I consult for a company that is based in a city with scooters. My view is that they are essentially industrial garbage. People leave them on the sidewalk blocking pedestrians at best. At worst they end up in the canal or in the middle of the road.
When they do get used it is often on the sidewalk.
If the owners and users respected these things it would be a different story but at the rush for market dominance noone cares a lick about the hardware or where it ends up.
In my opinion they are a plague and I'm glad I dont have to deal with the accumulating detritus. Someone does though and I dont envy the people who have to fish these things out of the canal.
I have to imagine one leaking in the river undoes any environmental gain from the rest combined.
I always thought S.F. would have made a great "city of the future" and ban cars and go full in on birds. Like https://culdesac.com/ (wow, when you look at the pictures from culdesac it looks like Sesame Street!)
God no, invest in building out the trains and public transit. Scooters are just toys. Get a public transit like the NYC subways and it will change the city forever.
Last mile problem exists even in NYC. Also, the geography and weather of SF isn't the same as NYC so you can't just cut-and-paste a solution from one to the other like a block of code from StackOverflow.
Not in the entire city, only Manhattan (and not even all of it really). And it works because Manhattan has 4x the population density of SF, which is yet another problem that SF prevents from being solved.
I've noticed a significant drop in the availability of scooters where I live (a major European city) over the past year or so, including Bird exiting the market. Prices have increased substantially, and high-use subscription plans have disappeared.
I wonder how much of that is a change in regulations, and how much is the end of early price competition that was never sustainable.
It's all the second thing. The economics never made sense. It doesn't have one damned thing to do with "onerous regulations". It has to do with bird losing $300 million on revenues of $70 million.
The scooters are super convenient when you can park it anywhere, the whole idea of micro-mobility actually works and is more convenient than taking an Uber or a Lyft. It’s also the most fun you can have with $3 in a city.
In theory it cuts down on unnecessary car traffic, and you don’t have to get sweaty on a bicycle. The problem is, cities started forcing by the scooters to add arcane geofencing rules requiring you to park it or pick it up far from your origin or destination. That sort of ruins the whole point of the scooters.
I remember not being able to drop one at a park. A pedestrian-friendly space with a huge bike rack where I could get the scooter in a location where it wouldn't obstruct the sidewalk. But some bureaucrat decided parks were off limits.
It was never a viable business model. This is just a byproduct of VCs looking to create a bag and offload it to a bigger fool. The scooters themselves are just a random product mutation that will not survive.
These companies (and there are several undifferentiated players) are now at a point in their development where the pressure to lose less money or (gasp!) potentially make money must be increasing dramatically. I can't imagine there's much of a lock-in for current or previous users though, so as prices increase I'd bet demand decreases dramatically. There's also no real novelty anymore, unless it's tourists from a smaller center that doesn't have scooters.
It seems in the US regulations seem to be spun as something negative by all major news outlets.
For me this reads like sensible government policy at work. If the fines of cleanup eat into profits and are not just a minuscule cost of doing business, they set it just right instead of plain forbid it outright.
Sensible policy that driving a scooter on the sidewalk gets you 5x the fine that driving a car on the sidewalk would? Holding the companies responsible for users of rental scooters actions but not users of rental cars is sensible policy?
Yes. Both of these are sensible because our spaces and regulations are already better set up for cars, and the scooter companies are deliberately introducing technology that they know (or should know) increase unexpected danger. Thus, the costs should fall on them.
The details aren't perfect, but the idea is generally good.
I have a feeling if you as an individual started driving on the sidewalks multiple times receiving multiple fines that the state would quickly remove your privilege to drive and if you continued, would imprison you.
The arguments that justify fines for blocking sidewalks are all too happy to ignore the sidewalks being blocked by trash and tents, it’s internally inconsistent.
Why is it inconsistent? Are you going to get thousands of dollars from that homeless person in their tent? No, you'll fine them, they won't be able to pay, then you'll throw them in jail for violating the court order and by the time you're done you've spent 10 or 20 thousand dollars.
Once said that the "too high fines" sounds like an excuse, I am not sure to understand the logic of the fines (i.e. the attributing them at least partially to the company).
When you rent a car, the driver/renter pays all fines during the rent period, except maybe those related to the car itself not being fit for street use.
I could understand somehow those (though there must be anyway some method to make the user "responsible" of the bad parking).
No idea how it would be achievable it is entirely possible that the user parked the thing correctly but a kid passing by moved it later.
Many years ago in Paris (France) there were normal (actually terribly heavy) bikes for rent that had dedicated stands, you unlocked them with a card or similar, and you had to return them and lock them to another stand, otherwise you kept paying the rent (it was far from perfect, but at least created not this kind of problem).
But I was talking more about the US$ 500 one for driving on the sidewalk:
>And scooting on a San Francisco sidewalk instead of in a bike lane or road can earn a fine of $500, even if there’s no bike lane available. That fine is split between the scooter company and the scooter rider.
That one should be all on the rider, shouldn't it?
The driver of a rented car pays things like speeding tickets, yes, but if they abandon the car in the middle of the road, the rental company is expected to retrieve it and will be fined if they don't. Same deal here.
The most obvious difference is that scooters companies typically do not provide a place to park their vehicles between rentals, whereas all car rentals do... even Zipcar.
The scooter return process typically involves taking a picture of where the scooter is parked. If it gets a parking ticket and the picture shows that the renter parked it illegally, I imagine the fine does get passed along to the renter.
Unlike cars, it's very easy for vandals to move a scooter without renting it, e.g. by picking it up. I've seen scooters thrown into bodies of water and inside fenced areas. Most jurisdictions require the owners to remove them from such locations in a timely manner.
When you rent a car any fine is notified to the rental company which then forwards it to you.They can do this because there is paper that you signed that says that at that time you were driving. In the case of a scooter there is just a row on a db, I don’t know if that is enough to shift responsibilities, thought if they wanted they could address it (for example I remember that in one place users are required to take a photo of the scooter before leaving it) but part of the appeal is that you can just leave the scooter anywhere as soon as you reach your destination
I was thinking not so much of the parking fines, but rather of the driving ones that reportedly are "split".
The scooters don't have a registration plate, so the Police (or whomever issues the fine) has to stop the rider (or not?) then:
1) if the rider is stopped and fined, how/why is the fine split with the company?
2) if the rider is not stopped and the fine goes generically to the company, same question, if the rider can be identified in order to split the fine, why can he/she not be made to pay the whole fine?
There’s no way to profitably run a company like Bird without foisting the externalities on someone else. Their model is literally to dump a bunch of electric scooters on the side of the road with QR codes on them and just hope for the best. Of course they’re going to get fined when their property is left blocking driveways, of course they’re going to be expected to clean up the piles of scooters that get thrown in the bay, of course their scooters are going to get stolen. Yes, all of that is ruinously expensive to deal with - it’s not a viable business plan. It’s not “onerous regulation,” it’s holding the company accountable for the costs of its business model.
How does an HMO make money from trauma cases? My understanding is a member of the HMO seeking medical treatment will cost the HMO money, and their only source of revenue is insurance premiums.
Yeah, I guess they do add costs to the healthcare system since they only injure their drivers instead of outright kill them like cars do to 46,000 people in the US every year.
There are places in the world where citizens have high levels of concientiousness.
Obviously there's a threshold problem in most of urban USA. There's sufficient pedestrian concientousness maybe in Salt Lake City or some small New England city. Definitely in Japan. Probably most Swiss communities, but beyond that there's just too many sketchy people. It only takes 1 in 100.
"foisting the externalities on someone else" is how all profitable transportation works though. Uber clogs the streets with circling cars waiting for pickups. private cars are scattered all over the streets and are the single most dangerous thing in a city. cars, trains, taxis, buses, everything all create huge amounts of noise pollution. airplanes and gas powered cars create air pollution.
just pushing through and providing enough value to the demographics who make the laws until people accept your negative externalities as "normal" or "acceptable" is totally a viable business strategy, and holding companies accountable for the costs of their business is definitely not the norm. i don't necessarily like it, but you can't say bird has more negative externalities than any other private transport option in the city. they're just new and different.
Bird's big mistake is they chose a particularly stupid variety of a business plan here - if they'd done something like selling the scooters for cost but making people pay a subscription to use it or something, they'd be free & clear, because what people did with their scooters wouldn't be Bird's problem. Bird's mistake is that every Bird scooter is owned by Bird Inc., which means Bird Inc. is held accountable for every stupid thing someone does with a Bird scooter.
I don’t care, that’s not the point. The point is Bird retained ownership of all its scooters, and so it retained liability for its scooters, which is why it’s having to pay fines. If they’d managed a business model that doesn’t maintain a giant scooter fleet and all the liability on their books, this’d be a different story.
not to mention, there's a method for solving this problem that exists. Bird probably just didn't want to do it because of cost.
I'm nyc, citibikes don't have this problem; because you have to park them in a dock, thus releasing the bike back into the care (and liability) of the citibikes program (which isn't a problem, because now the bike is in a dock and not strewn about like trash).
These scooter companies are a menace, and the model they operate on is "take it as far as we can get away with at lowest possible dollar wherever will allow us to get away with it".
Makes me wonder how much they paid the chronicle for this piece, frankly.
Ever notice how bikes parked into docks has been an attempted business model since like the 1960s? Note the absence of such bikes today in pretty much all cities worldwide ...
I mean, I'm French, I know we're weird. I'm also from La Rochelle (half of me is) and our most beloved mayor decided to dump 350 yellow bike all around the city in 76. Free to use.
I've lived in Paris, La Rochelle, Rennes, Lille, Nantes. I do not remember one city I've lived in without docked bikes. And La Rochelle is quite small, with a population of 80k.
> Note the absence of such bikes today in pretty much all cities worldwide
I do not note this. My city has docked bikes, and has for a decade. They’ve been in NYC for the same period, Portland has them as well, and I seem to recall seeing them in New Orleans, too. I believe Boston also has a system. Hell, even Riverside had one, last time I was there. Come to think of it, I’m struggling to think of a city I’ve been to recently that Didn’t have a docked bike share.
And yet, I see twenty Lime bikes in London for every Boris bike I see. Docked bikes are not a popular business model, not even when heavily subsidised.
Too bad. The state puts its thumb on the scale in every market. Others have commented on cars below. If the city wanted to encourage scooters it would have. In America people actually try to build a Bird. Elsewhere they just don't bother. Thankfully there are other states in America that don't take the existence of business, innovation, or material prosperity for granted.
Electric scooters are still outright banned on public roads/pavements in the UK, outside of limited government trials (which appear to have been set up to fail, to keep them banned)
Anecdotally, nobody likes these scooters and I can't imagine any normal person who isn't financially invested in their success would care when they leave. They are a very dangerous and gimmicky mode of transportation in a nation where we could all use to walk much more than we do.
I loved them when they first arrived- cut my walking commute into downtown from 20 minutes to about 4 minutes, plus they are super fun to rip down hills and fast since you can lane split through traffic.
I think of it like skiing- sure there’s a lot of potential risk but it’s a super enjoyable of getting around. Bird was the first scooter I ever rented when they launched in SF and I loved it. It was so much fun waiting at stoplights with other scooter riders next to you chatting and racing together to make the next light. Then the city threw all the birds in trucks one night and took away the fun.
For a website that often complains about how mundane modern life has become, it’s ironic to see so much hate directed at a fun, novel way of moving around the city.
It still exists for you- just buy one. People have been using “hoverboards” before bird and they’ll continue to do so. Bird wanted to profit but not take responsibility. They were completely reckless in 2018 and were very easy on their customers riding on sidewalk at full speed and not even providing a way to securely lock it. Then when the regulations came down, after the city saw how reckless they were being used, it’s going to be harsh, duh. If they were thoughtful or even took responsibility to correct some behavior they could have even sold this as transit for the poor and made the city pay them for the privilege of providing them with an option that public transit can’t match. They’d have come up with stations for them to store and retrieve. They’d have strictly banned users taking it to the sidewalk or unsafe use.
Point to point transit is way different from riding to a bar and taking a Lyft home. Having my own scooter means lugging it indoors. It’s a hardware storage issue, really.
I think e-bikes that dock in specific places will eventually be the end state. Everyone can ride a bike and people don’t seem to care about bike racks on the sidewalk.
No one says it's not fun to ride one, but you dont throw the sky lift in the bay when you are done for the day.
The issue is no one not even Bird or apparently their investors care about the hard ware at all. In a rush for market dominance the scooters are disposable and riders treat them a such.
I like them. I am not (to my knowledge) financially invested in them.
I live in a major European city. Cars don't make sense for most trips because parking is limited both naturally by population density and artificially by policy. Public transit is crowded, and there are several airborne viruses of concern going around. I got a quote to insure my bike against theft when locked up in public and concluded it is very likely to be stolen. Bike rentals with parking stations are inconvenient because the stations often aren't where I want to go, and the bikes are very heavy/slow with airless tires.
So I use scooters somewhat often. I used them more when there were subscription plans that were effectively unlimited use for a month for a flat fee.
Anecdotally, where I live they are popular especially in the summer and lots of people ride them. I've used them a lot, always enjoyed it and hope they stick around.
But I live outside the USA and in a city where we have literal cargo trains that roll down the street in places where there are pedestrians, so the idea scooters are dangerous in comparison seems silly.
>> another innovative company, this one focused on the crucial task of getting people out of their cars and onto other modes of transportation as climate changes worsens and our streets feel like one huge traffic jam.
Oh please; scooters don't get people out of their cars and they're essentially treated like short-life disposable goods. They're a convenient alternative for short-distance trips, like zipping through a busy downtown core, probably on a sidewalk, through pedestrians at too high a speed and with no signaling or safetly equipment. I don't like much about SF, but would love to import whatever brought about forcing out Bird to my city.
I am 100% in favor of more regulation when it comes to transportation in cities. Solutions like Uber, scooters etc strike me as great ideas; but also somewhat inevitable, and would have benefitted from a growth process other than "all the Silicon Valley VC money fueling everything."
(I still maintain that a movement to enshrine the idea that these scooters left around where someone lives fall under the legal category of "mislaid property" and anyone finding one as such gets to keep it and modify as they wish.)
> (I still maintain that a movement to enshrine the idea that these scooters left around where someone lives fall under the legal category of "mislaid property" and anyone finding one as such gets to keep it and modify as they wish.)
The positive spin on these companies is they've been pretty solid VC-funded programs for providing transportation to the homeless population and spare parts to hobby hackers.
The on-demand scooter rentals model needs more thought. The scooters are often broken, not charged, under powered or unsafe (unless you bring your own helmet) to get around. Ppl leave them blocking sidewalks and etc.
Best thing I ever did was buy my own ebike. Battery powered personal vehicles are the answer, and ownership pays off quickly compared to Ubers and parking and rentals.
I hope the city bike rollout keeps going. Keep adding bikes and hubs everywhere and lower the price of rentals. Having stations to park and charge and pick up bikes everywhere is better than the free for all of Bird imho.
I much prefer my own scooter, however the rideshare model has a single absolutely massive advantage over private ownership: once you get where you're going you don't need to worry about it getting stolen.
I have the best lock I could find and glued an Apple AirTag to the inside, but still whenever I go to dinner on my scooter I spend 5 minutes trying to find a place to park it and convince the restaurant staff to give me a seat where I can see it (although some very nice people will sometimes let me fold it up and store it inside the restaurant behind the front desk or something), then spend the entire time worried about it getting jacked while I'm eating. I tend to visit only restaurants with sidewalk dining as a result, and I often take a car instead for anything like shopping where monitoring it isn't possible.
Wide availability of secure parking infrastructure (or maybe even law enforcement attempting to do something about theft in the first place) would go a long way toward making private e-vehicles viable transport IMO.
Sounds like Bird just doesn’t want to deal with the downsides of their business model.
In most cities where I’ve seen them, they’re usually just abandoned by people with reckless abandon. Granted, some of that was probably not the users but other people…
I’d see them in the Bay, thrown into peoples hedges, cluttering up sidewalks.
While I know they serve a use for many people, they also were indistinguishable from garbage.
If their business model depends on other people (not just their customers) taking care of their product and the cities/individuals to clean up after them, then their business model is clearly flawed to begin with.
Even in so called "walkable" cities in the US, the car is king. Cities who have bulldozed entire neighborhoods to save drivers 5 minutes of waiting in traffic cannot fathom anything rising above the slightest accommodation for any vehicle that weighs less than 1000kg.
I also left California because of the regulations and hidden taxes everywhere. They made it Very difficult for a hardware startup company.. If you don't have angel investors, don't bother opening up in Cali, go to a more friendly state
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadWhen they do get used it is often on the sidewalk.
If the owners and users respected these things it would be a different story but at the rush for market dominance noone cares a lick about the hardware or where it ends up.
In my opinion they are a plague and I'm glad I dont have to deal with the accumulating detritus. Someone does though and I dont envy the people who have to fish these things out of the canal.
I have to imagine one leaking in the river undoes any environmental gain from the rest combined.
If it doesn’t have schools, sports, and recreation for kids, it’s a dystopia.
Nowhere did I say it's a cut and paste solution. I said invest in the trains they have already instead of dumping money on scooter startups.
I wonder how much of that is a change in regulations, and how much is the end of early price competition that was never sustainable.
The scooters are super convenient when you can park it anywhere, the whole idea of micro-mobility actually works and is more convenient than taking an Uber or a Lyft. It’s also the most fun you can have with $3 in a city.
In theory it cuts down on unnecessary car traffic, and you don’t have to get sweaty on a bicycle. The problem is, cities started forcing by the scooters to add arcane geofencing rules requiring you to park it or pick it up far from your origin or destination. That sort of ruins the whole point of the scooters.
Had to drop it on the sidewalk next to said park.
For me this reads like sensible government policy at work. If the fines of cleanup eat into profits and are not just a minuscule cost of doing business, they set it just right instead of plain forbid it outright.
The details aren't perfect, but the idea is generally good.
When you rent a car, the driver/renter pays all fines during the rent period, except maybe those related to the car itself not being fit for street use.
Why is this different for these scooters?
No idea how it would be achievable it is entirely possible that the user parked the thing correctly but a kid passing by moved it later.
Many years ago in Paris (France) there were normal (actually terribly heavy) bikes for rent that had dedicated stands, you unlocked them with a card or similar, and you had to return them and lock them to another stand, otherwise you kept paying the rent (it was far from perfect, but at least created not this kind of problem).
But I was talking more about the US$ 500 one for driving on the sidewalk:
>And scooting on a San Francisco sidewalk instead of in a bike lane or road can earn a fine of $500, even if there’s no bike lane available. That fine is split between the scooter company and the scooter rider.
That one should be all on the rider, shouldn't it?
Unlike cars, it's very easy for vandals to move a scooter without renting it, e.g. by picking it up. I've seen scooters thrown into bodies of water and inside fenced areas. Most jurisdictions require the owners to remove them from such locations in a timely manner.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34848478
I was thinking not so much of the parking fines, but rather of the driving ones that reportedly are "split".
The scooters don't have a registration plate, so the Police (or whomever issues the fine) has to stop the rider (or not?) then:
1) if the rider is stopped and fined, how/why is the fine split with the company?
2) if the rider is not stopped and the fine goes generically to the company, same question, if the rider can be identified in order to split the fine, why can he/she not be made to pay the whole fine?
Obviously there's a threshold problem in most of urban USA. There's sufficient pedestrian concientousness maybe in Salt Lake City or some small New England city. Definitely in Japan. Probably most Swiss communities, but beyond that there's just too many sketchy people. It only takes 1 in 100.
just pushing through and providing enough value to the demographics who make the laws until people accept your negative externalities as "normal" or "acceptable" is totally a viable business strategy, and holding companies accountable for the costs of their business is definitely not the norm. i don't necessarily like it, but you can't say bird has more negative externalities than any other private transport option in the city. they're just new and different.
I'm nyc, citibikes don't have this problem; because you have to park them in a dock, thus releasing the bike back into the care (and liability) of the citibikes program (which isn't a problem, because now the bike is in a dock and not strewn about like trash).
These scooter companies are a menace, and the model they operate on is "take it as far as we can get away with at lowest possible dollar wherever will allow us to get away with it".
Makes me wonder how much they paid the chronicle for this piece, frankly.
Docks make the business model unrealistic too.
I've lived in Paris, La Rochelle, Rennes, Lille, Nantes. I do not remember one city I've lived in without docked bikes. And La Rochelle is quite small, with a population of 80k.
I do not note this. My city has docked bikes, and has for a decade. They’ve been in NYC for the same period, Portland has them as well, and I seem to recall seeing them in New Orleans, too. I believe Boston also has a system. Hell, even Riverside had one, last time I was there. Come to think of it, I’m struggling to think of a city I’ve been to recently that Didn’t have a docked bike share.
Electric scooters are still outright banned on public roads/pavements in the UK, outside of limited government trials (which appear to have been set up to fail, to keep them banned)
I think of it like skiing- sure there’s a lot of potential risk but it’s a super enjoyable of getting around. Bird was the first scooter I ever rented when they launched in SF and I loved it. It was so much fun waiting at stoplights with other scooter riders next to you chatting and racing together to make the next light. Then the city threw all the birds in trucks one night and took away the fun.
For a website that often complains about how mundane modern life has become, it’s ironic to see so much hate directed at a fun, novel way of moving around the city.
I think e-bikes that dock in specific places will eventually be the end state. Everyone can ride a bike and people don’t seem to care about bike racks on the sidewalk.
The issue is no one not even Bird or apparently their investors care about the hard ware at all. In a rush for market dominance the scooters are disposable and riders treat them a such.
I live in a major European city. Cars don't make sense for most trips because parking is limited both naturally by population density and artificially by policy. Public transit is crowded, and there are several airborne viruses of concern going around. I got a quote to insure my bike against theft when locked up in public and concluded it is very likely to be stolen. Bike rentals with parking stations are inconvenient because the stations often aren't where I want to go, and the bikes are very heavy/slow with airless tires.
So I use scooters somewhat often. I used them more when there were subscription plans that were effectively unlimited use for a month for a flat fee.
But I live outside the USA and in a city where we have literal cargo trains that roll down the street in places where there are pedestrians, so the idea scooters are dangerous in comparison seems silly.
Oh please; scooters don't get people out of their cars and they're essentially treated like short-life disposable goods. They're a convenient alternative for short-distance trips, like zipping through a busy downtown core, probably on a sidewalk, through pedestrians at too high a speed and with no signaling or safetly equipment. I don't like much about SF, but would love to import whatever brought about forcing out Bird to my city.
> They're a convenient alternative for short-distance trips
(I still maintain that a movement to enshrine the idea that these scooters left around where someone lives fall under the legal category of "mislaid property" and anyone finding one as such gets to keep it and modify as they wish.)
The positive spin on these companies is they've been pretty solid VC-funded programs for providing transportation to the homeless population and spare parts to hobby hackers.
The on-demand scooter rentals model needs more thought. The scooters are often broken, not charged, under powered or unsafe (unless you bring your own helmet) to get around. Ppl leave them blocking sidewalks and etc.
Best thing I ever did was buy my own ebike. Battery powered personal vehicles are the answer, and ownership pays off quickly compared to Ubers and parking and rentals.
I hope the city bike rollout keeps going. Keep adding bikes and hubs everywhere and lower the price of rentals. Having stations to park and charge and pick up bikes everywhere is better than the free for all of Bird imho.
I have the best lock I could find and glued an Apple AirTag to the inside, but still whenever I go to dinner on my scooter I spend 5 minutes trying to find a place to park it and convince the restaurant staff to give me a seat where I can see it (although some very nice people will sometimes let me fold it up and store it inside the restaurant behind the front desk or something), then spend the entire time worried about it getting jacked while I'm eating. I tend to visit only restaurants with sidewalk dining as a result, and I often take a car instead for anything like shopping where monitoring it isn't possible.
Wide availability of secure parking infrastructure (or maybe even law enforcement attempting to do something about theft in the first place) would go a long way toward making private e-vehicles viable transport IMO.
In most cities where I’ve seen them, they’re usually just abandoned by people with reckless abandon. Granted, some of that was probably not the users but other people…
I’d see them in the Bay, thrown into peoples hedges, cluttering up sidewalks.
While I know they serve a use for many people, they also were indistinguishable from garbage.
If their business model depends on other people (not just their customers) taking care of their product and the cities/individuals to clean up after them, then their business model is clearly flawed to begin with.