Especially if the fee is only $30 plus $2 a day. I can’t think of anything that size and weight which could be delivered or stored for that cost. Probably not much more expensive than hiring juicers to pick them up, when you include admin, recruitment, and overhead costs. Compare to $500 which sfpd charges for towing a car. This is a labor of love, not profit.
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Apologies if this has been linked to before:
Guardian article on e scooter backlash
It’s interesting to realise that we don’t have this (yet) in the UK, because it’s illegal to ride escooters on the road or on the pavement.
That may not last long if Boris decides to cave in to Trump to get a trade deal with the US, post Brexit.
Don’t be so sure!
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If that was/is used as a car impound lot, bad idea. As I told an angry friend once: “They’ve been dealing with angry people trying to liberate their cars for years, and they’re still in business. Why do you think that is?”
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So, now it’s the job of the guy whose yard is next to the bus stop to regularly clean up LimeBike’s shit.
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E-scooter Death Zen Site:
https://www.instagram.com/birdgraveyard/?utm_source=ig_embed
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bk6ibnnFiiP/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=embed_video_watch_again
Kill them with fire!
Yeah, I feel better. 
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Then again, if they get a bad batch of batteries, they’ll self-immolate.
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https://www.instagram.com/p/Byn7FESF3jk/
Short on description but, it looks like self-immolation to me.
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Wow. So they’ve impounded 10,000 scooters.
There’s a $30 impound fee. And they charge $2 per day for storage.
Assuming these companies ever pay, that’s $300,000 in impound fees, and $20,000 per day of storage.
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Yep, you make a reasonable case, but both can be parasites. Parasites that feed on other parasites are called Hyperparasites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperparasite
See a parasitic wasp as one example: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/how-one-parasitic-wasp-becomes-victim-another-parasitic-wasp
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That makes sense to me. It seems to me that ScooterScoop is playing a useful function. I’m curious whether they are pitching their investors on a limited life time for their business. Frankly, it would be nice if more companies understood their business model as limited in scope rather than unlimited growth going on indefinitely.
Parasites can play useful functions in nature by balancing things out.
step one
start scooter repo company
step 2
mandate all employees take rental scooters to work and part and abandon in private lot next door
step 3 have employees repeat on way home and leave in neighbours yard.
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If you can come up with a more Snowcrash-esque reality than a bunch of gig economy freelancers called “juicers” trying to steal back electric scooters that have been impounded by a competing gig economy repo men who invented the industry of scooping them up in the first place, I’d sure like to hear it.
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I read it again and it sounded like I was endorsing those companies’ model, but I’m not.
I think they were too lazy to try to set minimum incentives for the users to behave well, and as expected they started abusing it.
I think those companies will soon disappear and leave a bad impression for anyone who try to start a similar (and decent) business.
Although I think is impossible to have something to effectively monitor the users and guarantee that they don’t leave the scooters/bikes anywhere, I honestly think that a few rules and showing some good faith to the community and the municipal administration could make it viable.
Incentives and punishments as it is done with cars and other personal property are a good start and can be tweaked to adjust to the scooters which are easier to handle.
It cannot grow as fast as the unorganized model of Lime and Bird, but it might result in a sustainable and positive result.
Imagine if you could access the logs of the scooters and find out how they got concentrated in some areas, how some of them slowly got dispersed through the city even if the new ones are always left on the same place.
1 Like
The problem with that that i presume Citibike avoided is that it would involve unilateral taking of a portion of the public space (i’m guessing Citibike worked things out with the cities that they operate in). This would just be another cost that these companies can’t really afford.
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There’s no way in hell to make scooter riders act responsibly. Humans have consistently refused to be responsible in everything.
I think their idea was to not give a shit because the people who actually run the company are still getting rich off gullible investors and the moment their individual take drops they’ll drop the scooter business like an armed grenade and move on to some other scam.
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As others upthread have pointed out, there have been multiple implementations including infrastructure (Citibike has racks you must return them to), GPS-determined drop zones and passing fines along to the last user (which would almost certainly eliminate this issue instantly). It seems to me that having people throw their scooters in the river and paying impound fees would cost far more than any of the above.
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Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.
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