Is this like the slow zone in the Expanse? As soon as you hit UT property your scooter instantly decelerates to 8 mph and you go flying off.
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Because one of them can be easily moved by hand the other one can’t? One of them can be rented by anyone walking down the street and the other one is private property and can only be accessed by the owner?
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one difference is that a car parked in a driveway is likely to have a driver who will come back, the dockless scooter is out of the scooter renter’s life once they toss it in your yard.
I dunno, I think that scooters are kinda in an annoying teething stage right now, but if they’re useful for getting people around town once they get off the bus / train from their neighborhood, cool.
Where I live they’re wildly popular with teenagers, not so much with anyone else.
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counterpoints:
- moving them does not solve the root cause, only passes the problem on to some other schmuck
- they are very certainly private property, and it is at the owner’s risk that they are rented out to folx who happily leave them wherever they please.
if scooter companies put more work into making sure these things were (a) parked responsibly and (b) not driven on the fuckin sidewalk I wouldn’t be so peeved
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I don’t get how moving a scooter off of your driveway and relocating curbside in public is passing it on to some other schmuck?
Scooters may be considered private property but they are available for anyone to use so in my opinion they benefit society more than a private vehicle that can only be used by a single person.
Separate note: I also feel like the public space handicap concern trolling is a bit too much to swallow considering how little regard we had for making public spaces accessible for those with disabilities before share bikes/scooters started appearing. If we are going to discuss as a society what can and can’t take up space in public I think it needs to be addressed from a comprehensive viewpoint of all objects left in public space. This includes everything from planters, outdoor seating, lamp poles, sandwich boards, bike racks, newspaper boxes, garbage cans, cars partially parked in driveways etc.
I got in a bit of an argument with another local bike shop owner about this. They plop down one of those massive sandwich boards on the sidewalk to advertise their business yet they were very concerned that bike shares were often blocking the exact same stretch sidewalk. I thought the most ironic part was that their company logo showed a sign hung safely overhead instead of a sandwich board that impedes sidewalks.
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They are literally privately owned vehicles that can only be used by a single person, if that person pays to rent it.
If they were publicly owned, I would feel like an argument could be made that they were for the public good and should be entitled to protections. But the idea that these private companies can just dump these things in public spaces to increase their rideshare market percentage and valuation, and we just have to lick the capitalist boot, is terrible.
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Because we definitely weren’t licking the capitalist boot before bike/scooter share?
Roads/sidewalks littered with private bikes and cars for corporate profit was happening way before they were rentable.
I’d rather be tripping over a scooter share that I could possibly rent or move out of the way instead of your personal bike locked to a rack that I can’t use nor move out of my way.
Publicly owned/shared transportation tools in the long term sounds like a great idea as the next step beyond our current private model.
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I think you two may be using slightly different definitions of public? I don’t know of any cities that have their own city fleets of scooters - my guess is that it’s a hard thing to roll out if you don’t have any of the same genius investors who gave Theranos money right before going all in on Bird and Lime throwing money at the project.
So public like anyone can use it or public like it’s owned and operated privately, but uses public resources?
And yeah, any complaint about scooters should be relativized to how much of a pain in the ass private automobiles are for everyone.
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Motherfuckers here have been parking them clean across the bike lanes.
So I’ve been knocking them over on my way past. Sometimes right in front of the renter. I’d throw them in a river if I had the energy.
I don’t even mind people everywhere riding them (too much…). Just don’t park like assholes.
pondering the idea that one of those scooters, which will be in a landfill in a year, “parked” on the sidewalk, $1+ per use funneling money to Uber, is somehow better for society than a craigslist commuter bike, locked to designated parking, costing the user a fraction of a scooter rental 
Maybe if they were truly a public good, but as a rental no way
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I definitely prefer scooters to cars but solely in the context of this article (because it isn’t about scooters vs cars) I am coming out anti-scooter.
I’m… fine with private bikes ‘littering’ the roads? Oh, you’re talking about bikeshare bikes. They share the same parking problems with scooters, right?
I mean, there’s plenty of places where you can’t lock your bike to a sign, it should be locked in the designated bike rack. Cars have parking regulations. It’s a thing for vehicles.
For the record, I am neither on the side of the scooter companies nor scummy tow truck companies. They’re both not great and better regulation is necessary to curtail the legal gray areas they both operate in.
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In other news: The lime bike I parked across the street, on the corner, next to the light pole and out of anyone’s way, is still there. Might ride it again tonight.
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Though I hope Uber burns alive, after I sprained my ankle, I took a Jump bike a few times last week and it was a pretty great service
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If someone leaves a 10-pound scooter in my driveway, I can pick it up and move it 10 feet. If someone leaves their car in my driveway… not so much. Not saying there’s no good argument for collecting scooters left in annoying/unlawful places and dropping them somewhere on the scooter companies’ dime, but the degree of harm/inconvenience done by an illegally parked scooter vs. an illegally parked SUV is pretty huge.
Splitting hairs. Tow em all.
It’s a for profit enterprise that’s making rolling garbage on it’s short trip to the landfill complete with a nasty battery. I’m unsympathetic to begin with.
The model literally encourages recklessness and total lack of accountability on the part of the user.
Weird hill to die on, but ok.
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for the record, literally nobody in “shared micromobility” is making profit, despite almost no operators being non-profit. it’s a very expensive thing to operate, but also can be pretty cool and provide a reasonable service if done well.
the scooters suck because:
-they only replace waking
-they last approximately a month on average
-they generally recoup maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of their cost in revenue, ignoring operating costs
-they are hardly maintained and break a lot, then it’s off to the landfill
-the operators often make promises like removing scoot scoots from places they shouldn’t be within 4 hours give or take. that’s fucking outlandish when you have 1000+ assets and very much fewer staff and terrible location data and a lack of morals
bike share is great but not without its foibles and certainly not public (at least in the united states). from my experience, it is least problematic when they have designated docks and are required to be left in them. yes it sucks when they are empty, yes it sucks even more when they are full (because by the time you find out about that you’re often already entered into a financial agreement and have this bike and need to find another place), but they sure don’t end up in the wrong places very often. also, if one of your major goals (that you actually act on) is accessibility and equity, you end up being a significant quality of life booster to those in otherwise drastically underserved communities.
edit: fwiw the claim of quick response time is outlandish because IME its hard enough to respond to full/empty stations when the stations are… stations, and by definition are known locations that can’t move
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Hello and welcome to growth mode, it’s Numberwang, but with money institutional investors earmarked for “alternative investments”!
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this includes those of us in the traditional realm of dock-based bikeshare, often partnered with municipalities and/or transportation agencies. it’s just not really a model that lends itself to being in the black
And now that SoftBank is starting vision fund II with the sole purpose of inflating the value of vision fund I, this is going to get even worse before it gets “better” ie worse in a different way
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