Yeah, all of these problems just come down to local politics. If your city’s political class values pedestrians, they’ll make the companies liable and it’ll magically turn out that they are actually capable of enforcing where their GPS-tracked devices are parked.
Doing so would also require the city to provide parking spots for them - which is the real reason for the bans. Drivers aren't interested in losing any parking spots to scooters/bicycles/???.
It's shooting themselves in the foot (because people driving less results in less congestion and competition for car parking spots), but as this thread demonstrates, there's no shortage of counter-productive thinking around non-automotive transportation.
Nobody has a right to city-subsidized on-street parking. In most cases there is considerably more off-street parking than needed, not to mention easy opportunities to park within transit/bike/modest walking distance, and removing street parking removes a significant portion of congestion and pollution because you don’t have guys driving around for 20 minutes looking to save a couple bucks, or blocking a traffic lane while they spend 5 minutes trying to inch their Denali into a Camry-sized spot.
Very strong agreement on that. I'm hoping that this is changing, especially with younger generations having less financial margin to soak up the cost of private vehicles. The amount of money we spend trying to indulge that 1940s commuter dream is unsustainable.
No, it's down to companies exploiting lack of regulations to get away with as little as possible ("free market"). Ideally they shouldn't be assholes, but failing that, local authorities should restrict them.
That’s just restating what I said. If the city has political will, the regulations will be enforced. Letting companies ignore the law is a policy choice.
As a thought exercise, any time we see widespread lawlessness ask whether it’d still happen if, say, a random citizen could get $100 by sending a video to the city (ala NYC’s truck idling law) or if the city employees like cops or parking enforcement had similar incentives. There are downsides to that kind of thing and I’m not suggesting it as the ideal general policy but I think it is important to remember that most of the time these are not problems we don’t know how to fix but rather problems people don’t think are their job to fix.
