A guide to the valuable electronics inside Bird's illegal-in-San Francisco scooters

Not necessarily. It’s probably embedded Linux, which is easily flashable once you get the hang of good ol BuildRoot. And there’s a dev kit for the board used by these scooters:

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Fair enough, the scale of both phenomenon are really different but there is some common points I think. The lack of management and dispatching, the aggressive strategy of the start-up, the poor quality, etc.
I have the chance to live in a city with really good (and improving) public transportation, Strasbourg. The tram network was build in the 90’s and its success is credited to led to other large French cities to build their own.
But a good public transport politic have to be diverse and complemented with buses and (you guessed it) bikes ! Those bikes have docks but you can rent them for a year (and park them where you want if so) and are sturdy as fuck.
An other important but overlooked point is the bicycle lanes, and it’s really the first and most important thing to do before promoting bicycling to the public because you can have the best bike-share systems nobody will care if the infrastructure is not there.

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I don’t know the order of events in SF, but in my town the rental bikes only came after years of negotiation with the city and careful considertion of how things like traffic would work. Lime scooters appeared with no warning overnight, no consultation with the city (though they lied and claimed they’d done so), and no consideration of how thousands of tourists would know whether to ride on the street, on the sidewalk, or wherever. The city impounded the scooters, the company cried foul, the city then classified the scooters as “mopeds” (two-heeled motorized vehicles) which cannot be legally parked on the sidewalk, and the company slinked out of town.

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Bird scooter components

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That’s why I like to drag my scooters out to international waters so I can claim salvage rights. /s

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