I’ve wondered how they deal with theft. But if you take a scooter and put it in a faraday cage now, in a year or two, will they will track them when you take it out?
> In a press release today, Bird confirmed that it had entered into a “financial restructuring process aimed at strengthening its balance sheet,” with the company continuing to operate as normal in pursuit of “long-term, sustainable growth.”
> The ultimate goal is to sell Bird’s assets, with a so-called “stalking horse” agreement kicking off a bidding process designed to get as much value out of Bird as possible, with its lenders setting a baseline bid before opening things up to external suitors over the next four months.
They might end up in the hands of someone that wants them.
There are many different scooter companies, so it’s likely someone will pick ups the assets.
No. In the event of a bankruptcy, the inventory should be sold to the highest bidder and used to reimburse the creditors of the company (probably the IRS/investors/suppliers).
Bringing scooters to your house would still be theft.
The people that throw them in the river are not the environmentalist kind but pretty trashy themselves. The kind that hang around street corners in groups making you feel unsafe. We call them 'hangjongeren' in Dutch (meaning youths hanging around).
Ps I hate these scooter companies but throwing them in the rivers is terrible for the environment.
I think you’d have to figure out a way to “jailbreak” it, if you did. Most (if not all) are locked down via software, and can’t just be used without that aspect.
The very early 365 models they dropped off in Santa Monica are easy to jailbreak. A couple years ago you could buy an already jailbroken one off of Craigslist in LA for around $100-200.
Obviously illegal although unlikely to get you in trouble.
I collected broken abandoned ones in my neighborhood in Baltimore. They were there for weeks maybe even months, lying on the ground. I took it home, removed the bird brain, bought a new ninebot ESC, repinned a couple of jst connectors, got a replacement battery, and a folding steering bar a latch from a guy in Russia.
Another company's E-Trash is another mans transportation when their car is broken.
Chapter 11 is still because of insolvency (debts > assets), it just results in the company continuing to operate with the creditors becoming the new owners, not being forced to cease operations, liquidate, and return cash to creditors.
>In a press release today, Bird confirmed that it had entered into a “financial restructuring process aimed at strengthening its balance sheet,” with the company continuing to operate as normal in pursuit of “long-term, sustainable growth.”
If it wasn't for the paragraph before, you'd think things were going just peachy.
I am a frequent user of other rental scooter services, but I could never get the Bird app to work. I wonder how large a role low-quality software development may have played in their inability to make a profit.
This makes me sad -- I liked the Bird scooters much more than the Lime or Spin ones, and parking a bunch of scooters in a parking spot takes up much less space than Citi bike docking stations or Google bikes or cars.
But instead running a scooter rental company became "who is best at navigating municipal RFPs" and the lack of availability brought people back to riding in -- and leasing/buying -- cars.
I don't blame the municipalities for holding private companies accountable when scooters inevitably end up blocking ADA accessible routes or end up thrown in the river. It's expensive to deal with these issues, and since American consumers won't take personal responsibility, it should rightfully be at the private company's expense.
Rentable scooters require 24/7 staff with collection vehicles in nearly every municipality they exist, and municipalities have a right to demand a standard of service in addressing issues caused by the private scooter rental customers.
It’s not nearly as expensive as subsidizing bus routes to the tune of $19 for every $1 of bus fare collected, like in my home town. But it solves about 80% of trips that would require 3x more bus dollars to be invested than are already being squandered.
This solved the last mile problem in a fashion no one else has to date. Every thing else in comparison on both convenience and cost is a joke.
Moving some scooters off of an ADA ramp is the least of our worries. And I’m guessing less than 1% of these wound up in a river, not that any city would care if they didn’t feel threatened in their monopoly on solving traffic problems.
Inefficiently run bus systems are a whole other issue. We need to move away from running largely empty gigantic vehicles over roads when the demand isn't there, and transition to public transit that aggressively scales based on data-driven demand measurements.
I don't know why on-demand public transit systems aren't more popular.
Edit:
> Moving some scooters off of an ADA ramp is the least of our worries.
Probably because you're not the person who is called when someone with mobility issues can't get to a bus stop.
> Probably because you're not the person who is called when someone with mobility issues can't get to a bus stop.
I realize you’re accustomed probably to arguing by using these types of straw men with preserved topics that cannot be criticized. But you’ll need to show some data exhibiting how many ramps were blocked by scooters versus other obstacles around here to garner any credibility.
Your anecdata isn’t evidence of anything, and there is a far greater on-balance positive EV to society for solving transportation problems. If we need to pay someone to mind the scooters in the accessible path, that’s a solution. It’s not a reason to discard the only solution that has produced results in the past 75 years.
What I take particular objection to is the suggestion that it’s my lack of empathy for folks needing accessible ramps that drives my affection for having a more convenient life where traffic problems can actually be solved.
>and parking a bunch of scooters in a parking spot takes up much less space than Citi bike docking stations or Google bikes or cars.
If only that's where these scooters were usually found...
For commuting these things are less convenient than an electric bike, more expensive, less quick, and less reliable.
In European cities these companies catered mostly to tourists using them for fun rather than actually replacing cars.
While locals had to deal with these scooters being absolutely littered everywhere as well as the riders ignoring all traffic rules and treating it like a n expensive toy.
If people want to replace their car they would use public transport or an electric bike. Or just buy one of these scooters directly.
The LUUP scooters and e-bikes are quite nice to use in Japan. They have designated parking (the company pays businesses and homeowners to create parking spaces and you can't end your ride except at a designated, non-occupied parking spot).
You can ride them on sidewalks up to 6km/h, bike lanes and car lanes at up to 15km/h and if you have a driver's license, in car lanes at up to 20km/h. The police do actually enforce this, at least in Tokyo. 20km/h feels a bit unsafe at times because they accelerate quickly ahead of cars from a red light, but then you get suddenly overtaken by 5 cars going. much faster than you. Overall though these are pretty good policies and they are convenient without being a menace to others.
They are ¥200 for 30 minutes. I liked the original pricing better, which was ¥110 for the first 10 minutes, but either way they are cheap as a transit-extender but expensive to use for commuting, long journeys or leaving parked. This means they are highly available and reliable to use at the start or end of taking public transit. Tokyo has amazing trains but there are times you are 1-2km away from a station that takes you directly to home or work, but you need to transfer 3 times to get to that particular station. Or you want to pick up a pizza on the way home from your home station, but you'd have to walk 1.5km instead of 500m.
I'm also a mechanical engineer and it was cool to see the scooters becoming better (control, handling, suspension) with each iteration. Maybe that's a Japan thing because bird and other scooters/bikes in NA/EU just become heavier with each iteration to deal with vandalism.
I live in Luxembourg now and I pay something like €16/year to use rental e-bikes (up to 30 minutes per trip, you pay more after that). Sounds great but I use them less over time because they are broken in some way more often than not. Often the "e" part doesn't work and because they are built SO heavy to survive vandalism, they are very hard to pedal. Sometimes very, very hard and you can feel vibrations in the brake lever. I don't know what's up with this, maybe overspeed is incorrectly detected. Sometimes you can depress the lever a bit and reduce it. Sometimes you can't so you try to swap bikes at the next parking place. When you do that there is a good chance you can't take another bike for 5 minutes, and a small chance you can't take another bike until the next weekday when someone does inventory. The first bike will be physically locked but not register as returned so you can't take another. You've taken a bike for a reason instead of transit so chances are you are looking at a 30 minute walk to your destination. In one case I was charged about €20 and it took more than a year to get a reply by email. I didn't even check if I got the money back or not.
Everybody hates these rental scooters, I've yet to find somebody IRL or even who can pass a Turing test online who enjoys them or thinks they're a good idea.
I like(d) them, they were great last mile vehicles, smaller than bicycles and all electric so I didn't have to pedal. Now they did have their problems such as cluttering up cities but they were fun.
I really like 'em when I'm in a city for a work trip. I have a truck at home. I don't have a car at an offsite. Being able to get around is nice. SF's muni buses are crowded and slow and the frequent stops are nauseating. Denver might have public transit, but a Lime bike or scooter is more convenient.
My friend and I had an amazing time scootering around SF a few years ago. Dangerous as hell but fun as hell too. I think it cost $20/scooter for several hours, completely worth it.
That said, I do think that just leaving the scooters around is exploiting loopholes and is a nuisance.
Cars aren't littered randomly on every sidewalk. If they were, everyone would be up in arms about it. Converting existing parking spaces into dedicated bike/scooter parking seems like the better option if you want more scooters and less cars.
I would, actually. We should just ban private vehicles in cities, they're nigh useless unlike between cities, and even that could be solved with high speed rail transit à la Asia.
What makes a weed isn't the plant but the location. Bike rentals while being essentially the same business don't have the same eyesore problem because the companies that deployed them built bike racks.
They're not liquidating, just restructuring, so they're not disappearing. But I agree, given they end up in ditches pretty often --which is weird, the market is for environmentally conscious customers but when they get drunk they also toss them into rivers... sometimes.
And what is truly horrible eyesore are humans in general... I think we should work towards getting rid of those, they are root of all problems... Not that other animals are problem free either...
I only used Bird once and have always thought they were not a great way of getting around. That said this is a real bummer to me. If commuting and mobility were much much easier the world would look a lot different for the better (in my opinion).
I hope there are more attempts to make getting around and getting to places you need and want to go easier.
Bird the company has/had lots of problems, but I'm sad to see them hit bankruptcy for what it signals about micromobility as a whole.
I've long been frustrated that micromobility is held to a standard no other transportation mode is expected to meet, at least in the US. E.g.
- "Micromobility doesn't make any sense, you can tell because all the companies lose money." But every other form of transportation is deeply subsidized! In the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on roads, trains get federal infrastructure money, public transit [where it exists] isn't close to fully paid for by fare revenue, airlines get bailed out in recessions, all carbon-burning transport has an unpriced carbon externality, etc.
- "I hate the scooters, they clutter sidewalks." Often the clutter is real and a problem and I wish people behaved better. Among the people who I wish behaved better, I'd include car drivers who park in bike lanes or on sidewalks, yet the prevalence of such behavior doesn't create widespread calls to ban all cars. (Well, in some corners of the internet...)
More generally, it's weird that scooter companies are liable - legally or de facto - for such behavior at all. If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?
At the end of the day, in the US we've built our legal regime and land use patterns around the assumption that most travel should be by car and this travel should be subsidized. The fact that scooters create some frictions by taking up some of the space left over by cars is more an indictment of the system than of scooters.
My ebike is governored to 28mph, some scooter's have geofenced top speeds. Yet a full car can drive thru a parking lot or residential street with highway speed potential.
At least in California my experience has been that Bird was doomed after the handicapables decided it was an issue. Great service, very convenient, good density, etc. Then a bunch of regulations passed limiting them to certain parking zones to solve some issue for the handicapped community and now they're basically worthless in terms of convenience. I mean the streets are littered with needles, tents and homeless but god forbid we leave something useful on them.
Yes, all those nasty wheelchair users who need to use the sidewalk to get around. How dare they interfere with your ability to dump a scooter anywhere you please without thought or consequence. No one has ever had an issue with tents or needles or the homeless, either.
I'm just saying, if the street is going to be worthless anyway the public could at least get some value out of it. But progressives care more about the homeless than the handicapped so instead we get trash on the streets and useful things going bankrupt.
> More generally, it's weird that scooter companies are liable - legally or de facto - for such behavior at all. If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?
Scooters are different because them being littered all over public spaces is absolutely intrinsic to these companies' value proposition and business model in a way that it absolutely is not for Hertz or similar.
I think hybrid transportation models of this kind are really essential to having liveable cites in the future, but businesses really shouldn't be able to benefit from just ignoring negative externalities associated with their model, and that (unfortunately) includes their customers behaving in an antisocial and/or selfish way. This is no different from how noise levels for residents are considered when granting a license for a bar or something. You're not able to just plan for a world where everyone behaves in a decent and considerate fashion.
Where I live we had a bike and scooter company who had a "park anywhere" type model and our pavements[1] were really littered all the time with bikes and it was difficult (as someone who basically walks everywhere) to get around. Now that company has disappeared and the bike/scooter companies which remain have to look after their inventory and keep it in defined parking spots the situation is a lot better. I don't exactly know how enforcement has been set up and I do see abandoned bikes and scooters around, but I also see company employees rounding them up and taking them to the right spots so the system appears to be working.
There are scooters in my town and I’ve used them a few times. When you park the scooter the app makes you take a picture of your parking job. I don’t know how good the enforcement is, but this is a plausible way of solving the problem of inconsiderate users.
1) QR code on every scooter so improperly placed scooters can be reported to the owning company with images
2) The use of accelerometer data to verify when a scooter was moved (to ensure things like renters not being unfairly penalized if a scooter is moved by somebody else afterwards)
> If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?
First, businesses which attract antisocial asshole clients do get extra scrutiny and burdensome regulation; the classic example is bars.
Second, the difference between Hertz and Bird is the rate and visibility of antisocial behavior. The overwhelming majority of Hertz clients park their rentals no differently than any ordinary car driver; and a Hertz rental parked illegally is hard to distinguish at a distance from any other car. By contrast, a very large fraction of rental electric scooters appear to be parked illegally, and they are very visible (due to the color scheme, and because privately owned electric scooters are not very common in most parts of the US and never get dumped in the middle of a road, lest they get vandalized or stolen).
Sure, but to the OP's point, isn't that because the US has subsidized car parking to an insane level? Most parts of the country have literal legal minimum amounts of parking spots for cars you have to have to be able to run a business or build a house there. There's none of that for bikes or scooters.
I'm not trying to excuse Bird here - I'm annoyed by scooters parked in the sidewalk like anyone, but going "car people are so nice and not antisocial" is kinda pointing at the underlying unfairness. If we spent/regulated billions of scooter parking spots, Bird wouldn't have an issue either.
I live in a historical city center in Germany. There aren’t many parking spaces, and sidewalk parking is illegal anyway. Scooters still end up on the sidewalk and in my way. I really wish there were some stronger regulations.
Sure. I'm not trying to say people can't be assholes or aren't being assholes. If the area is walking only with no place to park anything, then that should be enforced. But excusing car drivers just because everything has bent in their favor legally seems to miss the point.
Practically speaking, at least in the US, there's rarely any good or approved place to park anything but a car anywhere. I'm upset with the scooters, but I'm also upset with bikers locking their bikes to trees, or people parking motorcycles in unexpected places. Half of the time there's dedicated motorcycle or bike parking, some asshole parks their car there and isn't fined/towed.
Point being, there's a lot of money behind making it incredibly easy to take a car to anything in the US, and while other options are regularly annoying in parking places that aren't allowed, I've seen some moves over the last few years to make dedicated scooter parking or expand bike parking to accommodate, and that's a net good. It's certainly not that Bird is part of some righteous civil disobedience program by leaving scooters in the middle of the sidewalk, but the scooter plague has done more to improve bike/personal scooter parking than years of pressure from bikers, so I'll take it.
Bird users are welcome to pay for parking like most cars.
But the biggest difference is rental cars need to be returned to a designated place like an airport or car dealership. Or they get picked up. They are never just abandoned on city streets, and even more rarely parked illegally.
I don’t know. A lot of people moved to suburbs for a very high quality of life per dollar using cars. Then they gained even more when work from home grew. The organic vegetables I’m e-biking around SF were trucked into Rainbow, not scootered. Trucks moved the berry pickers onto the fields. Cars and trucks shlep a lot of people and stuff and make a lot of very cheap land and a lot of very cheap labor accessible to many, many people. There wasn’t some huge surplus created by scooters the way there was with cars, for all their faults.
I agree that cars and trucks are appropriate for a variety of trips and cargo-hauling use cases that scooters are not appropriate for. But I confess I'm missing the implication - what does this imply about the claim that micromobility is held to a standard we don't typically hold other transportation modes to, in part because we have a default cars-first perspective?
I have no problem with the owned scooters. The scooter rental market is designed to tax the walking infrastructure. They need to have plug in stalls like the electric bikes. There also needs to be a way of keeping them off sidewalks.
"If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?"
If people could rent cars for very short periods of time and 'return' them on the street, they most definitely would be re-parked illegally. We'd never allow a rental car company to use city streets as a parking lot for their inventory. And, yes, it would be the car company's liability.
Whoever they employ to collect and charge the scooters loves to line them up on the ramp to the crosswalk of a major intersection near me. It makes it impossible for the disabled people in the neighborhood to cross the street safely. So passersby will throw them all into the gutter. Then they become a road hazard.
Say what you will, this behavior is from an employee, and is thus the direct responsibility of the company, who does not care at all.
When you escalate from being a nuisance to outright endangering people, there needs to be consequences.
Bird was doomed from the very start, as they aimed to only be a scooter company.
Scooter operations shut down for nearly half the year in most markets due to the winter, and in those markets they either have to pay employees or lay them off (bird did the latter) once a year. They still have to store the scooters during that time, and they need to have scaled operations for their entire market.
Bike rentals tend to be shut down far shorter periods of time in the winter, and ridesharing doesn't shut down. This allows other companies providing bikes/scooters to move their operations around to other business units when they shut down their scooter unit.
As a whole the scooters make less sense than bikes. If we're going to subsidize something, it should be bike sharing (which _is_ somewhat government subsidized btw).
We had Bird electric bikes in our town. They were too expensive to use, though some people did. Mostly college kids from what I could tell. Still, I used one once and it cost me $10 to get just a couple miles. Not worth it.
The Lyft app seems to show me prices for a car service that are way lower than taking an ebike. I only use it because it is close to free if you are under the poverty line.
Bird was often more expensive than Uber/Lyft in my area. I always thought that was weird. Not sure if that was something wonky on Bird's end or they just weren't taking as much of a loss as the rideshare companies.
You can't take an e-bike on many transit systems. You can't go meet somebody and go walk with them to another location. Rental micromobility is very convenient for those kinds of things.
They don't replace a car or a bike, what they replace is the walk from the train station.
>"You can't take an e-bike on many transit systems. You can't go meet somebody and go walk with them to another location."
e-bike is somewhat limited in this particular usage. I mostly ride EUC though and that thing can go as fast as a car in the city and since it is so compact I have no problem taking it into any place - store, client's office, coffee shop etc. etc. So unless there is adverse weather, need to bring loads of stuff from A to B EUC replaces everything for me.
I use Bird in Rome and it's the operator whose scooters I see the most around. However, it could also be due to the fact that the municipality has enacted strict rules allowing only 3 companies to operate and forcing a certain number of scooters to be placed in peripheral areas.
> It’s also worth noting that Bird’s Canadian and European operations are not part of this bankruptcy filing, and will “continue to operate as normal,” the company said.
really is quite a shame that they destroyed or prevented actually sustainable well-run companies from succeeding. the culture of US-aggressive VC-backed conquer-the-world-or-die-trying businesses really does need to be reigned in.
So much crab-bucket thinking. 90% of the right of way is dedicated to automobile traffic but because rental scooters occasionally get left on the remaining 10%, the problem is clearly the scooters and not the cars.
I think that neither cars nor rental scooters (with how they are used and operated) belong in cities.
Obviously, there are always exceptions (delivery/transport, emergency vehicles, ...), but for personal transport in cities, the negatives of cars far outweigh the positives.
About 3 years ago, Bird used to be the only scooter useable on my college campus. And they were pretty commonly used. Then, 2 years ago, the bird app completely stopped working on my phone. Every time I tried to unlock one, the app would just show an endless loading animation. I tried reinstalling. I tried using different payment methods. I couldn't find any way to get a scooter to unlock, and the moment I needed one, I was always in a hurry. By then, Lime began to comply with my university's rules and their scooters were allowed to park on campus. I tried the app many more times, even a few weeks ago, and just... never worked.
I don't think it was just me - I stopped seeing Bird scooters get used by others. I still saw the occasional Lime.
It's entirely possible I'm extrapolating too much from my experience and a rough observation. But still, I'm kind of surprised it took them so long to fail.
Good. I was nearly hit numerous times by riders on the sidewalks here in SF. They provided something easy for people to get around, but in the end people were reckless with them. I myself had several close calls riding on the janky streets of SF.
So what? When I am on the road, so are all the reckless drivers. When will car manufacturers start taking responsibility for the behaviour of their customers?
Why do you only hold the vendor responsible for what happens on the sidewalk? Is it some kind of sacred space? Why do we just accept that people will behave like savages on the road running parallel to it?
I hope more companies will follow. I hate rentable electric scooters with passion - they cause so many accidents, block the walkways and pollute the landscape. They aren't even particularly ecological, considering how they mainly replace walking, and have short lifespan.
Of course it's more of an user problem rather than tech problem. They could work well in a society where bad behavior is not tolerated, and eScooter use is regulated properly. Unfortunately I don't live in one, and thus eScooters really seem to attract lazy and irresponsible types.
I mean I am not a big fan, but can we stop spewing falsehoods?
>have short lifespan.
Those things are build like tanks by now, every big player has its own repair shops and they are repaired over and over, and nearly none of the damage is from normal use
I can't speak for wider stats, but anecdotally I used them instead of things like taking the bus, or getting a lyft. If is close enough to walk I generally wouldn't want to spend the money.
I feel like this is really what killed the scooter companies. Either you have enough need to use one for commuting/etc. that you just buy your own, in which case you always know where it is, know it's in good condition, charged, etc. or you have infrequent need for one, in which case you're looking at spending maybe $20/year on scooters.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 54.8 ms ] threadAlthough bankruptcy can also mean restructuring...
They might end up in the hands of someone that wants them. There are many different scooter companies, so it’s likely someone will pick ups the assets.
Bringing scooters to your house would still be theft.
JOKING [I try not to litter] — my US city banned this trash service years ago.
In its place, city-serviced bikes are available to rent (and must be returned to their "stations" after use).
We're strange creatures.
Ps I hate these scooter companies but throwing them in the rivers is terrible for the environment.
Obviously illegal although unlikely to get you in trouble.
https://scooterhacking.org/
Another company's E-Trash is another mans transportation when their car is broken.
If it wasn't for the paragraph before, you'd think things were going just peachy.
But instead running a scooter rental company became "who is best at navigating municipal RFPs" and the lack of availability brought people back to riding in -- and leasing/buying -- cars.
Rentable scooters require 24/7 staff with collection vehicles in nearly every municipality they exist, and municipalities have a right to demand a standard of service in addressing issues caused by the private scooter rental customers.
This solved the last mile problem in a fashion no one else has to date. Every thing else in comparison on both convenience and cost is a joke.
Moving some scooters off of an ADA ramp is the least of our worries. And I’m guessing less than 1% of these wound up in a river, not that any city would care if they didn’t feel threatened in their monopoly on solving traffic problems.
I don't know why on-demand public transit systems aren't more popular.
Edit: > Moving some scooters off of an ADA ramp is the least of our worries.
Probably because you're not the person who is called when someone with mobility issues can't get to a bus stop.
This is just a taxi.
OP just wants the government to monopolize transit because he really doesn’t want folks having autonomy of mobility.
I realize you’re accustomed probably to arguing by using these types of straw men with preserved topics that cannot be criticized. But you’ll need to show some data exhibiting how many ramps were blocked by scooters versus other obstacles around here to garner any credibility.
What I take particular objection to is the suggestion that it’s my lack of empathy for folks needing accessible ramps that drives my affection for having a more convenient life where traffic problems can actually be solved.
If only that's where these scooters were usually found...
For commuting these things are less convenient than an electric bike, more expensive, less quick, and less reliable.
In European cities these companies catered mostly to tourists using them for fun rather than actually replacing cars.
While locals had to deal with these scooters being absolutely littered everywhere as well as the riders ignoring all traffic rules and treating it like a n expensive toy.
If people want to replace their car they would use public transport or an electric bike. Or just buy one of these scooters directly.
You can ride them on sidewalks up to 6km/h, bike lanes and car lanes at up to 15km/h and if you have a driver's license, in car lanes at up to 20km/h. The police do actually enforce this, at least in Tokyo. 20km/h feels a bit unsafe at times because they accelerate quickly ahead of cars from a red light, but then you get suddenly overtaken by 5 cars going. much faster than you. Overall though these are pretty good policies and they are convenient without being a menace to others.
They are ¥200 for 30 minutes. I liked the original pricing better, which was ¥110 for the first 10 minutes, but either way they are cheap as a transit-extender but expensive to use for commuting, long journeys or leaving parked. This means they are highly available and reliable to use at the start or end of taking public transit. Tokyo has amazing trains but there are times you are 1-2km away from a station that takes you directly to home or work, but you need to transfer 3 times to get to that particular station. Or you want to pick up a pizza on the way home from your home station, but you'd have to walk 1.5km instead of 500m.
I'm also a mechanical engineer and it was cool to see the scooters becoming better (control, handling, suspension) with each iteration. Maybe that's a Japan thing because bird and other scooters/bikes in NA/EU just become heavier with each iteration to deal with vandalism.
I live in Luxembourg now and I pay something like €16/year to use rental e-bikes (up to 30 minutes per trip, you pay more after that). Sounds great but I use them less over time because they are broken in some way more often than not. Often the "e" part doesn't work and because they are built SO heavy to survive vandalism, they are very hard to pedal. Sometimes very, very hard and you can feel vibrations in the brake lever. I don't know what's up with this, maybe overspeed is incorrectly detected. Sometimes you can depress the lever a bit and reduce it. Sometimes you can't so you try to swap bikes at the next parking place. When you do that there is a good chance you can't take another bike for 5 minutes, and a small chance you can't take another bike until the next weekday when someone does inventory. The first bike will be physically locked but not register as returned so you can't take another. You've taken a bike for a reason instead of transit so chances are you are looking at a 30 minute walk to your destination. In one case I was charged about €20 and it took more than a year to get a reply by email. I didn't even check if I got the money back or not.
That said, I do think that just leaving the scooters around is exploiting loopholes and is a nuisance.
Exactly, they're just littered everywhere.
I hope there are more attempts to make getting around and getting to places you need and want to go easier.
I've long been frustrated that micromobility is held to a standard no other transportation mode is expected to meet, at least in the US. E.g.
- "Micromobility doesn't make any sense, you can tell because all the companies lose money." But every other form of transportation is deeply subsidized! In the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on roads, trains get federal infrastructure money, public transit [where it exists] isn't close to fully paid for by fare revenue, airlines get bailed out in recessions, all carbon-burning transport has an unpriced carbon externality, etc.
- "I hate the scooters, they clutter sidewalks." Often the clutter is real and a problem and I wish people behaved better. Among the people who I wish behaved better, I'd include car drivers who park in bike lanes or on sidewalks, yet the prevalence of such behavior doesn't create widespread calls to ban all cars. (Well, in some corners of the internet...)
More generally, it's weird that scooter companies are liable - legally or de facto - for such behavior at all. If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?
At the end of the day, in the US we've built our legal regime and land use patterns around the assumption that most travel should be by car and this travel should be subsidized. The fact that scooters create some frictions by taking up some of the space left over by cars is more an indictment of the system than of scooters.
28mph is pretty much a motorbike.
In either case, solving homelessness is probably more complicated than scooter litter.
Scooters are different because them being littered all over public spaces is absolutely intrinsic to these companies' value proposition and business model in a way that it absolutely is not for Hertz or similar.
I think hybrid transportation models of this kind are really essential to having liveable cites in the future, but businesses really shouldn't be able to benefit from just ignoring negative externalities associated with their model, and that (unfortunately) includes their customers behaving in an antisocial and/or selfish way. This is no different from how noise levels for residents are considered when granting a license for a bar or something. You're not able to just plan for a world where everyone behaves in a decent and considerate fashion.
Where I live we had a bike and scooter company who had a "park anywhere" type model and our pavements[1] were really littered all the time with bikes and it was difficult (as someone who basically walks everywhere) to get around. Now that company has disappeared and the bike/scooter companies which remain have to look after their inventory and keep it in defined parking spots the situation is a lot better. I don't exactly know how enforcement has been set up and I do see abandoned bikes and scooters around, but I also see company employees rounding them up and taking them to the right spots so the system appears to be working.
[1] Sidewalks for Americans
1) QR code on every scooter so improperly placed scooters can be reported to the owning company with images
2) The use of accelerometer data to verify when a scooter was moved (to ensure things like renters not being unfairly penalized if a scooter is moved by somebody else afterwards)
First, businesses which attract antisocial asshole clients do get extra scrutiny and burdensome regulation; the classic example is bars.
Second, the difference between Hertz and Bird is the rate and visibility of antisocial behavior. The overwhelming majority of Hertz clients park their rentals no differently than any ordinary car driver; and a Hertz rental parked illegally is hard to distinguish at a distance from any other car. By contrast, a very large fraction of rental electric scooters appear to be parked illegally, and they are very visible (due to the color scheme, and because privately owned electric scooters are not very common in most parts of the US and never get dumped in the middle of a road, lest they get vandalized or stolen).
I'm not trying to excuse Bird here - I'm annoyed by scooters parked in the sidewalk like anyone, but going "car people are so nice and not antisocial" is kinda pointing at the underlying unfairness. If we spent/regulated billions of scooter parking spots, Bird wouldn't have an issue either.
FWIW, I don’t own a car at all.
Practically speaking, at least in the US, there's rarely any good or approved place to park anything but a car anywhere. I'm upset with the scooters, but I'm also upset with bikers locking their bikes to trees, or people parking motorcycles in unexpected places. Half of the time there's dedicated motorcycle or bike parking, some asshole parks their car there and isn't fined/towed.
Point being, there's a lot of money behind making it incredibly easy to take a car to anything in the US, and while other options are regularly annoying in parking places that aren't allowed, I've seen some moves over the last few years to make dedicated scooter parking or expand bike parking to accommodate, and that's a net good. It's certainly not that Bird is part of some righteous civil disobedience program by leaving scooters in the middle of the sidewalk, but the scooter plague has done more to improve bike/personal scooter parking than years of pressure from bikers, so I'll take it.
But the biggest difference is rental cars need to be returned to a designated place like an airport or car dealership. Or they get picked up. They are never just abandoned on city streets, and even more rarely parked illegally.
If people could rent cars for very short periods of time and 'return' them on the street, they most definitely would be re-parked illegally. We'd never allow a rental car company to use city streets as a parking lot for their inventory. And, yes, it would be the car company's liability.
Isn’t this exactly what evo/gig/zip is? Easy to miss if you live outside of a big US metro I suppose.
Say what you will, this behavior is from an employee, and is thus the direct responsibility of the company, who does not care at all.
When you escalate from being a nuisance to outright endangering people, there needs to be consequences.
Scooter operations shut down for nearly half the year in most markets due to the winter, and in those markets they either have to pay employees or lay them off (bird did the latter) once a year. They still have to store the scooters during that time, and they need to have scaled operations for their entire market.
Bike rentals tend to be shut down far shorter periods of time in the winter, and ridesharing doesn't shut down. This allows other companies providing bikes/scooters to move their operations around to other business units when they shut down their scooter unit.
As a whole the scooters make less sense than bikes. If we're going to subsidize something, it should be bike sharing (which _is_ somewhat government subsidized btw).
If you get a rental car, and let it in the middle of the road, you will be fined and Hertz might sue you.
I personally own e-bike, and EUC. Totally happy with both.
They don't replace a car or a bike, what they replace is the walk from the train station.
e-bike is somewhat limited in this particular usage. I mostly ride EUC though and that thing can go as fast as a car in the city and since it is so compact I have no problem taking it into any place - store, client's office, coffee shop etc. etc. So unless there is adverse weather, need to bring loads of stuff from A to B EUC replaces everything for me.
I don't think it was just me - I stopped seeing Bird scooters get used by others. I still saw the occasional Lime.
It's entirely possible I'm extrapolating too much from my experience and a rough observation. But still, I'm kind of surprised it took them so long to fail.
(Why are we holding scooters to a higher standard than the utter madhouse that I see on the roads on a daily basis?)
ftfy
Why do you only hold the vendor responsible for what happens on the sidewalk? Is it some kind of sacred space? Why do we just accept that people will behave like savages on the road running parallel to it?
I'd say never. Because they successfully lobbied against it and shaped public perception way back.
They used to be blamed for it. They just acquired and spent enough money to make it disappear permanently.
Of course it's more of an user problem rather than tech problem. They could work well in a society where bad behavior is not tolerated, and eScooter use is regulated properly. Unfortunately I don't live in one, and thus eScooters really seem to attract lazy and irresponsible types.
>have short lifespan.
Those things are build like tanks by now, every big player has its own repair shops and they are repaired over and over, and nearly none of the damage is from normal use
I can't speak for wider stats, but anecdotally I used them instead of things like taking the bus, or getting a lyft. If is close enough to walk I generally wouldn't want to spend the money.
You ain’t scooting in Manhattan or San Francisco at 65mph.
I assume this was a Vespa style scooter, not a “stand on a board with no protective gear at all” type of scooter?