I have spent a lot of time observing this phenomenon in Venice; here are some of my thoughts.
What these scooters have done for SM-Venice is, they’ve gotten people to park farther away and spend less time in cars. Especially the tourists. What does that mean for locals? Well, for one, it means that the nuisance of having to drive slow past people on these things, rather than the nightmare of sitting in standstill traffic if all of those people were in cars instead. Summer traffic in Venice was definitely helped by the scooters, as they replaced a bit of car traffic. These “short haul mobility vehicles” make it much easier for larger groups of people to engage in a large, spread-out, mostly-pedestrian area.
They’re completely dorky and I’ll never be caught dead on one... but, at the same time, there’s serious benefits to us all that these things exist. There’s definitely problems (not sure how I feel about seeing them in piles outside of public schools, such as Venice High, and there’s something very Idiocracy-esque in watching them being used by people who would benefit from walking), but I find it to be an overall net-positive.
I’m interested to see where the next form factors go, and how these things factor into future urban planning decisions. Especially within geofenced environments where you don’t have to pay for them, they just exist. There’s a lot to ponder here.
Yes, it's Venice, Los Angeles. When he says "SM-Venice", he means Santa Monica / Venice.
Incidentally, I was in Venice Beach a few weeks ago, and I too witnessed that the scooters are very popular down there, and becoming enough of a fixture that you hear things shouted on the street like "hey, that's my Lime" when someone breaches etiquette and takes a scooter that someone else has just parked and intends to use again right away.
This is the thing that bothers me. They appear to be getting set out in front of my kid’s school (in sets of 4), and it’s the natural inclination for kids to want to run jump and play on them.
So now there’s this sort of quandary I have as a parent: do I tell my kids and or other kids to not play on these scooters? And to take care of them? Where should I draw the line?
I don’t see them in poor areas of town, so it’s like they exist in large part as an almost “parasite” on the good will of nice communities where they won’t be stolen or chopped up for parts. They’re here to make money for a private company.
In a public park or at the public library it’s easy to say: “this is here for our community, by our community, you need to take care of it because we’re all in this together.”
These scooters (despite their benefit) are ultimately taking money out of the community (if they’re profitable) and they’re budgeting for loss and damage, so why not let the kids play on them and damage them?
> These scooters (despite their benefit) are ultimately taking money out of the community (if they’re profitable) and they’re budgeting for loss and damage, so why not let the kids play on them and damage them?
This is pretty much the same argument as people who litter at ball games and then say "The cleaning crew will pick it up. That's their job."
Maybe, and maybe that's part of why it's bothering me. I don't have a frame in which to easily sit it.
I think that's a good analogy, but it's not quite right imo. The important factor for me is that, in this specific case the distributor (or whoever is putting them out) is placing them directly in front of a school.
Potential consumers of the service are socially expected to do work to maintain something they didn't put there or ask for and it's being purposefully placed in more naturally risky location. Or they're being placed in a way that's not very nice to others (blocking sidewalks or bike racks).
In the ball game scenario the consumer has chosen to get popcorn, made a mess (either purposefully or accidentally) and then chosen to leave it for others to take care of. So the consumer is being personally irresponsible.
My interpretation is that the scooter companies are being personally irresponsible, but then sort of making it look/feel like the potential consumers are being irresponsible?
You put your backpack in the main walkway of the airport. I tripped over it. Things spilled out of the backpack. Should I feel bad and try and pick up those things? Does that answer change if I see you doing the same thing every single Wednesday when I fly out?
If someone parks their car across two spaces and I hit it, should I feel bad? What if someone does it every day in the apartment parking lot?
By the way, would you mind photographing the situation here? I think I might change my mind based on how much space these things are taking. My experience in SF is that people go out of their way to have them be in their way. But I may be judging you unfairly to be doing the same.
If there's lots of room, I feel the same about the scooter as I do about the hot dog man.
There is no moral quandary about teaching children to respect property that isn’t theirs. If you want them out of your community there are myriad channels for addressing that.
Which is legit, but at least where I am, those are (normally) not placed directly in walkways, or in a place that "consumes" an asset created and maintained by another business (i.e., a bike rack).
If they're damaged too much or too often, then either they'll be taken away, or else the service will become more expensive to offset the cost.
So, ultimately, it will be to the detriment of anyone who wants to use the scooters. If your kids don't know anyone who uses them or even see them getting used ever, it may not be a very compelling argument.
>These scooters (despite their benefit) are ultimately taking money out of the community (if they’re profitable) and they’re budgeting for loss and damage, so why not let the kids play on them and damage them?
Any business is predicated on a win-win proposition. Lime / Bird provides the capital, maintenance and network that maintains the scooters, and the people that use them pay the cost of their usage. The money they "take out of the community" is likely outweighed by the positive externalities brought to the community:
1. Traffic is lessened.
2. Jobs are provided to community members to pick them up and charge them.
3. Businesses make more money / pay more sales taxes from higher foot traffic.
4. Community members have a pleasant scooting experience readily available to them on demand.
Of course, scooters also have negative externalities:
1. They are not useful for people with disabilities, and can actively prevent people with disabilities from participating in public spaces when people park the scooters like assholes.
2. People will hurt themselves using the scooters.
3. Piles of dead scooters are aesthetically unappealing.
I have to think it's going to be harder and harder for theft to occur. The GPS, cell network, and constant iteration on the design is going to make it very hard for thieves.
So I also had the chance to observe them in Venice, and I don't know if I agree with the premise that they are actually getting people to park further away, people are however, taking less cars between the beach front areas within LA for sure.
At least for me, there was a clear before and after moment, where you suddenly saw far more people on your block in Venice riding around drunk on scooters all the time, where as before, you hardly saw anyone.
This said, I use them all the time, Venice is a bitch to find parking in, and the neighborhood is just spread out enough where you need a vehicle to get around. Before it would've been a huge pain to grab breakfast at Gusta, head into ocean park for some shopping and then head on down to Washington to spend some time near the pier all before noon.
Yes, but there's the same risk with conventional bikes on streets today. And cities like San Francisco agree - they are making it legal for adults to ride electric scooters _without_ helmets so that it matches regulation around bicycle helmets: https://la.curbed.com/2018/9/21/17884220/bird-lime-scooters-...
I think the scooters are riskier in some ways. My experience is with bikes you can easily take one hand off the bike to signal a turn - what your traffic intention is. But with the scooters, it's not really possible to take your hands off the handlebars (you lose control!), and there is currently no blinker control to indicate your traffic intention. I wanted to take a left-turn on a scooter recently and this was an issue. I got honked-at.
I think they should add blinker light controls to the handlebars.
Yes! This is a major issue even in moderate traffic. They could probably adapt the under-side lights to function as turn signals. The scooters are just too narrow to drive one-handed.
Could you drive one footed and extend the other leg? Sorry I've never ridden a scooter. But you can ride a skateboard on one foot for short periods with some training.
>> Looking at something and saying "I don't think I would do that because it would be very embarrassing" is a thing adults can do.
And its exactly a moment when one should stop for a second and ask him/herself a question "why would I feel so"?
Wearing glasses, reading books, dyeing hair with some tint, preferring pieces of clothing of some fashion or other, riding a personal vehicle that is supposedly beneficial for ecology (at least at the level of common knowledge) AND evidently improving quality of urban life - all of that shouldn't be embarrassing, or "completely" "socially inept"[1]. Wearing dirty clothes when you have the means not to or not looking after your hygiene should (and I can't really recall anything else at a moment's notice).
Dyeing hair and choosing clothes are a matter of style preference, so why can't people think they don't like their style appearance on a scooter?
I agree it's weird but clearly as we see for cars, choice of vehicle is also driven by style preferences. E.g most people wouldn't buy a pink car with green polka dots.
>>why can't people think they don't like their style appearance on a scooter
They certainly can. Calling something with a particular epithet means it bears this particular quality, which is not subjective. The opinion is, but the characterization is not.
I ride kick scooter almost daily on my commute and can't find anything sarcastic about calling it "completely dorky", sorry.
I've also gotten used to not hear (or make) such comments in my adult life, contrary to the school years, where it was a norm of communication, unfortunately.
I live in Baltimore and these things have been awesome. Over the summer and early fall, I used them a lot for trips that were between 3-15 blocks. They were usually less than half the price of a Lyft, were fun to drive, don't directly use fossil fuels and were usually available (in one app or the other) within a block or two of my house. I used them to meet friends for brunch, to pick up my car from getting worked on, to go to bars near my house and to go vote in November.
Now that it's gotten colder, I think my range for using them will contract to something like 2-8 blocks, but I don't think I'll cut off using them entirely. I don't notice them being "piled up" anywhere (except for at a street festival, but lots of people were picking them up too), and I don't think I've ever run into a situation where my path was actively blocked by one.
Baltimore used to have a bike share, but I've heard it's being shut down and even when it was up they had a hard time keeping bikes in all the stalls.
I must be in a bit of a minority but my main objection to these would be the installation of an app to use them - I am perhaps too privacy-conscious and admit I haven't attempted the signup process but even with a throwaway email address, I'm not comfortable installing it on a device I take with me when I leave the house; I even Uber via the web interface and would probably stop using the service if they hamstrung that more than it is already. Is this something other HNers concern themselves with?
Not really. Its the same as people who are vegetarian or people who ride a bike rather than take a car even when a car is so much more convenient for them or people who bring a refillable drink bottle rather than buy a disposable one. Some people are just really driven to support a cause and fight for something they know is right.
If you don't feel strongly about this then thats ok but I think we are all better off that there are people who put the effort in to make society better even if it means personal inconvenience.
It's a great question! It's honestly not too bad, although every now and again I flirt with throwing in the towel on account of the fact I'm sure I'm not really making a difference to the data collection at large. I browse with Firefox, an ad-blocker CookieAutoDelete and NoScript also, which sounds horrific, but actually works well (although I'm under no illusions that combined with routing my traffic through a VPS and browser fingerprinting are not hiding me at all). Browsing on ios with Firefox Focus is needlessly laborious also, but other than that I've found it to be fine.
It was a bit of a nightmare for the first day or two, but I was buoyed by seeing how many external tracking scripts are automatically loaded on websites that I never expected that from. It's largely seamless once you've whitelisted the things you like, but it takes a couple of days.
One recent example where I packed it in and just used Safari instead was buying a flight - I've found airline websites to be finicky at the best of times and the added layer of non-standard browsing was immediately painful. Other than that, it's been worthwhile; I recommend giving it another try!
Isn't it exhausting to live like that?
Will convenience ever win out for you?
My smartphone went bonkers and now only shows half of the screen, which makes it less than smart.
I replaced it with a Nokia 8110 (the 4G model) and so far it's an intersting experience.
While it might be a smidgeon less convenient it's far less attractive to immerse yourself into your phone while, for example, using public transport. The browser is fine for very basic things and you can get basic email to run. But in terms of distraction Snake can only give you so much.
In essence I seem to gain a lot of time to observe my fellow citizens, read books or just stare out of the window and think some idle thoughts. In short: It seems I'm gaining a lot of time back by not being constantly distracted by what is essentially a slot machine with never ending possibilities.
I'm sure it helps that I don't do social media. None!
The phone provides a 4G hot spot in case I really need to connect a laptop if I must. Having dual sims it seems like quite an ideal thing to take on vacation. (It does GPS and Google Maps)
How well will this work? I don't know yet. Right now I'm really not inclined to replace it, but time will tell.
Is it exhausting?
Well, no. Quite the opposite since there's no temptation for permanent distraction.
Will convenience ever win out for you?
I really don't feel too much inconvenienced. The acid test will probably checking in for flights (which should work with the minimal browser) or comparable tasks. Not being able to hire a scooter or use an Uber (which I anyway don't since I consider it a totally despicable company and there's no way I would ever trust them with my personal -, let alone location data) is pretty much a non-issue.
I find it liberating. When things are too convenient you tend to do a lot of worthless stuff. When there is a little bit of planning and difficulty involved, it helps prioritize. I don't have data on my mobile device either so I'm not sure I could even use the scooters.
If something can be done through a web page, why is it being done through an app in the first place? Most of the time it is so that updates can be pushed and the app can be doing more than it really needs to do to deliver the service.
For things like this, you just need to sign up and put in a little bit of info, but now you have to install and app that may or may not be hugely bloated, require permissions you it doesn't need, push updates frequently, etc.
I always wonder why these kind of folks even bother to visit sites like this at all? Isn't this a tech focused site? Why are you here if you hate advancements in technology so much?
It reminds me of all the bitter old curmudgeons on Slashdot back in the day. Every post about advancements in HDD storage or more memory had at least a few highly voted comments droning on about the dangers of bloat and why all anybody really needs is green screens. Articles on higher resolution monitors, or fancier TV's would always have a couple predictable upvoted comments wondering "why do we need all this extra resolution?"
These kinds of comments really don't add anything to a discussion. They just bring a lot of negative energy. For some reason people always seem to upvote them--probably because they sound edgy or controversial. I just roll my eyes at the old grumps and move on with my life.
The big danger is the site gets taken over by these kinds of grumpy people. Then the site starts a slow decline into irrelevance as the world passes it and all the people still using it by....
I like tech. I like programming. Lots of the stuff I see here is quite cool. Liking tech does not mean disregarding privacy. In fact being enthusiastic about tech is almost required to seriously improve your privacy.
A lot of the stuff here is cool open source projects and even the stuff like this thread is still worth talking about even if I wouldn't use the product myself. No point reading only posts and comments I agree with.
Also even though I would never use this product for privacy reasons, I personally benefit from other people using it when the air I breathe doesn't kill me and I don't fear for my life while crossing a road.
I'm 22 and privacy-conscious. I also love tech, but I really enjoy my personal privacy and knowing that I'm not being surveiled all the time. I am also a FSF supporter and try to run libre code wherever possible.
Convince me: why should I give up my privacy to use products that will inevitably treat my data irresponsibly?
Define irresponsibly. Your plaintext passwords, ID scans and physical address getting leaked is one thing. Using your basic demographic data for advertising is something else.
An obvious solution is just to use bogus data: name, email, dob, address, burner phone.
Only thing you can't fake is your credit card but I'm sure a lot of companies do actually accept payments where the name of the card differs from the name on the account.
Disposable gift cards can be loaded with up to $500, and cost about $5.
If you buy your cards in cash, they're about as private as the security cameras are in whichever convenience store you pay for them in.
Based on what we know about Target's shopper surveillance and behavioral identification efforts being capable of targeting pregnant women with pregnancy products, who didn't even know they were pregnant yet, themselves, even seemingly benign store locations can be pretty lacking in actual privacy.
Between electronic survellance of mobile device identifiers, blue tooth signatures, free wi-fi usage, versus brute force video analysis yeilding facial recognition results for targeted ads on flatscreen monitors as you pass by bus stops, the status of tracking in public spaces is weird, although you really can ditch credit card tracking.
The only problem is, the truly huge companies have assuredly been routing around that idea for years, by diversifying their information channels.
Advancements in user tracking are not the same thing as general technology advancements. Apps that suck up location data deserve all of the flak they get.
> Why are you here if you hate advancements in technology so much?
Hating the abuse of something isn't hating that thing, and
> I just roll my eyes at the old grumps and move on with my life.
going to such lengths to smear someone indirectly and calling isn't moving on with your life. Adapting to "the world" (which is people doing things, and you're one of them) isn't either.
> when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
Well of course and you make a fine point, but I don't know what the app is up to when I'm not using it. And there was also the fiasco of them tracking after rides were completed [1].
I suppose what it comes down to is that we pour huge amounts of information into our phones and by extension, companies that don't necessarily have our best interests at heart, and any steps I can take to ameliorate that without a huge trade-off of inconvenience, I am all about doing. I don't know what my data will be worth in a few years!
Probably stored indefinitely. Imagine 30 years from now, a company being able to go back and check on the current president's ride history when he was in his 20s.
I haven't done it for a while, and I've only done it in New Zealand but yes! m.uber.com should get you there. The car display freezes on occasion, but they'll ring you if they're outside and you're not. Good luck, and you are so welcome!
Fair, it’d be worth doing some math on this. Let’s assume a scooter Travels distance T on a full battery (across multiple trips of course) and has efficiency TE based on the efficiency of the (presumably fossil fuel) power plant and that the person picking it up for Charging drives distance C Picking Up PU scooters with a fossil fuel engine that has CE efficiency. Of course, we need to assume that TE and CE are measured in miles/kg-of-carbon-emission. So, the full equation would look something like:
(TPU/C)(TE/CE) = Carbon Efficiency of using Lime/Bird
I’ll admit that I don’t know all the numbers to plug in here (being HN, maybe someone else does) but given that even dirty power plants have better fuel efficiency than ICEs and that chargers don’t need to drive super far to find a ton of scooters my money is on this being better than driving, carbon-wise.
The distance the charger drives to/from the charging location and then to the vendor-determined deployment point has nothing to do with the distance the previous rider rode.
Yes, the companies have trucks which drive around the city picking up all the parked bikes each night and recharging them. So while they don’t “directly use fossil fuels”, a lot of fossil fuel is indirectly used.
A huge number of chargers (the people) ride the scooters and stack them on the one they are riding.
Even if a vehicle is used, it is nowhere near the fuel consumed by all the scooter trips combined. It collects multiple and is only after several days per scooter.
A future solution would be having charging ports on streets and have people plug them in after a trip. The scooter/bike can then report back to the server that it was plugged in after use.
My order of operations (if the weather is good and I’m going somewhere in that range) is to look at Bird and Lime to see if there’s a scooter within a block or two and call a Lyft if there isn’t. If there is, I save the time I’d spend waiting for a Lyft.
Given that I perceive fossil fuel savings, I feel it’s worth it to check and try to lean towards this method of transport.
> Baltimore used to have a bike share, but I've heard it's being shut down and even when it was up they had a hard time keeping bikes in all the stalls.
Sorry if these are stupid questions, but isn't this a problem with Bird? I see random birds all over the place. Can someone explain why bikes can't be left around randomly like a bird can?
Not a stupid question! The bikes in the Baltimore bike share (and I think also the NYC bike share) had electric motors that would work with the rider to make peddling easier. Thus they had to be left in charging “yokes” when you were done with them.
As for why a non-powered bike couldn’t just be left around, here are a few thoughts:
- As some people have mentioned, bikes are just bigger, and take up way more sidewalk space. If Bird and Lime have gotten unpopular, a “Bird for Bikes” would probably make people livid.
- Honestly, the fact that Birds and Limes come with Anti-theft mechanisms and GPS transponders (which run on the same battery as the motor I think) makes them a bit harder to steal (and there aren’t easily removable parts or a viable black market for selling them). Even a non-powered bike would need a charge every once in a while if it relied on power for its transponder.
- I think the “we supply’em, you pay us to ride’em, we pay people to charge’em” business model is just a straight up new thing that happened to be first successfully done by a scooter startup. I imagine it would be hard for a person in a minivan to pick up tons of bikes for charging without having to remove their minivan’s seats. Again, scooters being small is a big advantage, which is probably also why bigger “sit down” vespa-style scooter startups don’t seem to be a factor right now.
Uhh the antitheft devices don't actually do anything, the police won't follow up on a good theft report, and passers-by don't care either. Literally all of the Chinese ebikes and escooters have standardized parts, so it's easy to sell parts or buy cheaper replacements. The lipoly cells themselves are also nice. I've personally converted birds back to stock xiaomi scooters for about $20usd per scooter (replace the "dashboard" board), which then sell for about $300. A few friends strip them for parts which is lucrative if you don't have much else going on
Is it ok to steal from the rich (nation-state and ultra-wealthy investors) to help the poor (me)? If I could steal a million dollars out of YC's checkbook I would do it in a heartbeat, wouldn't you?
This thread is full of oddities. Some people here think it's OK for you leave your scooter/bike on a private business's property without consent, because the "businesses should like having a signal attracting people to their property". Like, when did consent stop being a thing, and who is anyone to tell me what I want or don't want for my own business?
No, stealing is wrong. No one is going to kill you, right? If you are going to die unless you do it, that might be different, at least arguable. Just cause you want to steal someone else's stuff and sell it for money - that's clearly wrong.
Where can I find details on how this is accomplished? I'm curious how the GPS/Brake is wired in, and what you would replace the front panel with. For science.
Dockless bike share is a thing. They had them all over the East SF bay area for a while but a contract with the existing docked bikes got rid of them in most of the areas. I think they still have them in SF. As you guessed, many people hate them but honestly, parked cars take 100x the space, just allocate some parking spaces to bikes, problem solved.
I suggested elsewhere in the thread, it'd be neat if they included a fourth class in the model: hub owners, in addition to the existing classes of supplier (Bird), riders (customers) and the chargers. The hub owners would register their places (private residence, business, campus, city area, etc.) as bird hubs, and people would only be allowed to ride birds between hubs. This would solve the "trash/get-off-my-lawn" problem.
The hub idea isn't feasible unless tons of people are already riding birds and creating a mess everywhere, because people probably wouldn't sign up as hub owners unless the demand was already deemed high. They are probably just ramping up usage right now until people start complaining, at which point Bird will be big enough to start issuing out hubs.
There are services that will credit your account if you leave the bike in a designated dock area, but you can still leave it in other areas.
This improves on docks in that the "dock" can just be a geofence with a few lines painted on the ground, whereas traditional docks are very sturdy and hence expensive.
This improves on dockless in that it's a more reliable place to pick up bikes, and still gives you the freedom of leaving your bike in other places.
I would imagine it would be a lot easier for civilians to host scooter waypoints at their residence. Bike docks seem like more effort, I can't seem them being a popular option for homes. At scale, the idea is that half of the houses in a neighborhood would host hubs for scooters. At high hub densities, the distinction between docked and dockless becomes negligible, however the hub solution has the added benefit of people not leaving vehicles at random locations.
I don't understand why you think anyone would do this, but I am also not sure that it would be any more legal to run a scooter rental hub at most homes than it is to put a pile of scooters on the sidewalk.
Sorry, why do you think it's a rental hub? It's not a rental hub, you're simply giving Bird riders consent to use your property to drop their scooters off (as opposed to them dropping their scooters off on a random person's property, which bypasses consent and is far worse). All of the rental happens between Bird and the rider, you're just giving people permission to leave scooters on your lawn. It's an opt-in rather than opt-out system, which is how it should be.
It is a hub for people to collect rental bikes. You are giving people permission to use your private property only if they have a specific commercial relationship with a business that you also have a specific commercial relationship to, which has a lot of differences to residential use. I'm not an expert, but I'd be pretty stunned if e.g a standard home insurance policy was willing to cover you under those circumstances.
Neat, although I was optimistically hoping your map aggregated all the actual GPS positions of all the different brands of dockless bikes and scooters onto one map. Since all the bikes (or scooters) are effectively equivalent it would seem useful for the customer to have an aggregated map app (less so for bird/lime/whatever).
Also, I wasn't aware South Lake Tahoe has scooters!
Thanks, this a great answer, and it makes sense now. The size matters because it enables the three-pronged business model: Suppliers-Riders-Chargers, and it would be infeasible to do such a thing with bulky bikes.
I've seen birds left around private property around campuses (e.g. businesses). Why would a business complain about a bike leaning against their wall but not a bird? They are both foreign objects leaning up against their wall. Is size really important here?
However, as reference points for US cities, the standard square blocks of Portland, Houston, and Sacramento are 264 by 264 feet (80 m × 80 m), 330 by 330 feet (100 m × 100 m), and 410 by 410 feet (120 m × 120 m) respectively (to the street center line). Oblong blocks range considerably in width and length. The standard block in Manhattan is about 264 by 900 feet (80 m × 274 m); and in some U.S. cities standard blocks are as wide as 660 feet (200 m).
I’ll admit it’s a bad unit of measurement given that Baltimore has weirdly shaped and non-standardized blocks. Looking at my Lime history, my rides seem to fall in the 0.5-2.5 mile range (0.8-4 km)
It's different in every city, but in Baltimore they're probably in between the size of Portland, OR city blocks and New York City, NY city blocks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lisZBL3_aW8
Yes, because in the long term electric vehicles consolidate fossil fuel emissions to a single large point (coal in this case) which can be eventually replaced with a clean energy source (i.e. solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, etc.).
I wonder how much of that gets offset by transmission loss and the scooter's charging/discharging inefficiencies?
Not that that would be a reason not to use scooters in and off itself, since they're be posed to take advantage of grids that will hopefully become more and more renewable over time
Additionally, the emissions of that consolidated power plant can be better filtered (eg particulates) than the corresponding thousands of disparate engines.
This is a big one. I live in Lehi, UT, in a place we call "Utah Valley." It's a bowl surrounded by mountains. When there's an inversion or when there's no storm to blow out the pollution, it sometimes reaches the top of the "worst air quality regions" scale. Moving the pollution to an area outside the bowl is a huge deal for me.
In computer science, we call this an "interface". Users can use energy without having to know it is generated, allowing the backend to be upgraded to a more efficient power source without users doing anything.
Also, the argument you're making here is called "the long tailpipe" and has been debunked – it's still a win even if the grid has dirty energy because of efficiency gains.
It doesn't matter what's powering them, the power requirements are so much smaller than those for moving a 2-3 ton automobile that you still come out way ahead
Yes, burning coal to generate electricity to power an electric vehicle is better than using an ICE to power that vehicle directly. Not sure about hybrid vehicles.
That is a legit concern. Hopefully, they engineer these scooters to be more durable over time. Also, hopefully user etiquette improves over time as well so people abuse these scooters less, resulting in far longer life spans.
I think if anything the etiquette will get worse. I've already heard of people throwing bunches of them in dumpsters, then when the dumpster is picked up and compacted the batteries catch fire setting the entire load of garbage on fire.
Easier to replace the energy powering the grid than to, say, power a vehicle directly with non-fossil fuel sources. It may still be using fossil fuels due to what is powering the grid, but that can be changed out over time; when using a gasoline powered car, you can't, until you replace the car.
It's why electric cars are viewed as being friendly; the grid they're plugged into may still be fossil fuels, but that can change at any time. A gasoline powered car won't change its reliance on fossil fuels until you replace it.
These scooters and scooter companies seem pretty divisive, especially on HN. I understand they're operating in grey areas, I guess kinda like Uber before them, but they are causing (I think) positive disruption.
I personally love these scooters. I'm living in Australia now where we don't have them. But last month I took a 3 week road trip from LAX to DC and back so I could hit cities I hadn't been to before. And in many of these cities, I used a Bird to get around. These scooters opened up so much more of these cities for me than I could have seen if I just walked every where.
I think they provide real value to a city, for tourists to get around, and for citizens for the last mile and to complement other forms of transport. We just need for these scooter companies to be less like Uber and actually work with the cities to come up with reasonable regulations (in particular insisting on all riders wearing helmets)
I could not be more upset that people who have stated progressive goals such as cutting down on fuel and providing cheap public transportation are against these. They are an absolutely great alternative that makes these goals possible without having to completely overhaul city designs. The only externality really seems to be they are parked in random places - but I don't see how that is any different than cars parked on streets which are actually much more disruptive. Now more people can get to work or do errands cheaply without the need for a huge car or spending extra time with consolidated public transporation.
Cars park in designated spots on streets, they are (generally) not randomly dropped onto sidewalks and parks.
The issue for me is the co-opting of public space for private enterprise in the least considerate way possible. People leave these scooters like litter in parks, sidewalks, and lakes.
You could object that this is an overly precious perspective, but I would counter that similar startups (ZipCar most notably) have solved this by contemplating the logistical implications from the get go.
I personally would not object the assigning some percentage of parking spots in neighborhoods as designated parking for shares, and would hope such a contract will emerge.
I certainly understand the dockless advantage here, but the result for those of us who don't use them is garbage some random company feels entitled to clutter up the sidewalks with.
Everything you said could apply equally well to cars.
Especially "the result for those of us who don't use them is garbage some random company(and individuals) feels entitled to clutter up the sidewalks(streets) with".
Also, what does private enterprises have to do with any of this? If anything I think there's a stronger argument the other way. Things that are owned by and only benefit a single person (e.g. driving my car and then leaving it parked on the street all day) is a worse use of space than things that are useful to many people (e.g. a Zipcar that gets frequent use, or, yes, scooters).
I hope you can recognize that your stated arguments here are not very honest, and that what you're actually saying is "I like privately owned cars so I want cities to prioritize them over other modes of transportation like scooters".
Cars stole that space from people walking, horses, carts, bicycles, donkeys, livestock, etc.
For thousands of years it was normal for children to play in the street, for people to stop and converse, etc.
Then drivers turned up, said "move or I will kill you", and weirdly we decided the streets were for cars. It grates when people say that people walking have any less right to stand in the middle of the street because they're not wearing a car.
Cars had to "disrupt" their way into getting a bunch of infrastructure built for them too; they weren't sitting in factories until streets were filled with parking spaces and traffic signs.
One of the strategies was to have officials take them and then be annoyed enough to change legislation. (eg there was a 3 km/h speed limit for the first car, then they went to fetch some officials from the train station with it. The legislation was changed very fast after that.)
Why "some percentage"? I personally am ready to start "parking" my dockless shared bike in parking spots. I don't use cars, but I have to put up with them taking up a huge percentage of public space in my neighborhood.
All road side parking should be removed from cities and replaced with bike/scooter parks. So many problems would be gone instantly including drivers seriously injuring people on a regular basis while opening their doors.
Yes, when I see that I move them. Just like I've spent years moving commercial sidewalk signs. Why is it only now that an environmentally beneficial and actually USEFUL item is causing trouble that the rest of you have started to care about wheelchair users and blind people?
I don't have any problem at all with people who own scooters. They seem great.
I have a lot of problems with a) companies seizing arbitrary amounts of public space for private businesses, b) venture-funded litter cluttering the streets, and c) novice scooter riders with no training turned loose on sidewalks I am trying to walk and not die on.
And I also have a lot of left-over ire for scofflaw companies. Yes, Uber got away with it. But no, would-be titans, that's not permission for you guys. It was a one-time trick.
I think the big issue that most people have with them is the large externality of having scooters littered around the sidewalk.
In a lot of places in West Los Angeles, you are having to step around them constantly if you walk down the street. People literally just drop them in the middle of the sidewalk, because there is no incentive for them to not do that.
This means that everyone who doesn't use the service has to suffer.
Functionally this is the easiest problem in the world to solve. It's the same solution for scooters and dockless bikeshare.
Take two parking spots in each block. Put beacons on the corners or some kind of signaling tape around the whole thing. Only let users drop off rides inside that spot. Bonus points for having non-locking racks to help organize.
People get to litter their car on the side of my road, often in the bike lane for free and everyone walks around like it's okay. It's not. Neither are the scooters on the sidewalk. We know how to solve both problems. Parking spots for dockless transit and banning cars from transit and pedestrian rich neighborhoods.
[edit] I removed a line saying I was annoyed that people kept complaining the scooter parking situation. Those complaints point out a very real problem with scooter deployments and that we have a solution for it that is difficult to get passed doesn't make the complaint less valid.
People keep bringing up this problem because it's still a problem. If it's so easy to solve, why is it not solved?
Cities should simply impound any scooter not properly parked and charge $200 to get it back. Since solving the parking problem is so easy, this will push Bird/Lime into finally solving it.
It's not easy to solve because people go ballistic if you suggest removing even a single parking space. See for example the 30+ year struggle to develop bus rapid transit on Geary in SF [0], or the effort Bay Area Bikeshare has to go through to get each and every dock approved by the city [1].
Fundamentally the problem is that car-owners currently receive an enormous subsidy in the form of cheap or free street parking and they jealously guard that privilege, even in supposedly progressive cities like San Francisco.
I think the other responses summarize the problem quite accurately. In fact, I alluded to it when I mentioned the littering of cars.
People who park cars believe in an inherent first claim to all roadside space above other users and they are extremely aggressive in their resistance to even the slightest loss.
I think you are being a little unfair to say ALL car parkers feel they own all space next to roads. I am sure some do, but I am a car driver who is happy to give up some space for other forms of transportation. I think there is a happy balance to be found.
You are totally right to say this, but local government is the rule of the vocal NIMBY that actually shows up to council meetings, and makes headaches for government officials not working to their beck and call. Local government exists to appease these ignorant few because no one else votes in the elections.
"local government is the rule of the vocal NIMBY that actually shows up to council meetings, and makes headaches for government officials not working to their beck and call. "
Would you care to list any city and meeting date in which you have observed this? I'd like to pull the tape and see.
Because people on the whole are incredibly resistant to even a tiny loss in street parking. Swapping out a carpark for a parklet that incorporates scooter parking can generate uproar. And action would need to come from the city/council side.
Whenever there is talk of changes to street parking, businesses are outraged at the removal of convenience for their customers. (In most cases, I think they're actually upset at the loss of convenience for their own parking.)
> Cities should simply impound any scooter not properly parked and charge $200 to get it back. Since solving the parking problem is so easy, this will push Bird/Lime into finally solving it.
That's true, but then said cities would lose the prestige of being a part of Silicon Valley innovation.
This is a very fair response and I completely agree with you.
In fact, I would argue that part of the negotiation that cities ought to do with Bird and Lime and others like it is to make any deploy conditional on the passage of and adherence to scooter parking laws.
Cities will, over time, reallocate a small amount of the space currently devoted to very large dockless vehicles to small dockless vehicles and thus solve the problem.
Maybe some parking areas for cars can be replaced in favor of scooters and bikes in certain places. Its interesting how we accept that cars are allowed to park nearly everywhere in cities. It's just normal - scooter and bikes will be a new normal also. But hopefully not in addition but instead of cars in some areas.
Santa Monica has a TON of parking laws. You certainly can NOT just park your car anywhere you want. Pretty much every parking spot available in the city has rules - how long you can park there, how much you have to pay to park there, who is allowed to park there, what permits you need, etc.
We have NONE of this for scooters.
We need these same rules for scooters that we have for cars.
Yes, rules, but probably not the same rules. Allocating space for scooter parking should be a lot easier than for cars, so fewer rules should be needed.
Sure, but that is kinda beside the point. My point is that we DON'T accept cars just parking everywhere, we decided on rules for where they need to park, and we need to do the same for scooters.
Obviously the rules are going to be different because the vehicles are different and are used differently, but the rules will still have the same basic form: you are allowed to park in these areas, for this amount of time, for this much money.
I don't so much mind them littering the sidewalk as them being ridden on the sidewalk. They are extremely dangerous for pedestrians. Should I step around that dog poop, I might be hit by a scooter coming up from behind me. I have had close a dozen close calls when I was walking in a straight line. I walk 4 miles/day on sidewalks with these things.
I’ve owned one of them for a couple years, and have stopped riding it because it’s fundamentally dangerous. I felt like on the streets (San Francisco), I was going to get squashed sooner or later. And riding on the Embarcadero (a wide shore-side walkway that’s bicycle friendly), I was sure I was going to eventually hit someone.
Extremely dangerous? Just so I can calibrate my understanding, what are a couple of other things you consider extremely dangerous?
For me, extremely dangerous means high risk of death or grievous body harm. Something like 100 micromorts per exposure. I want to ensure I'm not underrating this.
I have had 10+ people whiz past me at 20 MPH, within inches of my body. Had I taken a step to the side they were riding, I would have been hit and been pushed to the ground. Had I hit my head, I could have died. People die from head injuries all the time. In the shower, falling down, etc.
Yes, I call this extremely dangerous, because death could result.
Is it likely? No. Is it possible? Yes.
A few years ago a 20 something year old girl was walking in SF and was hit by a bicycle, knocked to the ground and hit her head. She died at the scene. (She was in the crosswalk and the rider was charged with something, I forget.) So, it does happen.
So if you had the following reference points: crossing the road normally as you do (A), skydiving (B), BASE jumping (C) where we know that A < B < C (empirically), does this fall below A, above C, or between two of {A, B, C}, and if so, which two?
I'm actually not Socratic-methoding this. I'm actually just curious where you estimate your risk at. I do things that some of my friends would consider dangerous (like skiing freestyle) but not things which some of my other friends consider safe (outdoor climbing, scuba diving). In this case, it's actually literally a calibration exercise.
More unsafe than walking. Is walking down the street with these vehicles around you less safe than running a marathon? Or around taking a road-trip across America? Or back-country camping?
How about is walking down the street with these vehicles around me less safe than walking down the street with these vehicles on the street and not sidewalk?
My risk of harm while walking to/from work increased orders of magnitude, through no change in my own behavior.
I'm starting to feel like I'm being trolled, because I think you know exactly what I just said.
Yeah, I think this is a fair assessment. Companies like Citibike and Zipcar provide similar benefits, but they do so by isolating their pickups to designated areas where they presumably have approval to operate. These scooter companies use the sidewalk like they own it, and that's pretty obnoxious if you want to use a sidewalk for walking. The big complaint that most people have isn't that scooters are displacing driving, it's that they're using the sidewalks as free scooter storage and externalizing the cost of that to everyone else.
I feel bad for people in wheelchairs that have to come to a dead stop for these scooters. I live in Santa Monica and regularly see scooters left flat in the middle of the sidewalk. I mean, what the actual fuck? The fact that so many people that use these services lack any respect makes me hesitate to ride the scooters(and thereby join them).
Curious thought: Disincentivize bad behavior. Scooter companies know who the last user was, so they could develop techniques to apply "parking violations." Whether that means GPS-enabled (sufficient resolution?) or crowdsourced (next rider taking picture) doesn't really matter. But this is like the automobile equivalent of a parking ticket.
The first company to do this is the first one that's dead in the water. Right now many users have both apps on their phones since they are functionally identical. Add a con to one, and the userbase will jump ship.
Right, this is what makes it an externality... Lime and Bird don't care about it, because the cost is born by people who are not customers. They have no incentive to fix the problem unless forced to.
I assume they care about it massively, lest cities drop the hammer a la SF.
Also: it's a fun exercise to go back in time and look at all the laws sponsored by automotive & oil companies to create today's car culture (case in point: streetcars). I assure you: there was a lot of protectionism & it wasn't always about the consumer.
Fine the offending user on their next ride? Offer discounts that promote good behavior (to avoid unnecessary regulatory over reach)? Experiment in various locations to figure out what method works best?
It's an entirely new mode of transportation; there are lots of fun things to try as we refactor our world. That's what startups do.
Especially hurtful to people who have limited mobility and get around with a wheelchair, walker, crutches, or have trouble bending down to move them out of the way. On top of that I've seen them left in bushes, in the street taking up parking space, or blocking doors or gates.
I don't see what's wrong with them taking up parking space. Considering mean occupancy of cars in America, the street parked scooter is doing just as well in serving one individual as a street parked car. In fact, I'd argue we should remove more parking spots and switch them to scooter spots.
In Hollywood if you take up a parking space with a scooter instead of turning it sideways so a car can still fit you are a massive dick. Parking is a very limited resource here.
Can't you just like, get out of the car, move it, then park?
If it's a shared resource like a Bird scooter then there's no moral quandary about "touching other people's stuff" that would make sense for an actual person's property.
The company doesn't care, there's no-one that even can care.
No? If you tried to park a car on the sidewalk you will get towed. I mean, in Santa Monica if you are 1 minute late past the time on the sign you will get towed.
The cars are parked in designated spots on the road, with all sorts of rules about how long and how much you have to pay for the spot. In Santa Monica, pretty much every available parking spot has a meter that means you have to pay to park there, and are limited in how long you can park there.
Now, we can have all sorts of public policy debates about how much of a city's public space should be dedicated to parking spots, but at least the public had a say in the policy and at least there IS a policy.
We just need rules around where you can park the scooters and for how long, and how much you have to pay to use the public space to park your scooter.
If the argument for parking is that it's democratically decided, then being able to leave scooters around wherever is also democratically decided. Santa Monica could pass a scooter law whenever it wants to. They don't have a policy on nose-picking or walking without looking where you're going either.
The actual basis of your complaint is that you like parking, but you don't like scooters being put wherever.
No, my entire point has been that we need laws about where scooters are parked.
I think it is a bit unfair to say we have democratically decided to let scooters park everywhere simply by the fact that we haven't yet passed any laws about where they can park; the law is slow to move, and the scooter parking issue is pretty new. Before Bird and Lime, there were not enough scooters around to be a big enough problem where we needed a law. Now we do, but the law is slow to change.
Your use of a phone does not fundamentally devalue the public commons.
Dumping private property on public lands, and expecting the citizens to respect what amounts to abandoned property is absurd.
This is a level 100 class of "Tragedy of the commons". And with enough scooters, the very act of going somewhere on a scooter will be blocked by corporate trash.... Err, limes and birds.
> No? If you tried to park a car on the sidewalk you will get towed.
This is disingenuous. It ignores all the externalities of car friendly cities that you're taking for granted. Busy streets are wider with more lanes, crosswalks are more inconvenient and take longer to cross. Half of the width of narrow streets is dominated by parking, not to mention all of the unsightly lots and parking garages.
Scooters don't cost millions/billions in real estate for parking. They can't use and don't require expensive freeway onramps. They don't cause massive congestion and the corresponding drop in local air quality. All in all I think if you want to compare externalities, scooters win by far over cars, and it's not even close.
Helmet laws for adults tend to reduce riders' willingness to use these services because they create inconvenience. In my opinion people should have the choice of whether or not to wear a helmet.
Personally, I usually wear a helmet, but if I happen to not have mine with me it won't stop me from taking a bike or scooter.
Having good situational awareness of surrounding cars, pedestrians, and other road users as well as stationary obstacles ahead of you provides much more safety than a helmet.
I have never fallen off my road bike and I ride fairly fast (up to 50km/h) I still wear my helmet because at that speed a fall would be bad but if I was just having a slow ride with some friends to the pub there is really no need for a helmet.
Yeah, there are unintended consequences with requiring helmets. Fewer people ride bikes, which means less exercise and more car usage. Affecting health and the environment.
Personally, I love the scooters and bikes these companies provide and I think you make a really good point about them being a positive disruption.
It's pretty clear that there is a growing demand for ways to get around other than driving yourself. Lyft and Uber are great for covering distances, but have their issues. In busy metro areas it can often be quicker to walk than it is to drive if you're only going a mile and traffic is bad. On the flip side, in more suburban areas the nearest Uber or Lyft can often be 10+ minutes away.
These bikes and scooters fill that "too long to walk, too short to Lyft" gap perfectly as well as being a great for getting from a public transit stop to a destination.
I don't think they have all the kinks worked out yet. I often see them left in stupid places and there are safety issues for sure, but I really do think they are a step in the right direction.
I visited Sacramento from the Bay Area recently, and the Jump bikes were a revelation. It seems to me that electric-assist bikes are an easier sell safety-wise than scooters (bike lanes often already exist). I’m from Austin Tx and I really hope that the electric assist bikes see widespread adoption there, especially given the horrific traffic and historical resistance to public transit there (biking in the summer there is a hard sell, and it seems to me that electric assist could reduce the number of cars on the road)
AND I could see electric assist leading to cyclists making full stops at stop signs (since the need for momentum hacking is not so great). Based on what I've read here, that would go a long way towards drivers and cyclists getting along better.
Privately owning a bike comes with a ton of hassles though.
- I live in a 570ft studio so storage space is limited. We have bike storage in my building, but it's $15 a month.
- If I go somewhere and bring the bike with me, I have to bring it back. If it starts raining, I can't just choose to leave the bike and take an Uber home.
- If I'm on a bike and I meet up with people that aren't, coordinating travel is a huge pain in the ass.
- I travel a lot and have been in 4 major cities this week. Having a bike at home helps there, but doesn't solve any problems in the other cities. Sharing services are great for visitors.
- Living in a major city, bike theft is a huge problem. By using shared bikes, I don't have to worry about that.
- On top of it all, Lime/Bird is just cheaper. I really only use one once every week or two. I've probably spent less that $30 this year on Lime/Bird. Even if I got a bike for free and it never needed any maintenance a decent U lock would cost more than that.
So yeah, I could own a bike, but these are more convenient and cheaper, so why would I?
I've used a bike for my primary transportation for the last 15 years. I'm not sure if your points are all real, or just what you imagine would be blocks. Let's go through some!
- I live in a 570ft studio so storage space is limited. We have bike storage in my building, but it's $15 a month.
Hang the bike up with a hook.
- If I go somewhere and bring the bike with me, I have to bring it back. If it starts raining, I can't just choose to leave the bike and take an Uber home.
They make clothes specifically to be worn in the rain. Getting a little wet won't hurt ya.
- I travel a lot and have been in 4 major cities this week. Having a bike at home helps there, but doesn't solve any problems in the other cities. Sharing services are great for visitors.
That, I agree! Goodness, that's a lot of traveling.
- Living in a major city, bike theft is a huge problem. By using shared bikes, I don't have to worry about that.
I must be lucky, because I've never had a bike stolen.
- On top of it all, Lime/Bird is just cheaper. I really only use one once every week or two. I've probably spent less that $30 this year on Lime/Bird. Even if I got a bike for free and it never needed any maintenance a decent U lock would cost more than that.
I guess I see the costs saving are from not owning a car. Haha, and I guess, not really needed a gym membership!
Nah, all of these are real points from my life. I live in Seattle and live close enough to work that I can walk. When I moved up here I sold my car and as part of that, I looked into buying a decent bike to use as my main transportation and came to the conclusion that it just wasn't worth it.
My original plan was a mix of walking and the bus, but now it's more walking and transportation sharing services (Uber/Lyft, Car2Go, and Lime).
Also, I'd like to give a rebuttal to a few of your answers.
> Hang the bike up with a hook.
I'm not saying I can't do that, but it would definitely be inconvenient. A mix of small elevators, an odd apartment layout (only one wall we could put a hook on), and a girlfriend who is picky about the decorations in our apartment makes that idea less than ideal.
> They make clothes specifically to be worn in the rain. Getting a little wet won't hurt ya.
You are right, but you still run into the issue of needing to plan ahead. If I leave my house on bike and it's sunny but it starts to rain later I'm going to get soaked. As you said, that won't kill me, but if I'm going from a bar to a party at a friends house, it would suck to show up soaked. Having the option to go from point A to B on bike and then B to C in a Lyft is a nice option to have.
> That, I agree! Goodness, that's a lot of traveling.
Hahaha agree with you there, I'm exhausted. This isn't my norm though, just had a friends birthday, a family event, and work travel happen to be back to back to back.
Just to kind of wrap my point up, I'm not trying to petition against people owning bikes. There are a lot of people who it makes sense for and if Bird/Lime weren't a thing, I would probably be one of them.
If I had no other options, I could definitely make it work, but for me, it's more convenient and less expensive to rent one when I need it.
I think what helped me, when I transitioned to using a bike for everything was having a large circle of friends that also rode bikes primarily. We laughed, we cried, but we also saw what we did as being normal things to overcome. For example, if we all went out, we did so on bikes. If it rained - so be it! We all got wet, and we laughed about it. In Seattle, I've joined up with these guys:
The logistics can be challenging, though, especially in an urban area. You need a place to keep and lock up your bike everywhere you go, and [for many people] a way to transport your bike on public transit.
In San Francisco, I wouldn’t trust leaving my bike at a bike rack. That’s why the bike/scooter shares are so useful. Otherwise I would ride my personal bike everywhere.
It could be from the perspective of storage and maintenance. For me, one of the hardest things about owning a bike is where the hell to put it. I live in a city where I can't lock it up outside overnight or it'll eventually be stolen.
And as someone else mentioned, flat tires are a pain, checking/maintaining brakes are a pain...I can afford to have someone else do it, but that's still way more of a hassle than just booping a bike on the sidewalk.
* It could be from the perspective of storage and maintenance. For me, one of the hardest things about owning a bike is where the hell to put it. I live in a city where I can't lock it up outside overnight or it'll eventually be stolen.*
Hang it from a hook.
And as someone else mentioned, flat tires are a pain, checking/maintaining brakes are a pain...I can afford to have someone else do it, but that's still way more of a hassle than just booping a bike on the sidewalk.
Squeeze the tire to see if it's holding air, squeeze the brake lever to see if it's stopping the wheel, then go! Not too difficult. Flat tires aren't too common these days. Wheels can be tubeless these days, even.
You can get a lot of help from low maintenance parts like marathon plus tires, roller brakes, nexus/alfine hub gears. For outdoor storage vs theft, a beat up looking muddy off brand frame does a lot.
I used to bike to work year round before these and I'm not eager to go back. Biking for 2 hours on the weekend is enjoyable, showing up to work sweaty and coming home exhausted five days a week was not. Hills are not fun!
I feel safer on one of these too; the acceleration can be handy in emergency situations where you'd otherwise be barely up to speed on a bike, in the wrong gear, etc.
It is when you have to figure out how to get the bike to the start of your last mile, deal with flat tyres, etc.
With these scooters, you can take public transportation (keep in mind some systems don't allow bikes on their transit systems) to somewhere, then solve the last mile problem.
Most people I know don't know how to, or couldn't be bothered to, change a bicycle tire. You have to also bring around a spare tire, a portable air pump, etc... or face the prospect of walking your bike somewhere.
Perhaps we should differentiate here between bike ownership and these bike/scooter share approaches. Scooters also have flat tires.
Compare ownership to a shared scooter or bike service, where these costs are in effect shared amongst everyone. If your scooter breaks down, you can leave it and seek other forms of transportation.
Changing a bike tire is not difficult, and is a lot easier to do than it was when I used to ride a bike to school. Even then there are may types of goo you can put in the tyre to automatically patch a hole should it happen. Bike pumps are a lot smaller than a drink bottle and normally clip to the bike, or would easily fit into a backpack. Again, in most cases you will not need to use it.
That leaves parking, acknowledged and your risk of having the bike stolen is totally dependent upon where you are and what facilities are provided. Many work places are seeing the benefit of fit staff and are providing bike cages in the corporate carpark. Same with shower facilities so you dont stink the office out.
There are many excuses you can use against bike use, but most of them boil down to it being something you are not used to doing and to do it you need to change your habbits.
Amusingly, they're forbidden from using all roadways including the green bicycle paths on the sides of roads. They must be ridden on the footpath, or on dedicated bikeways that aren't on roads. I don't understand why this is the case.
The helmet thing is currently tackled by having a helmet on each scooter. I haven't seen any go missing yet but I've also not ridden one myself, though I both live and work inside the proximity for using them.
People I've talked to who've used them have found them fun and convenient. Friends have used them to get to work faster than walking when running late. Others have gone out on the weekend to just sight-see and enjoy the weather, which I think is a positive change vs. sitting inside. I think they're a net positive, but there's some downsides that I think can be addressed.
edit: For additional context, we have a bike share system in Brisbane too (called CityCycle) which is tied to our transit card system. I see it getting some use, but it seems like the scooters are far more popular (at least right now). With our CityCycle system, you pay a ongoing membership fee ($5/mo) plus usage fees (after the first 30 minutes), though there's also a day pass ($2/day) rather than ongoing membership. This makes it a bit harder to start using or sporadically use compared to the scooters. Additionally, you have to return them to dedicated rack locations rather than just park them anywhere. Lastly, they're somehow more dorky than a lime-green scooter, given that they have bright yellow plastic and ads on them.
> I personally love these scooters. I'm living in Australia now where we don't have them. But last month I took a 3 week road trip from LAX to DC and back so I could hit cities I hadn't been to before. And in many of these cities, I used a Bird to get around. These scooters opened up so much more of these cities for me than I could have seen if I just walked every where.
I wanted to like them when I was visiting from Europe to STL but I couldn't:
- They require a helmet. I don't have a helmet and I'm not gonna buy one for a 5 day trip. Most people do not wear helmets but if police stops me I can hardly point at other people disobeying the same rule.
- They require a drivers license. I last drove a car half a decade ago or so so I tend to use my driver's license at home, especially on trips abroad.
- Using the scooters on streets in STL feels a bit scary. I commute to work by bike every day but we have cycle lanes and drivers who are used to seeing cyclists everywhere so it is a rather safe environment.
Lime has been in Brisbane for a month now, and they are a menace to pedestrians. Whats more, it does not look like it is alleviating the traffic problems whatsoever.
I saw one pulled out of the Brisbane River the other day too.
I haven't had too much issue with them as a pedestrian, though I'm baffled as to why they're forbidden from using bike lanes on roads and are therefore forced to use the footpaths. They travel with the same sort of speed as a bike, and the user wears a helmet. Surely the risks are pretty equivalent.
Helmets are important (I always wear one,) however, government ought not force people to wear them. Freedom still should matter. Grown adults should be able to make their own decisions. I support helmet laws for the under 18 crowd, but for grown adults? Too much nanny state for my liking.
One reason people might disagree is that you're pushing the externality of your own safety onto others. An example of an externality: those who don't wear helmets and crash are much more likely to have a brain injury (or death). This means that we all have to pay for your care now. In death (lack of taxes) or in financial damage. And in some cases like safety standards, people will also argue for emotional safety as well. Your death or injury could have a severe affect on those surrounding you even if you don't care but that's less measurable.
Freedom is complicated when you don't live in a silo.
>This means that we all have to pay for your care now
I'm not convinced. By that logic, we should also ban unhealthy foods, limit how many calories each person can eat, and mandate them to exercise for n hours per week. I'm sure that some of those will have a higher ROI than putting on helmets.
>In death (lack of taxes)
so we should ban emigration then? it has the exact same effects from a tax perspective.
Why are you not convinced? That's precisely the logic used by a sugar tax, and is the same logic used in tobacco taxes.
In countries where there's public healthcare, the burden of it on the public purse is a very real consideration where trade-offs must be made in varying ways. One of these ways is to tax things that contribute to higher loads on the spending of those public policies. Australia's tobacco laws are a key example of this.
Unhealthy lifestyle = cumulative effects. You don't get a heart attack from one big mac but you can need decades of life support from one outing on a motorbike without helmet.
To make it worse, people who don't wear a helmet aren't the best riders either and thus more likely to be involved in an accident.
Right, but isn't that also the case for people in cars? They get head injuries in car crashes that may have been prevented by wearing a helmet.
As for helmet laws, they have unintended consequences, such as fewer people riding bikes. Resulting in more cars/pollution and less exercise, less healthy population.
Incorrect - universal healthcare would make this discussion even more relevant. As we're all going to be paying for his head injury rather than whoever decides to go with that particular company or insurer.
The risk of crashing and getting brain damage is real but small. The risk of not riding a bike because of helmet laws and then getting fat is real and common. One of these issues costs a whole lot more to the public.
Drinking half a liter of wine exposes you to as much risk as a bicyclist traveling twenty miles. Are you ready to have drinking regulated? We might need to register you with our central database to ensure that you do not exceed your government-mandated allowance of alcohol consumption for the day.
Shouldn't your same argument apply to the "under 18 crowd"? Why is it a "nanny state" to force adults to wear helmets but not children and teenagers? Alternatively, shouldn't grown adults be able to make their own decisions about whether their children wear helmets?
As someone who rides motorbikes I can tell you riding without protection is absolutely the stupidest thing a person can do.
Society shouldn't have to spend any money on medical bills stemming from not wearing proper protection while riding any vehicle and injuries are usually very serious. Not sure how it works in the US but here in the EU society does basically cover those bills.
Facts are facts but to me this always seemed like the dumbest idea. I thought it was a dumb idea before the City Bike program was introduced here in NYC then I thought so many people would get hurt with the way Cabbies drive out here.
Fast forward a few years and the program is a huge success here in NYC, there was some accidents but no where near what I thought there would be. People obviously love Biking and I was completely wrong.
What’s even crazier now I think with the technology and access becoming even easier this has the power to completely transform cities. Obviously people love this and politicians that don’t support it will be voted out, it’s looking more and more like there could be entire roads dedicated to bikes and scooters as this becomes more popular.
Mayor Bloomberg wanted to limit the amount of cars in the city and put a toll on any any cars going below 95th street in Manhattan, people rebelled back then but if something like this had been in place the Cabbies and Car owners would be out of luck.
Cars are fundamentally, egregiously inefficient. Most of their use comes from one person going to one place using one of their 5+ seats, yet automakers have to design an engine powerful enough to move 5+ people, and the 3000lbs of the car. A scooter only needs enough energy to move one person plus the 15lbs of the scooter. Older generations are blind to this fact because their entire life they've been sold the idea that they need to buy and spend money moving and storing a 3000lb hunk of metal with them every single day. Imagine paying money to go somewhere, knowing full well the major percent of that money is going to move a ton+ of material, and only a fraction is spent to move your physical body; you'd be outraged, but that is what a car is.
My guess is that Lime and Bird's latest investors don't actually believe in these insane valuations. Instead, they see these companies as a safe place to park their money due to the limited downside provided by liquid preference terms.
I discovered scooters recently and have rode them in three major cities during the past month. I have to say it is the most genius consumer tech product I've seen in a long time. I instantly felt a sense of "wow" after riding the first one (bird). The entire experience is so simple, so elegant (ui/ux), cheap, efficient, and most importantly FUN. I looked up bird and lime to discover they'd each received over 400M in funding and it makes perfect sense to me. This is a disruptive technology that's going to see major adoption in every city across the entire planet. You have to ride one to understand, especially in an urban, downtown, waterfront or metro type area. They're going to easily cut into bikeshare and short-trip rideshare services. Take a ride and you'll see, #scootlife!
Also worth noting, none of the technology is itself "new", but rather bird & lime particularly have packaged existing technologies together to make a product with all the qualities mentioned above. Innovation is usually just a twist on something that's already out there.
> This is a disruptive technology that's going to see major adoption in every city across the entire planet.
Disruptive pioneer is not necessarily good investment even if the base idea is solid.
In the Dot-com bubble (1995-2000) many companies with good ideas eventually failed. There were several online book retailers, web search companies and online shopping sites, even online food delivery services. They were highly valued, but most of them went bankrupt. Amazon two Google survived (It took over decade for Amazon's stock valuation to recover).
We have now transportation boom. When the boom goes bust and regression hits, most run out of money and go bankrupt.
Holy crap. You ride on one of those standing electric scooters for at least 37 minutes each way?! (20 mph) That's a long time... I could understanding biking but not stand up scootering.
A 1x return on a large investment like these would not be good for a venture fund. They probably need to return 3x on the whole fund to get their carry/bonus, so a 3x return for a given investment is the bare minimum for success. They almost certainly would not have made these investments unless they believed they could make a return of >3x.
> They almost certainly would not have made these investments unless they believed they could make a return of >3x.
Softbank isn't like a traditional VC. They structured their fund like private equity where they retain a percentage of returns above x% per year. In addition to this, they take a 1% management fee regardless of returns.
For most VC's, you'd expect the carry to represent the majority of incentive. But, Softbank is unique in that their fund is $100bn. They take home a hefty $1b in management fees regardless of how their portfolio performs.
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if they make 'safe' bets for the sake of boosting their allocation numbers, even if they think there's a nil chance of 3x EV.
Fenwick publishes a quarterly survey of market terms for VC rounds. Their Q3 2018 report suggests ~10% of rounds are being done with a liquid pref >1x, and those terms are almost always between 1-2x. Given that these stats are for series A-E rounds, I would expect the liquid pref in these mega rounds to be very close to 1x if not 1x exactly.
Source: https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/Silicon-Valley-Vent...
In West Oakland I see many people using the Ford Bikes, but yet even more people using the Lime scooters. Kids, adults, techies, non-techies.
I think they look kind of dorky, and some end up on the sidewalk and dumped in Lake Merritt. On the other hand, it appears that people are using these scooters a lot, possibly instead of driving. That seems like a positive outcome to me.
I'd imagine that horseless carriages looked dorky back when they were introduced too :) Maybe it's one of those things that will become normalized with time.
It would be good if more safety concerns were met though - I do think mandating helmet usage is a good thing.
Currently there is a huge trend at the Chaos Communication Congress because the new buildings are so big and the distances far. Last year many places were actually sold out. It's even better if you outfit it with some LEDs and stuff! (So if anyone is going this year - wheels recommended.)
I really liked riding them until I realized how expensive they were. When you use them everyday, it adds up quick. Hundreds of dollars a month. I now bike everywhere instead and wonder why others don't.
I could see using them when traveling, where I wouldn't have my bike with me.
Stand up scooters feel so unstable. Why not just add a seat and allow a seated scooter that’s foldable. The problem with last mile transport is that the laws in many countries need electric bikes to have peddles and peddle assistance. Just let people have a certain power and max speed and they will drop the car and replace it with a powered scooter. Aka, China.
> Just let people have a certain power and max speed and they will drop the car and replace it with a powered scooter
I think many Americans have a higher expectations for safety than many people in China. No way I am packing my kid onto a scooter and driving them around downtown.
Some EU countries have already announced that scooters will soon be treated similarly to e-bikes, i.e. max 250W and 25km/h for the ones that don't need registration and plates.
While more expensive and less portable, a bike is a lot safer and more versatile.
A bike is safer? Definitely need some citations for that. Versatility is debatable. I can fold my scooter and put it under my table at a restaurant or toss it into the trunk of a car. Scooters are also extremely low maintenance: no flat tires, no need to carry a pump or patch kit.
The bigger wheels give it much better stability. Hitting a hole or rock on a bike and a scooter is a very different experience. lots of the scooter steering setups make it very easy for the front wheel to suddenly turn 90 degrees and send you flying
My experience is with bikes you can easily take one hand off the bike to signal a turn - what your traffic intention is. But with the scooters, it's not really possible to take your hands off the handlebars (you lose control!), and there is currently no blinker control to indicate your traffic intention. I wanted to take a left-turn on a scooter recently and this was an issue. I got honked-at.
I think they should add blinker light controls to the handlebars.
I feel far less safe on a bicycle than I ever do on a Bird/Lime-style scooter. Main reason is I can go a lot slower, bicycles have to maintain a certain amount of inertia and that seriously affects riding habits. If I'm coming up on an intersection I can slow down a lot but if I'm riding a bike, I'm incentivized to blow through. With a scooter, I can go at a safe speed around pedestrians on sidewalks and stop abruptly if necessary with my feet. The inertia requirement makes it difficult to go sufficiently slow around pedestrians on a bike and I always feel like I'm an asshole no matter where I am if not a dedicated bike lane.
I think only familiarity leads people to think that bikes are safer than scooters. Given a choice between an electric bicycle and an electric scooter, now that I've ridden both, give me the scooter any day.
Full disclosure, I'm anti scooter. People drive them on the sidewalks, leave them in front of my front door, and I genuinely hope that both of these companies, specifically, fail.
With that disclosure, was anyone else horrified that the lifespan of these scooters is only 3 months?
Are they really removing enough vehicle trips to make these a net positive from an environmental standpoint?
That’s a pretty shortsighted opinion. The big problem here is that our cities are structured so that you have to move several tons of metal around to go more than a few blocks.
Being angry about a better alternative instead of the lack of infrastructure is just crotchety.
I put in my disclaimer out of sense of honesty. I'm a bike rider, I don't like cars either. As you can see however, my question is whether electric scooters with a three month lifespan can come out ahead in environmental savings.
I toured the US with my bicycle for 5 months this year on a Walmart bikes. Each one lasted only 1 month (1000 miles) before it developed serious mechanical problems like broken spokes. But it was much more economical than an expensive touring bicycle: For example, every time I flew domestically, it was very expensive to take it as checked luggage. So I left it at the airport and bought a new one at the other side.
A bicycle (or a scooter) weighs a fraction of a car, so even if I replace it frequently, it uses much less raw materials per mile, especially if you include the fossil fuels consumed.
I never rode a bird, but I was sad when I saw the cops banning them from Venice beach in August. Hopefully the city will embrace the new technology and build enough (shared) infrastructure (bike lanes / sidewalks).
I'm also a cyclist but am pro-scooter...but, yes, I found that super disturbing. In fairness, the lifespan is 4 months. 3 months of profitability. Either way, it sounds crazy wasteful. Obvious questions arise (and answers are alluded to in the article): How much of old scooters are reclaimed? Obviously some scooters are stolen / utterly destroyed...but for the ones that break down, is some percentage re-used?
Also, are there planned improvements to the lifespan? These companies have been operating for a crazy short amount of time considering their growth...so hopefully they can improve this as they bring the scooter design in-house.
Where else would they drive them? On the road? They would just contribute to the thousands of cyclists that die or are seriously injured every year.
If you are suggesting that every electric vehicle be banned because sidewalks are for pedestrians only then I disagree. Streets are for cars only, don't let these fake bike lanes fool you.
Vehicles that move faster than pedestrians should go on the road, like bicycles do. As a bike rider, its a vastly superior option that going on the sidewalk.
In more developed areas, there are three options. Fast (main road for cars), medium (bike lane) and slow (sidewalks). I'd imagine birds would ride in the medium and slow lanes. They go up to 15 MPH, which is the run-speed of a human. Should runners be on the bike lane? I don't think so.
> In more developed areas, there are three options. Fast (main road for cars), medium (bike lane) and slow (sidewalks). I'd imagine birds would ride in the medium and slow lanes.
And to be clear 'bike lane' != road shoulder with a bike painted on it. A bike lane should have at least some amount of separation from the road in the same way that sidewalks are separated.
I'm hopeful that the popularity of scooters speeds up the adoption of medium speed lanes.
runners have a much better stopping speed than bicycles, and also don't have sharp metal or carbon fiber frames that can hurt pedestrians :)
Also 15 mph is a sub 4:20 mile, and for most people will be pretty close to a flat out sprint. Not super adviseable on sidewalks either. Most joggers will be going half that speed.
That certainly doesn’t show that it’s far more dangerous.
In every scenario listed, a minority of motorist / cyclist accidents at intersections involved a cyclist on the sidewalk. Meaning that the majority of such accidents occurred where the cyclist was not on the sidewalk.
We actually don’t have enough info from that to say which is safer. If 99% of cyclists ride in the sidewalk, but the 1% who don’t make up more than half the accidents, I’d say riding on the sidewalk is far safer.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusion. I just don’t like the use of faux data to show a conclusion that feels right.
98% of kids with autism were vaccinated in the prior three years!
You might just be thinking it used to be that way because when a new company/product becomes successful, their brand name becomes the term for the thing.
I have friends in London and commuter towns buying scooters for their own use- despite knowing that they can’t ride them legally. There are none for hire here. When are they arriving?
Given C. London pavements are incredibly narrow, inexorably busy and often uneven, people on these things are a nightmare. Even non electric ones are a nightmare.
It's strange that even though SF approved 2 scooter companies to operate that I feel like I rarely see anyone actually use vs what I saw when Bird/Lime were here.
SF didn't want to make BART feel bad by providing actual competent transit options, so we got the joke that is Skip/Scoot.
Seriously, this city has convinced me democracy doesn't work. Maybe China should regime change us.
Edit: stingrae points lack of availability may be the City's fault, rather than Skip/Scoot. No sé -- but for sure the city's intervention took a useful, environmentally friendly transit option and made it non-useful.
I haven't tried 'em in a bit, so to be fair, maybe it's better now.
But last time I tried:
Scooter coverage was too sparse to be useful.
If you did try to chase down one of the sparsely scattered scooters, usually it would be missing. No way to make it play a sound to help locate it, no way to report it was missing.
Gave up and just kept skating everywhere. Whereas I found Lime and Bird to be a practical alternative mode of transport, before they got kicked out.
That sounds like a different issue. SF limited the number of scooters each company, Skip/Scoot, could deploy. When Bird and Lime launched in the city they had no limits, so they flooded it with scooters.
I really want to try this. I think easy car sharing could be huge and it'd be amazing to be rid of the hassle that is car ownership (monthly parking, insurance, maintenance, etc.)
I am a frequent user of lime bikes. I think they have a few drawbacks that make them difficult to use all the time however. Mostly:
1. Consistently Well Working Bikes can be hard to find
2. I often use these to get from the residential part of Seattle to the urban parts for date night... it can be very difficult to find two of these near each other.
3. They really need some sort of limited reservation system. This would help mitigate the difficulty of getting multiple bikes.
Bird is actually rolling out reservations, although I think it's more intended for daily users (they say they'll drop a scooter off on your doorstep every morning and only you can unlock it).
Because then you have to worry about it getting stolen, and you have to remember to charge it. Part of the magic of the birds is that when you're done, you just get off of it and park. 0 anxiety about somebody stealing it.
This article says these scooters make $16/day in revenue?! Where are they making that kind of money? The scooters in my city just sit in the same place for DAYS without moving... I don't buy those numbers at all...
Bit of a selection bias... you are much more likely to notice the ones that are in the same spot day after day, and not notice the once that are in constant use.
This is the average revenue, I am sure there are some that generate a lot less/barely any.
Pricing for Bird looks like $1 to unlock and $.15 / minute to ride. I think it's not unrealistic to see utilization of at least 5 rides per day for $5 of revenue + average of 15 minutes per ride for the other $11 to get to $16 / day.
It's likely that there's a few that are much more highly utilized to balance out those that are not utilized at all.
That's possible, but with a range of only 15 miles and they're most likely only getting charged at night, that's a max revenue of around $35/day for a scooter. I doubt there's enough scooters maxing out each day to offset the losers.
The problem with these scooters is that they are great as a user, but terrible for everyone else. They are a lot of fun to ride, but if you're just a regular old pedestrian they are a nightmare, people park them in the streets and pass by you way to quickly and closely on the sidewalk.
But riding them in the street pisses off drivers and is pretty dangerous, at least that's how it shakes out in Cincinnati.
Never had a problem with these. My main issue in cities are cars. They are noisy, they pollute, they are dangerous, they make the buses go slow, they require large streets that take ages to cross, require you to be constanty looking out for cars that might kill you...
I finally had a chance to try one out recently and was very frustrated with the experience. After attempting to use several shown on Bird's map I gave up. Some were broken, some were almost certainly being hoarded inside of apartment buildings, and some simply could not be found anywhere near the map marker. The experience was a huge letdown after being tempted to try the product so many times.
I loved using Lime, but I can see cities banning it like SF. You aren't supposed to ride the scooter on side walks and many people do it. People just leave it in random places and I know some cities don't like this.
Someone somehow managed to abandon one on the roof (7th floor) of my work building. Getting the damn thing down to the ground floor and out of the building was not a lot of fun. Moving it locked up the wheels and triggered the alarm. It even announced through a speaker that it was "calling the police." With some help I was able to get it down, moved into a service elevator, and escorted out of the building. The stupid thing would not shut up. Someone must have come by and collected it because it was gone by the end of the day.
Pain in the ass, and the company, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, didn't have any information on their website about how to contact a real person or to report an abandoned scooter. If this is going to be a regular thing, where I have to be an impromptu scooter wrangler, I want my cut :)
And about 33k people die every year in car crashes. The scale is _very_ different, but transportation is always unfortunately somewhat deadly... people are out in the real world and are moving fast.
Someone died the other day in a Lime scooter after hitting a tree.
If you search for news on scooter accidents you will see they are more likely with Limes. Why not Bird? Because Bird throttles the speed according to the current laws (15mph) while Limes go sometimes up to 20mph.
As a cyclist, I'm hopeful that these bike/scooter/wheel-shares programs will force governments to examine their plans for keeping people safe. More low-speed travel lanes for bikes, scooters, one-wheels, hoverboards, etc. Keep the sidewalks for walking and wheelchairs.
Lime and Bird have collectively raised nearly a billion dollars within 14 months of founding at valuations of $1.1 billion and $2 billion, respectively.
For reference, American Airlines has market cap of $18 billion and 950 jet planes.
Actually, I’m pretty sure American Airlines has 950 jet planes on lease, and they have a century’s worth of pension and other obligations that remain hidden in their books.
Companies are far too complicated to compare based on single numbers. Try not to make this mistake —- it’s great for clickbait, not so much for critical thinking.
> The big wild card, though, is whether Uber or Lyft buy Lime or Bird. Uber is talking to both companies about an acquisition so this is not just a hypothetical question.
Why would Uber buy either of these companies? Uber already has JUMP scooters. Can't they afford to create way more scooters than either Lime or Bird?
Sure, Uber isn't one of the two companies who are part of the scooter pilot in SF. Still, I doubt that justifies spending hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on buying a company.
A lot of this evaluation assumes the price stays the same. $1 + 15 cents a minute.
I think we'll see prices come down 80%. These scooter companies will face more competition than uber and Lyft do because people are happy grabbing the first scooter they see when walking.
My personal scooter costs a third of a cent per mile of electricity + $350 to buy it. I'm at 150 miles so far, and could easily see this thing lasting a few thousand. So ~20 cents a mile.
The lifecycle will increase dramatically. Just a few parts need to be beefier. The motor and battery can last a long time.
Its 12 cents to charge, and I imagine there will be city infrastructure added to accommodate charging on the streets. Pay someone a dollar to plug it in to the nearest streetlamp at the end of their ride.
Mind sharing which make/model you purchased? I've been looking at buying one recently, and all the well-reviewed ones seem to be significantly more than $350
Thanks for the recommendation! They're currently $399 on Amazon, however, the scooter seems to have a rating of 3.3/5, which is concerning — with reviewers noting various build quality issues.
Anything with a 4+ rating and enough reviews seems to go for ~800+, which is why I haven't purchased one yet.
Will be interesting if Uber or Lyft will postpone IPO in favor or buying one of them. Cant imagine it's possible to acquire one of them and still IPO in near future - but who knows. Exciting to see scooters and bikes get nice adoption! Changing the form factor to be more like a mini car (with at least a seat) would be neat, scooters just dont feel that safe.
Uber has around 7 billion (last time I heard) and this year they will lose around 5 billion, maybe more.
Uber is on track to run out of money in 2019, so a financial event is inmminent. I don't know if we will see an Uber 2019 IPO, but if it doesn't happen is more likely due to the current bear market and not so much because they are considering a large acquisition.
If they acquire a scooter company I presume they will do it through a mix of debt and a heavy stock component. In fact it seems that they already raised another 2 billion through private placement bonds.
Yes, I think whether Uber or Lyft (esp. Uber) can pull off such big acquisitions before their IPOs is the big big question on how this market shakes out.
Reading the comments here make me chuckle. I honestly find it mind boggling that people would complain of bicycles taking up space, let alone scooters.
I love the bike share programs in Taiwan and China. I haven’t used a car in years. Yeah some people trash the bikes but most people at least seem to give a shit.
Why this is such an issue in the West, I can’t understand...
I cannot stand the Limes and Birds around Santa Monica.
I walk out of my apartment, and the streets are littered with them. It's annoying when walking, it's even more annoying when jogging, and riders are constantly riding them (without helmets) on sidewalks even though we have bike lanes. They're even a nuisance when driving.
I'm hoping for some legislation that will ban them -- I might set up a grassroots campaign myself. It's mostly the tourists using them, anyway.
In all seriousness, they should have dedicated docking spots but even one parking spot per block would be more than enough and would solve the problem.
I am also in favor of dedicating some parking spots of cars to alternative transports, like scooters. Cars all over the place is just as "ugly" as scooters.
I was actually in Santa Monica / Venice area for the first time a few weeks ago. I was /floored/ with how many scooters there were. I live in Atlanta and find them to be super awesome and unintrusive, but I could understand how the sheer quantity could put you off of them.
At least realize that they aren't so ridiculously overpopulated in other places -- it's probably the tourists that make it financially worth it to put out a deluge of them.
New things bring a particular reaction in some people. The streets around me are lined densely with parked cars. They take up a lot of space, impair visibility, etc but people look past them. Add a shared bike on the corner of one block and because it is new/novel some think it's a messy outrage.
(I drive and use street parking. There are no scooters here, but I'd love to have them as part of the city's ecosystem in the future.)
I was in Atlanta last month, and outside of Midtown (Tech/GSU), I didn't see them anywhere else. Here, we have them in SM/Venice, in Westwood, in Culver City, in DTLA, etc.
They're all over Atlanta. Midtown probably has the highest density of them but they're all over downtown, west midtown, Old 4th ward, Decatur, Reynoldstown, Cabbagetown, etc.
Go down Memorial or DeKalb heading east in the morning and you'll see rows and rows of them freshly set out ready to be kicked over like dominos by some jerk.
I live in Santa Monica and that sounds exactly like my experience. Don't you also love those hideous red bikes from Uber? haha Fortunately I'm seeing less of them.
At the very least, people should actually get licensed to ride these things. I know that it requires they have a driver's license, but that doesn't mean they're actually trained to ride these scooters around in traffic. At that rate, why even bother having licenses for motorcycle riders? A regular driver's license and training for a regular car is apparently all they need.
Set up a shop buying and selling "secondhand scooter parts" - don't ask too many questions and you could make a nice profit while incentivizing others to dismantle their inventory.
Why would that bother you? It's not your skull going unprotected, right?
If you stretch an argument to worry about public funds lost to medical bills or lawsuits, someone might respond that the more people we encourage to leave their cars at home, the better we are off when it comes to safety, pollution, congestion, noise, etc.
I walk out of my place and there are huge lines of cars parked against the kerb, I can hear car traffic constantly even from inside the building, it can be dangerous to cross the road, and so on. I've been to Santa Monica a few times and know that the same applies there. What gives you such a strong reaction to this new option that you might not apply to an existing technology?
With anything new there is a settling period. It makes for an interesting discussion (where to park them, etc) but you sound pretty outraged: cannot stand. littered. annoying. constantly riding them without helmets! nuisance. ban.
I feel completely the opposite. I wish they were everywhere in SF so that we would have less cars and I wouldn’t have to take cabs to commute everywhere.
Is there a reason these don't count as just trash? If I leave my scooter lying on the side of the road, I would never assume that it would still be there if I came back to it.
They're a menace to society given the un-insured nature of their services. A local journalist had some scooter doofus run into her vehicle badly enough to damage the ability to open the driver's side door, then he turned around and claimed she hit him. So she was facing having a record of striking a pedestrian on her driver's and insurance records and was only saved by footage from a surveillance camera. What a joy!
It's funny to see this just after in Nashville a Bird user ran a red light and got hit by a car. Now I know this user is not indicitive of all users, but it's enough to galvinize the people against them.
I say this as someone who loves them. I hope they stick around, but its only a matter of time someone in a party city like Nashville is drunk and ends up getting hit leading to a death.
Why are cars allowed to litter the public roads and park all over the place, taking up a massive amount of space with mostly empty seats and driven around less than 10% of the time?
As cars gained mainstream adoption, governments passed legislation regulating their use in the way you described.
I'm sure scooters will follow a similar trajectory; we're just waiting for legislation to catch up.
It's not littering since local statues have rules about parking. FYI, in some areas, parking is illegal, and in most areas leaving your car in a spot for too long will allow the city to tow it.
Since the majority of places don't have statues for scooters, the default actually is littering, it's no different than dumping anything else on the sidewalk.
Scooters are definitively vehicles. What would governments do if people just started parking bikes and scooters in free full-size car parking spaces :)
Yeah, but those statutes came after cars were popular. Early on, I bet people were parking all over the place and it was people complaining about it that lead to those rules being put in place.
>Why are cars allowed to litter the public roads and park all over the place, taking up a massive amount of space with mostly empty seats and driven around less than 10% of the time?
Because car owners pay extra in taxes, specifically to cover the additional costs to society.
It's not a "get off my lawn" comment. Regulations about these scooters don't exist in the large majority of places- meaning the default local regulations about illegal dumping apply. Whether people derive value from it or not is not important to local laws.
These scooter companies are operating in a grey area; that's a fact. Please don't quickly dismiss discussion about this issue, especially in such an ignorant manner.
Scooters occupy ~5% the space as a car. Dedicating 2-10% of the spots on each block/public lot to bikes/scooters should already be built in as a public service.
If you've ever biked as a mode of transport, even in most US 'bike-friendly' cities, you'll know how few bike racks are available.
> These scooter companies are operating in a grey area; that's a fact
That's not true at all where I live. Santa Monica often bans them for not following rules, makes deals with other companies, etc.. Every app is forced to implement geofencing for not allowing riding on the beach walkways, for example. On popular roads like Abbot Kinney there are small fenced off corals where the government has replaced a car parking spot with a scooter and bicycle one. So yes, scooter companies do have specific laws they have to follow. It's actually a drawback since the city favors Jump over local companies like Bird, and Jump has a lot less availability.
San Francisco now has limited the use of these scooters so much that they are effectively useless. You can’t find them anywhere, it’s not practical, and you need a driver license to ride one. They effectively killed an alternative to cars...
Just because lots of people derive value from a service does not give them carte blanche to push externalities onto everyone else.
I mean, do you say "No no, you can't complain about all those chemicals being dumped into that river... look at all the value people are deriving from thing the factory is producing!"
Yes, there are externalities, but perhaps the question to ask is, are the externalities of scooters less than those of cars when solving the last mile problem in transportation?
Cars and drivers, in my view, push MUCH more externalities onto everyone else (and let's not limit ourselves to thinking locally, all that CO2 we emit from driving disproportionately affects those in the third world and those yet unborn).
Yes, those are certainly good conversations to have. I agree we need to do a better job of handling the externalities created by cars.
I don't think we should be using the argument of 'well, the externalities for cars are worse' when deciding how to deal with the externalities of scooters, though. By that argument, we only have to ever make sure our externalities are better than the very worst offender in order to be beyond reproach.
Thanks for the reply. I'm not arguing that scooters are beyond reproach. I'm for development of scooter regulation in a way such that we as a society can harness the benefits from it. Being against them just because they don't work in the current regulatory + road system setup in my mind is at risk of forgoing potential massive benefits for us as a society.
> Let's leave the "get off my lawn" comments off HN.
I like the Bird idea, but why should people who find them a nuisance not be able to voice their opinions here? They are literally being thrown on people's lawns. I think those companies have some responsibility to develop spaced waypoints with the city which act as hubs for birds. Private businesses should be allowed to register their space as a hub for a payment by the Bird company.
The different users would be: Hub owners (colleges, cities, private homes, businesses), riders, chargers. Hub owners and chargers would get paid to host hubs and charge birds, respectively. The riders would pay for use between hubs.
Maybe this is a little over the top in complaining, but it bothers me that they get to take up space in the city without paying rent/property taxes/etc.. like every other business that takes up space has to do.
They covered my city with them recently and I'm yet to see anyone use them for actual transportation. I tried Bird out over the Thanksgiving holiday with my parents for fun. The app was a bit complicated but overall were pretty fun. Riding the scooter felt a bit dangerous and I wouldn't be able to bring anything back from a store on a scooter, so I'm not sure when I would use one. Also you can't ride them at night, so they're in no way an uber replacement.
Also my city is meeting tomorrow to discuss banning them. The writing seems to be on the wall for all these scooter startups. If anyone knows a good vehicle for shorting these companies, let me know ;)
Remind me why most of the street length you need to cross is because cars need a lot of space to circulate ANd park? Remind me why we allow deadly vehicule to drive by us while we have literally zero public streets reserved for pedestrians? Remind me why most of the noise pollution in cities come from cars driving and honking?
Is it really that big of a nuisance? You literally walk around them, I don't see the issue.
You should give them a ride one day to "see what all the fuss is about." They really are an incredible idea and allowing them to be "parked" anywhere is one of its main appeals.
People are comparing them to litter. You can also walk around trash, but you probably don't want trash everywhere. They're an eyesore and take up more space than a piece of trash. It makes the city look more 'dirty'. All they would have to do is have actual designated spaces for them to fix that, like how cars work.
So you wouldn’t mind people parking the scooters in front of your house then, since you can just walk around them?
I’ve seen scooters literally blocking entrances and pathways, heck people even take them inside buildings up to the 5th floor; not to mention that at night they emit a high pitched disrupting sound. Some people are plain lazy and highly inconsiderate. We need some rules because some people lack common sense.
> You literally walk around them, I don't see the issue.
It's not an issue for most people but I live up the road from an old folks home and often see the residents heading to the shops in their mobility scooters. If there's a dumped lime scooter blocking the footpath it completely stops them from using the footpath until someone moves it out of the way for them.
At least in the city I am in this seems to becoming less and less of an issue (despite there being more and more scooters) as people get used to them, and learn to properly park them.
Sidewalks aren't always wide enough to support foot traffic and parked scooters. I live in a residential part of a major city, with sidewalks designed a century ago, and a Bird (usually a cluster of them) is long enough to block 2/3 of the walking area.
Like any gig economy job, people have gotten religious at it. There's a guy by my neighborhood who drives slowly with a brand new sprinter van while another loads the scooters into the moving vehicle. There is no shortage of people willing to rack up $100 a day on the side.
Just waiting to be able to ride one in San Francisco without a driver license (which is impossible right now). I can’t wait to be able to commute short distances without having to take cabs everywhere.
Yep, my town temporarily banned them because of safety issues, I liked the dockless bikes better because they at least had some barrier to entry that anyone who wasn't versed in basic riding safety couldn't just pick one up since most bike riders know the basics.
That said they are cool when used properly, but they're being regulated and towns are starting to charge taxes/fees to make sure they're not a nuisance and require them to leave them in low income areas.
Uber for scooters. How many times was that autogenerated by one of the million (ironic) startup creator sites? These companies are not worth billions. They have an app, thousands of scooters and a near-slavery workforce. The charade of companies like this being displayed as marvels of capitalism and technology isn't going to last much longer. Uber is wearing out its welcome worldwide already.
What these scooters have done for SM-Venice is, they’ve gotten people to park farther away and spend less time in cars. Especially the tourists. What does that mean for locals? Well, for one, it means that the nuisance of having to drive slow past people on these things, rather than the nightmare of sitting in standstill traffic if all of those people were in cars instead. Summer traffic in Venice was definitely helped by the scooters, as they replaced a bit of car traffic. These “short haul mobility vehicles” make it much easier for larger groups of people to engage in a large, spread-out, mostly-pedestrian area.
They’re completely dorky and I’ll never be caught dead on one... but, at the same time, there’s serious benefits to us all that these things exist. There’s definitely problems (not sure how I feel about seeing them in piles outside of public schools, such as Venice High, and there’s something very Idiocracy-esque in watching them being used by people who would benefit from walking), but I find it to be an overall net-positive.
I’m interested to see where the next form factors go, and how these things factor into future urban planning decisions. Especially within geofenced environments where you don’t have to pay for them, they just exist. There’s a lot to ponder here.