more permanent basis, then presumably the restrictions will be lifted.
For context, the bike share pilot programs (e.g. the Ford GoBikes and the JUMP bikes) also have similar restrictions.
Same answer goes for why limiting the number of scooters.
Regardless, the deadweight loss from this decision is substantial. Imagine that the equilibrium number of scooters (the # the market will support, note that we are in the 'rapid adoption phase' right now) is 5000, instead of 2500. At 10 rides per day, times $3 per ride, times the duration of both levels of the quota, that's about $40M in lost economic value. You may fairly argue about those assumptions, but if the city were to propose a special $40M (or $5M or $10M) tax to pay for a study on the scooters, we would rightly be outraged. But they both have the same impact -- people in the city are $40M worse off with what, exactly, being gained in return?
Also note specifically that a big issue with the taxi medallion system was that the quotas prevented the discovery of the equilibrium # of taxis. If we do not allow a market equilibrium to be reached, it's very easy for regulators to endlessly argue over the 'right' number without ever getting close to what the market actually wants. Politics has a lot of inertia -- the medallion system perpetuated itself for generations -- so I do not think you can understate the importance of bad precedent.
Not really, this is how pilot programs generally always work. You limit the scope of the program for two reasons:
1. It keeps the program manageable, and it keeps the data more consistent. If the number of operators or scooters are constantly changing it makes it hard to actually draw any conclusions from the program.
2. The pilot program is being run because the SFMTA hasn't yet made the decision to allow this going forward (or they haven't finalized the rules governing it). Not having any restrictions on the program is basically the same thing as simply approving it, but the pilot program exists to determine if it should be approved and what rules it should be governed by.
> Regardless, the deadweight loss from this decision is substantial.
The theoretical loss under certain assumptions, true. What if it turns out that the usage of scooters actually produces a net economic drain in the city?
The pilot program limits the potential benefit, but it also limits the potential downside too.
> Also note specifically that a big issue with the taxi medallion system was that the quotas prevented the discovery of the equilibrium # of taxis. If we do not allow a market equilibrium to be reached, it's very easy for regulators to endlessly argue over the 'right' number without ever getting close to what the market actually wants. Politics has a lot of inertia -- the medallion system perpetuated itself for generations -- so I do not think you can understate the importance of bad precedent.
It sounds to me like you don't understand what a pilot program is. The pilot program only lasts a year, so these restrictions are only in place for a year. After the pilot program ends, the SFMTA will determine the new rules to use (assuming they decide to allow the scooters to continue operating at all) and the rules that governed the pilot program won't apply anymore.
Presumably the SFMTA will continue to require companies operating in this space to obtain a permit, but they'll also likely drop the "only 5 companies can participate" rule because that rule exists to limit the scope of the pilot program and keep it manageable. As for restrictions on the total number of scooters allowed, I guess that depends on the outcome of the pilot program. However, if the outcome is "2,500 scooters is better, or at least not worse, than 1,250 scooters" then the SFMTA is unlikely to put a cap on the scooters (since, as you said, they won't know what the optimal number is at that point).
That's pretty cool.
This. Exactly. In the past week alone, I've been witness to, or victim in, 3 pedestrian safety incidents. In the first one, a dude and a lady companioned were riding the "Bird"s and turned into the sidewalk I was walking on (Fillmore Street) and crashed into me. They awkwardly apologized and were gone, didn't even bother to see if I was injured. In another incident on Market and 1st (going towards the bay bridge) a scooter "Parked" on the sidewalk was blown from the wind and had falled on the sidewalk ramp. Saw an old black lady in a wheel chair struggling to get around it to get on the sidewalk. The 3rd was a Muni driver honking at 2 riders who were bank in the middle of the road on Howard St going towards the Ferry Building. He almost crashed the bus into them.
While I'm all for innovation, it cannot come at the cost of pedestrian safety. Even if these startups meant for their scooters to be riden on the road, and not the sidewalk (It's ILLEGAL to ride a motorized vehicle on the sidewalk of San Francisco[1] ) only a small minority of the riders seem to be following it. I've seen so many riding it on the sidewalks.
[1] Source: Reminder: It Is Illegal to Ride Scooters On City Sidewalks => https://sf.curbed.com/2016/6/1/11831080/scooters-sidewalks-i...
I wish scooters made the top 5 public safety issues.
The other interesting competition aspect is that each is limited to 250 scooters. Not enough to build a network. So you'll have to join a few of them to make it reliable. This will keep some less competitive companies alive a little longer.
Long term it would be crazy to prevent competition like this. And worth watching, cities are laughably poor at good licensing. There are supposed to be 45,000 licensed uber/lyft drivers vs 1,500 taxi medallions in SF. 30 times too few taxis! It's amazing that was the status quo for 40 years. [1]
The slow ramp is the huge bummer though. Three months of 1250, 6 months of 2500 would make more sense. Then 10-30 thousand for a couple years. You need a lot of vehicles to make a reliable network. Same goes for Jump style locking bikes.
Scooters are a little objectionable and probably need to be managed, but wow cars are so much worse. Any possible replacement for SF's 500,000 cars should get the fullest support and permissiveness from government. They take up huge amounts of space for parking, kill people, cause pollution, and sit in traffic jams. Tesla is cool but in cities cars are not the answer (go Boring company go!).
It's worth pointing out that in SF you can still buy and operate your own electric scooter or ebike. Unlike the baffling NYC situation. SF is actually ok at adapting, just really slowly.
Some numbers:
[1] http://www.ktvu.com/news/clogged-streets-45000-uber-and-lyft...[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/add5eb07-c676-40b4...
[3] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/5/16854592/traffic-deaths-san-f...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Cyclist-p...