a weird side-effect of living in SF is cities in movies start to look fake: where is all the feces and shattered glass and tent cities?
i've always assumed the city govt was just disfunctional, but the speed with which they removed the menace of convenient, ecofriendly scooters makes me wonder if they're actually malevolent, somehow.
Have you considered the possibility that the scooters are genuinely unpopular? It may only be a minor inconvenience for you or I to walk over them when strewn all over the sidewalk, but for someone in a wheelchair, they can be a serious obstacle to getting from one place to another.
People complaining about dockless scooters strewn over sidewalks makes me wonder how we ever got people to stop littering. If the primary reason why people leave scooters in the middle of the sidewalk is out of empathy-lacking convenience, then why don't people throw food wrappers and plastic bottles all over the sidewalk in the same quantities and for the same reasons?
The answer (supposedly) is due to widespread anti-littering campaigns and the new ubiquity of trash cans. Why can't there be similar measures for scooters? Painting lines on sidewalks saying "it's OK to park a scooter here!" (painting lines being an option that costs almost nothing and is completed extremely quickly) combined with signage saying "you must park dockless scooters only in the lines or else $250 fine" (akin to only throwing trash in trash bins or else fine).
Scooters aren't inherently problematic, it's the sclerotic municipalities which refuse to adapt to changing circumstances who are the real culprits.
You’ll find no disagreement from me that we needn’t completely ban scooters, only figure out the right way to regulate them. Not coincidentally, the MTA isn’t completely banning them, just beginning to regulate them.
As for the specific solution you suggested, I think that sounds great, although it isn’t obvious to me that it would “cost nothing”. At the very least, deciding on parking spots for them seems like it would take a lot of a bunch of government employees’ time. It certainly seems reasonable to me to start with a permitting system on the handful of companies, which seems like it would take much less time to implement.
I agree. As a pedestrian I see scooters whizzing past me about 10x more than I see scooters left on the sidewalk. When I have the opportunity, I tell the drivers, very nicely, that they aren't supposed to be on the sidewalk. Very often I get some 4 letter words thrown my way.
Because when your only hammer is regulation everything else is a nail.
Edit: this isn't meant negatively. If you ask a painter what will make your house nicer they'll tell you to paint it. If you ask an organization that creates and enforces legislation to solve a problem they'll try to legislate it out of existence. Problems are solved with the tools at hand.
You can't store your stuff in public areas. This has little to do with scooters, leave your motorcycle on the sidewalk and it's likely to be gone when you get back.
PS: A much better solution IMO is to simply pick them up and sell em for scrap. Problem solved.
In Santa Monica, they're planning to add a pictograph of a scooter to bike lanes so the tourists know to ride there instead of the side walks. (And they're charging the scooter companies additional fees to pay for the costs.)
They've also started a marketing campaign. Recently saw a banner on a city bus with 3 "scooter laws" written on the side (helmet, not on sidewalks, etc). Both Lime and Bird have adopted giving out free helmets to frequent riders. Seems they're much more accepted down here as well when compared to SF.
That's par for the course, for example you don't see Ford chipping in for the 275,000 street parking spots in the Bay Area. SF could easily remove one parking spot per block and make it parking for bikes and scooters. But then all the people used to the city subsidizing their parking will be in an uproar. It's only a subsidy when the other guy gets it.
Cities have done that for thousands of years. It's a symbiotic relationship. The businesses pay taxes which pay for services to make the businesses more viable.
No, I'm suggesting that cities pay for infrastructure to reduce the negative externalities imposed by dockless scooter companies. If such infrastructure incidentally makes it easier for those companies to make a profit, because the lack of the negative externalities is no longer producing a negative effect on the company's reputation, is that really so horrible? Are you willing to, through inaction, harm society just so a private company won't profit?
Sure, ideally, the scooter company should pay some kind of tax or fee to help pay for the infrastructure, but I'm not convinced that it needs to be a special tax or fee, applied only to the scooter companies, beyond typical general corporate income taxes etc. that the scooter company is already paying. Particularly because the infrastructure costs involved are cheap. In my opinion, society is better served by government moving quickly to provide needed services out of a general fund, than it is by delaying action for months or years just so that expenditures are 100% just instead of 99.9999% just. There is a balance...
> Have you considered the possibility that the scooters are genuinely unpopular?
Pretty sure they're not more unpopular than the human feces and used needles people are also stepping over, yet those haven't been addressed in SF yet. By comparison, Vancouver, New York, Chicago, Miami, and many other big cities don't have such problems, and SF is getting worse every year.
The homeless and drug addicts operate outside the law--hence the difference.
Personally, I'd be fine with scooters if they were never used or stored on sidewalks. Which will happen right after bicyclists start obeying traffic laws...
That may all be true (although I certainly was not under the impression that New York or Chicago were particularly clean) and good evidence that with the right policies and programs, those are tractable problems, but I think we can at least agree that nonetheless they are harder to solve than the MTA taking a vote and mailing out some letters about new permitting requirements. So the fact that that has happened for scooters, yet homelessness and substance abuse haven’t been solved, doesn’t strike me as “malevolent”.
This could be an oversimplification, but my perspective having lived in both NYC and Chicago:
New York is dirty. It's very dense for the US and the trash collection is on the sidewalk in front of businesses, meaning you are walking around trash on a daily basis.
Chicago is one of the cleanest cities in the US, largely because of the alley system built after the Great Chicago Fire.
You are fully correct. The reason SF don't address it, IMO, is that it's a no win situation for them. If they clean up the homeless they'll be forced to make tough choices and enforce public order against people their stated ethos which tells them are oppressed and deserving of unlimited compassion. If they do the right thing and clean the place up there will be a backlash from activists. If they do nothing at all then they don't have to make tough choices, don't have to face backlash, and the frog continues to slowly boil which will be the next administrations problem.
I’m not doubting that it has happened, but this seems to be way overplayed. I’ve never actually seen it happen, whereas it’s pretty common to see homeless with tents and suitcases obstructing a sidewalk.
I think it’s definitly more of a case of NIMBYism and tech hate than anything else.
You're definitely right. For someone relying on a wheelchair, scooters everywhere are a significant impediment.
With that said, I have heard very few people voice such completely reasonable concerns. Most of the complaints about scooters I've encountered from actual people seem to hinge on them looking funny, especially when in use. And even those are rare. Most people don't seem to care, suggesting that scooters are not genuinely unpopular.
Your concerns are real, and very important. Yet, they don't seem to bear much on scooters in the public consciousness. Have you considered that there may be other factors at work in the minds of most?
You may be right about all that, but that’s no reason to think the MTA is going off silly reasons or being “malevolent” for regulating (not even banning!) the scooters, rather than acting out of genuine concern.
I don't think they're malevolent. I do think they're acting at the behest of Supes looking for a quick win over something trivial instead of working on SF's very real, very visible problems of people suffering immensely.
Just like SF has microclimates for weather it also has them for compartmentalizing the city's various problems. Fidi and east cut (or whatever realtors are calling it now) don't have feces, needle, and tent problems. It does have scooter litter problems. The city population swells 2x every work day and the majority of those workers interact with scooters parked haphazardly.
If it's one thing entitled early adopters and east bay commuters have in common, it's that they DGAF about the sense of community in SF. So they park these things in the most selfish ways possible. I swear some of them have to be doing it on purpose. I've seen them blocking turn styles at embarcadero station before.
I had a friend visiting from out of state and usually the first criticism of SF I hear is something about homelessness as we pass through the 'loin. But this time we were by embarcadero and it was "did a scooter gang of children all get raptured at once?"
I’m confused by your dismissive tone, the answers to this seem like common sense.
No, feces and shattered glass are not a major impediment; wheelchair tires can usually go over them, and additionally, area taken up by individual instances of feces on the street is measured in square inches, so wheelchairs can typically be navigated such that the wheels avoid touching them.
Yes, tent cities are also an impediment, which is why the city actively works to get rid of them, even implementing short-term solutions that do no good and possibly harm in the long run like having the police and community workers forcibly clear them. Not to mention the literal hundreds of millions of dollars a year the city spends on homeless programs, which is many, many orders of magnitude more than they’ve spent on any kind of regulation of scooters.
Are you comparing tent cities where homeless people live with faeces and broken glass? I certainly think the city could do a better job providing public toilets and cleaning the streets but what are you suggesting they do with the poor people's temporary accommodation? Sweep them up and throw them away? People live there as a last resort.
Have you considered people don't like scooters in the city because it's another thing that's happening in SF where rich private companies decided to introduce changes without asking the people who lived there.
It's likely not entirely about the scooters themselves but what they represent and how the process has been implented. The city streets are funded by public money and the companies didn't treat residents with adequate respect or forethought before dumping scooters all over the city.
To me it is a physical manisfestation of startup culture and that's why many people hate them. Why consider the problems in advance, let's just do it and see what happens.
you may be right. would be curious to see polling numbers.
my reaction is perhaps a little overheated, but it's frustrating to see a city that is completely inept at solving its many real problems so quickly and effecively squash something that is at worst a minor inconvenience and at best actually a signifcant boon.
> a weird side-effect of living on the west coast is cities in movies start to look fake: where is all the feces and shattered glass and tent cities?
FTFY, the third-world style shantytowns and tent cities, along with the accompanying feces and detritus, are prolific in every major west coast city including SF, LA, Seattle, Portland, and many of the smaller hubs too. There is a full blown homeless crisis that is completely ignored by nearly everyone.
For someone living in a town that is still scooter-free at the moment (Chicago) can someone explain to me:
1. Wouldn't it be a great business for thieves to specialize in stealing these and finding out a way to fence them in large quantities?
2. How can it be economical to pay people to lug these to their homes and charge them on a regular basis?
3. With tires that small, and with many riders riding them that are not experienced with skateboarding and other small-tired vehicles (which can get viciously trapped in crevasses/potholes while driving full speed) isn't the risk of injury pretty high, far higher than a bicycle?
4. What is the reliability like on these things? It seems like it would be a device with pretty frequent electrical problems and loose connections.
I'm mostly a fan of the idea BTW, I just am unclear of the economics...
I'm not sure about the scooters in question, but there's a similar dockless model for bicycles in many cities in China (ofo, Mobike, etc.) and as far as I can tell the bikes there are made of components that are pretty unique to those brands of bike. Because of their unique shapes and non-standard fittings, they'd basically be useless on any other bike frame, which means that the aftermarket value is extremely low. Additionally, the locking mechanisms are pretty robust and are welded to the frame, so removing the locking mechanism and just using the bike for free just isn't worth it given how cheap riding it is.
There might be some cultural differences that might make things different for scooters in America, but if the service is offered very cheaply, and the scooters are unique enough in build to be useless for retrofitting other scooters, then I don't see much of a market opportunity for fencing. Especially if the scooters have accurate GPS welded to their frames.
I think that seriously underestimates how industrious some of people who collect scrap metal are.
If scooters get popular then people will steal them. It only takes one person to figure out some way to monetize your scooters before all your scooters are disappearing and need to patch the exploit.
I'm betting that for awhile most scooters will be vulnerable to the typical "apply cordless drill in the right place" exploit.
The battery packs will probably be the most useful thing to scrapper. There will probably be a cottage industry of people repackaging them in more useful form factors and then selling the end result on eBay. The motors aren't going to be worth much but if you're already picking one apart you may as well pull the motor and toss it in the electric motors pile.
Points 1 and 2 are answered in this article [1] from a couple weeks ago. To summarize:
1. Scooters are indeed stolen. The batteries can be sold for around $50. "The Bird will chirp at you if you try to steal it, but they chirp so often that no one pays attention
2. From the charger's POV, they do it on the side: "in the end it pays for a fancy dinner" and "It’s like a game and I would do it even if the prices were halved, which they probably will be". From the company's point of view, would it really be a surprise if they were losing money?
I think our weather made the scooters arrive here earlier than other places. Chicago just came out of winter 6 weeks ago while its been shorts weather in Atlanta since March.
I'll be surprised if the loop wasn't drowning in scoots by end of summer.
I wondered about them, since it's illegal in Switzerland to ride anything motorized on a pavement (also goes for hover boards, Segway's and such).
While the cops will hardly send in a SWAT team to nab offenders there's a very real risk, in that insurers will not pay if you're involved in an accident.
I like today's article. I've been subscribed for a couple of months now (volun-told at work) and a lot of the latest articles had the author trying to sell the "Aggregation Theory" a bit too much. I found myself skipping large parts of the articles because they were just re-iterating the theory, applied to current events.
It's a shame cause I really like the analysis provided otherwise. Specially when numbers are brought in like today with the parking spaces.
as a onetime subscriber i'd say ben has nothing to sell or prove anymore with regards to his theory. he just truly honestly sees the world through Aggregation a lot of the time. he's clearly right. but i agree its more interesting when he starts talking about new ideas and biz models.
> as a onetime subscriber i'd say ben has nothing to sell or prove anymore with regards to his theory. he just truly honestly sees the world through Aggregation a lot of the time
I agree! I probably shouldn't have used the word "sell". Maybe "apply" works better
I used one the other night on the pedestrian bridge in Nashville, I had walked to the other side and realized I had forgot my wallet in my car, what would have been a 10min seriously boring walk turned into an awesome scooter-sesh that gave me the joy of a 10 year old. I dont see the scooters being littered everywhere as a problem though, more annoying is people walking while texting, actual trash-litter etc. Big gov will always want to regulate things they dont understand.
I rode bird scooters many times and I'm in favor of electric scooters succeeding. Yesterday, saw a couple of bird scooters that were not properly placed, just lying on the ground not using the kickstand. Just to do my small part, I fixed them up by using the kickstand and making sure they are least obstacle to foot traffic and wheelchairs. It only took less than 60 seconds. For those in favor, we can all chip in.
the fact that someone just went "hey what if we had Uber but with scooters" and it worked is the very definition of low hanging fruit. the good ideas are NOT all taken.
The Xiaomi M365 scooters everyone is using were released Dec 15th, 2016. Bird started working on rigging them for rentals less than 6 months later and launched in August 2017.
If you have been following the developments in personal electric transportation, the timing is hardly random. The M365 was one of the first scooters that had the range and speed to be viable for rentals. The good idea was not low hanging, it was just taken by good founders before you realized it was good.
Um. I'll take the founders who designed and engineered the actual technology (i.e. the scooter, not the app). They will be the winners in the long run. Show me a great lithium/PV/manufacturing/fluids/materials team and I'll invest!
Brushless DC motor and lithium battery advancements are the primary tech enabling these devices, and both are commoditized. The winners in this market will be the people who can best externalize the cost of repositioning, charging, and storing these scooters.
There are proprietary advances in lithium and other chemistries, as well as in the charging systems.
Uber can best reposition and charge scooters ofc, not bird or lime.
But very unclear that it will be worthwhile to do so. There is also the price that the consumer will bear for a scooter. When it's cheaper to own one's own after 30 days, and storage is trivial (not true with cars, true with scooters), not clear there is a rental business to be had.
Comparison: the UberX experience these days is terrible. Smelly cars, surly people. But popular still, bc because need it and it's the best option. Whaddya going to do? Drive yourself? That's impractical for UberX use cases.
When the Bird experience is no longer novel and the scooters cause broken arms and are smeared with urine, will people still use them? Or pop $300 for their own clean ones? Or walk? Both possible for all use cases.
Because the scooters are commodities and extremely cheap, it's hard to see the economics of these companies as strong, contrary to Ben's assertion.
Much of the demand comes from the novelty factor. (Cars are boring, especially the Prius, yet Uber was a winner from day one!)
When the novelty factor wears off, consumers will "get real" about their last-mile transpo options, and either there will be so many scooter services that the price is $0.25 + $0.50/min (Bird economics broken) OR you will buy your own scooter to have forever for $300 (Bird economics broken).
Having your own scooter is a crappy option. Then I have to store it (both at home and at my destination), maintain it, and charge it. Right now the scooter businesses handling all of that is the only reason I would ever take a scooter somewhere.
If there are multiple services, likely one of them can hang on long enough to take over the market as the others fail. If not, someone else can start a new one when all others fail and have gotten tired of the idea.
The police are enforcing the helmet law in San Diego (300 dollar ticket). I think the convenience factor is diminished when you are forced to lug around a helmet.
It is diminished but the amount it is diminished by is relevant. For someone having to deal with the last mile problem by taking their bike to work or walking, a helmet does not seem like a lot to lug around.
I was hoping to get a more in-depth analysis of the 2-sided network effects of the scooter space. I'm having a hard time understanding the defensibility of these companies against each other. Habit doesn't seem to be enough to win the market. Exclusive contracts or leveraging regulations could be options but they don't feel strong enough either.
If it's not a winner takes all market and multiple players can coexist at the same time, then I don't understand the investment decision from the VC firms to value them so high so early. It feels like Uber/Lyft can easily get into this market and provide a better experience overall.
Or to flesh that out a bit with more context from the article, I think it's likely you're a "typical tech first-adopter" since you're commenting on Hacker News:
>> your typical tech first-adopter may have no problem checking multiple apps to catch a quick ride, but I suspect most riders would prefer to use the same app they already have on their phone.
Then again I'm more in the latter case. I only use Lyft because a) it's not Uber and b) I already installed it and set it up on my phone.
It goes both ways, I've only ever installed and used one service. Uber got me first and I see no reason to even deal with the inconvenience of downloading the Lyft app; although I have heard great things about Lyft and maybe it's cheaper/faster at times. It requires a small amount of effort on my part that I don't care to make
That particular scooter is only $500 + tax from Amazon (or was just weeks ago, it's sold out at the moment,
but you have many other options). If you like it, just buy it and it will pay off within months. It is not like a car where the upfront costs are substantial. I heard that it is even $210 at wholesale prices if you can ship it from China and there is not even an import tax.
Of course the author was just visiting SF and only needed it temporarily - in that case I understand the need for a rental option, but you should be able to rent it for a whole week for little cost.
I am an owner of an electric scooter myself, but I do not enjoy the shared scooters lying around everywhere on the streets like trash. It is understandable to me why the numbers would be limited by the city.
If you leave a car “laying around” in a spot not designated for parking a car then it’s likely to be towed, or at least ticketed. This works because the car usually has a registered owner who wants it back.
the point is it's silly to complain about the "eyesore" of scooters when you've already accepted insanely higher impositions from cars. cars actually kill people! they have hugely detrimental effects on air quality! they take up tons of space, way more than scooters ever could. the factr that the space has been "officially deemed ok" is irrelevent.
This is all true, but one problem that is not widespread is cars strewn all over the sidewalk. The aesthetic problem that you mention is indeed minor; the accessibility problem for people in wheelchairs is not.
Cars have all the problems you’ve mentioned and more and I’m also dissatisfied with how much public space we’ve set aside for them, but they also mostly stay off sidewalks and wait at street crossings, so at least we’ve also set aside space for pedestrians to get from one place to another that is usable even for those in wheelchairs.
but the scooters function in large part as as a replacement for cars. so it's replacing something with lots of problems with something with fewer problems. it's a net win.
i do agree having regs to dissuade people from blocking & riding on the sidewalk with scooters seems very reasonable.
once you have that i think scooters are basically problem free (except for maybe aesthetic concerns).
even w/o that, i still don't see how anyone reasonable could think scooters were anywhere near the top of the list of hazards of sf streets.
(perhaps they are a major inconvenience for wheelchair users?; i'd be interested in any first-hand accounts.)
An issue is where/how to park your own scooter. It's a good deal larger (and dirtier) than many offices will allow to be brought in an leaned against your desk. And there is no place to lock your $700 scooter on the street.
I don't ride the scooters but I ride the gobikes. The main advantage is that I don't have to bring it into the office, and I don't have to worry about bringing it back home when i take it out.
If I have to do that with a bike or scooter even once! in those months you mention it takes to pay itself off, then it's not worth it.
I don't want to have to carry my scooter into a crowded Illy just to meet someone for coffee.
Where are you riding your scooter? Because I ride to coffeeshops, or the ferry building to catch a boat, or street festivals around town, not just the office. You want to carry a scooter through the Haight street fair?
I’ve done quite a bit of research looking for such a scooter and have not found one. Would you mind linking me to such an e-scooter that you’d recommend (with high build quality and reliability - has to be worth buying of course) that can easily slip into a backpack? I truly have not found one that is so. I’ve been looking at the new Boosted Mini X - which could at least potentially strap to the back of a backpack.
Was about to come in here and ask what will prevent people from just testing out the scooters then buying their own for $300 if they like the experience.
I live in a smallish apartment in NYC and don't have room for a bike so city bike makes sense but I could see myself buying one of these and keeping it in the closet.
For Americans, there have been effectively 2 meanings of scooter for a long time. There have been kick scooters back to the 80s at least, and in the late 90s to 2000s there was an explosion of razor scooters. The “small motorcycle” is also called a scooter, but at least in my own circles I hear people call those by the name “Vespa” (a common name brand for motor scooters) a lot more often.
Maybe just an American thing, but we kind use the term for both but usually call the larger ones "mopeds". If there was a change, I don't think it was too recent either as I had electric (similar to the Bird scooters, but much larger) and manual "scooters" in the late-90's/early-00's.
In what alternative reality is San Francisco "car-friendly"? I get that the public transit isn't great, but that doesn't make a city where reserved spots run upwards of $400 a month and street parking involves constantly moving your car out of seemingly permanent temporary construction zones and dodging getting towed (and having your car damaged, etc) "car-friendly"
You can imagine a user doing both. Daily commutes get handled by the scooter you own. Evening / Weekend events get handled by the rentals when you don't want to lug it around all day. There's definitely space for both. (Think car owners that commute but use Uber/Lyft to go out drinking)
But then you have to carry a scooter around with you and remember to charge it. It seems way more useful to just have one that is charged always available. Especially at the price point.
Isn't the point of the scooter to carry you around ;)
Remembering to charge isn't a big deal. I do it for my phone and my car. I would buy a second charger and keep it at work to keep down on the hassle. A lot of offices have bike storage, why not scooters?
They retail for around $500. But that’s not the point. You can get them from and store them anywhere. You pay for the convenience of not lugging one around. You have the flexibility of walking between destinations, not always having to use the scooter.
i've always assumed the city govt was just disfunctional, but the speed with which they removed the menace of convenient, ecofriendly scooters makes me wonder if they're actually malevolent, somehow.