No private scooters, only taxis.
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i’m kind of curious what the environmental effects of making and disposing of the scooters are.
doesn’t seem so great if they’re cheap enough to be left in a river. it’s bad enough to be littering the sidewalks, but to be leaking out battery junk in the water? seems even worse.
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The best line from the article…
“We advise those people not to park scooters in the River,” White said.
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I dont know if it was a Bird scooter specifically.
Two-wheeled Uber monsters.
I think a key problem with the scooters is that they tend to get left out willy-nilly without regard for other sidewalk traffic (or sometimes even car traffic). By comparison, the Divvy bikes in Chicago have dedicated racks, and the clock keeps ticking until you put it into a rack.
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In the future, some time-travelling investor will struggle to decide between Hula Hoop and YouTube.
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There are no commercial eScooter rentals in London (aside from in the old Olympic Park) so Emily Hartridge was on a private scooter.
It is against the law to ride an eScooter on public roads or footpaths in London - long may that continue!
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There’s an intensive lobbying process going on right now to legalise them in the UK, so don’t hold your breath.
Our best hope is that Lime and Bird burn all their money on existing idiocies before starting another one. We have the Lime bikes in Milton Keynes and judging by the fact abandoned ones sit around for weeks before being collected I can only assume they are being bled white.
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I don’t think Amazon really lost money. They didn’t turn a profit - which is much different. And they didn’t turn a profit, because they were putting all their money back into expanding the business.
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Peachtree City, Georgia apparently has massive numbers of golf carts used for local transportation, with about 100 miles of multi-use paths they can use. There’s a Tom Scott video about it:
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The thing to remember about license-free modes of transportation, is that frequently, there’s a reason that they don’t have a driver’s license.
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Yeah, they tip over much, much more easier than, say, cows.
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Went to Washington, DC a few days ago and the place was lousy with the share-scooters. Being at and around the National Mall, museums, etc was a pain. Already annoyed by swarms of aimless tourists? Now put a bunch of them on motorized scooters zipping and weaving all over. Wonder how much ER visits have climbed from related collisions.
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Have you tried?
Meanwhile, I live in a remote mountain village a half-hour from a tiny Mother Lode county seat. Yet even in that hotbed of 4500 creaky residents, golf-cart lanes exist along roadways. We’re doomed. (Wait. I’ve never seen a cart there. Is it fantasy?)
Yes. All I got was a bemused look.
Wouldn’t that be “a be-moo-sed look” ??
(I’m from Sonoma Cownty. Clo the Clover cow protects us.)
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They aren’t losing money now, but for years they were losing a ton of money on every sale.
Or did you think that selling books for less than the publisher charged, and then offering next to free shipping (especially before they had warehouses figured out) was a money making operation?
I remember the despair of smaller bookstores wondering how they could compete when investors had given Amazon the license to lose about $5/sale in the early days.
Nowadays Amazon doesn’t give quite such great deals, has mastered warehousing, and has persuaded consumers to pay for the shipping in advance, so now they do make money. But for the first few years ('98-'02), especially before Amazon Web Services, they lost money hand over fist.
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