The scooters aren’t municipal property, and at least according to ScootScoop, they only remove scooters from private property. The scooter companies dispute this, but if it is true, I can’t see any reason why the municipality would be involved. This is a dispute over property between private companies.
There’s a whole body of law around what obligations an individual has when they unintentionally come in to possession of someone else’s property (referred to as a ‘involuntary bailment’). There are literally centuries of court cases on the topic and I believe the California Civil Code also has something to say on the matter. I’m definitely not going to pretend to be an expert on the law that would apply in this case, but it sounds like the property owners are paying to have the scooters transported somewhere where they are stored safely and can be retrieved by the rightful owner (for a fee). The repo company is acting on the property owner’s behalf. That sounds like a pretty defensible position to me.
Edited to add: I can’t find a copy of the Bird or Lime lawsuits online, but other news reports all say that the lawsuits allege ScootScoop removes scooters from public property. Which suggests to me that even Bird and Lime acknowledge that if the scooters were removed from private property they wouldn’t have much of a case.
So I guess it’ll come down to: where are these scooters being plucked from?
I think I’ll start a business that depends on parking large concrete planters on public and private property, and suing anyone who removes them. Let’s see how that goes.
Maybe it’s my pessimism, or general lack of faith in people (present company excepted) but it seems like any enterprise that depends on people behaving decently – like not drop the thing where it dies, or tossing it into a tree for the lulz – is doomed to fail. Just look at how shopping carts are treated in a grocery store lot. Individuals can be great. People as a clump are horrible.
I wonder if the scooters are on a public sidewalk but impeding access to a private property or business would the property/business owner be in the right for having them impounded? Probably not something you can answer but i’m just asking out loud.
For what could be an easy fix, they’ll need to crack down on their own customers. Maintain a $100 deposit. If you park it illegally (or on someone else’s private property) and don’t provide proof to the contrary, you forfeit the deposit. Maybe split the forfeited deposit with the city to fund enforcement, which has become a costly nightmare. But the VC’s won’t like that.
Fine idea, but it would be such a huge barrier to entry that nobody will use their scooters if that was required.
Would you want to give a company $100 of your money and hope that nothing happens to the scooter after you leave it? That’s more risky than putting down a damage deposit on an apartment. You’ll never see that money again.
Especially if it relies on the company being honest, and not thinking, “Hey. That money’s just sitting there.”
I believe they all require a deposit that is well over the cost of a single ride. So yeah it’s much lower than $100 but they could double that and have a deposit you could reclaim when closing the account or after you’ve done x trips without issue.
A deposit is very typical of other rental businesses. When you park the scooter there’s a message from the app to take a picture of where it is parked. Not sure if everyone does that, but there’s the proof. They could add to the app better complaint/issue reporting methods. They could require an introductory “training” ride, maybe that one’s free, where you put on the helmet (which is supposedly required) and photograph yourself in that, go through a section of the app about proper vs. improper parking, send proof of that to some kind of AI and get the thumbs up to continue.
On the Lime app, I couldn’t locate a scooter that was over a fence on private property and the only reporting option was “parked illegally” which I couldn’t determine was true since I couldn’t even see the thing and didn’t know if it was being charged, was sitting with the property owner’s consent etc. So this was impossible to report one of their most common issues without a major hassle. Maybe good for their stats, but lousy for customer and community relations.
You don’t really need that. Just look at Citibike and other municipal bike systems that have been operating around the world for like 20 years now. By having a defined pickup drop off area, and charging the users until its returned, or using a deposit system. You don’t need to track bikes or users, or theorize about a population of randos self optimizing.
Its a problem that’s already been solved. And you solve it with physical infrastructure and fee based incentive for using that infrastructure. But their whole business model seems based around not doing that. As with most cases the “disruption” is side stepping that sort of thing.
They’re less growing than spreading. I have trouble describing this sort of money bleeding, throw it even where people don’t want it, no pathway to income situations as growth. Yeah they’re expanding everywhere but they’re just losing more money as a result.
Yeah interesting. But its the sort of information and studies that transit departments and urban planners have already done. And their existing information about that is what allowed the bile shares to figure out how to make this sort of thing work. The tech/startup sector has a bad habit of entering well understood spaces without any awareness that anyone has ever considered these things. Basically inventing problems that don’t need to be solved or attempting to resolve problems others have already figured out. On the assumption that private business or algorithms or tech will blah di blah di blah.
For example in this case they don’t seem to have accounted for one way trips. And the fact that just because its a city. Does not mean that every area is dense, trafficked enough, or laid out in a way where there’s anything like an optimal place to stick these things. Nor did they seem to have really looked into where and what sort of trips or transit these things were appropriate for. The bike shares were based entirely on exactly that sort of thing, a specific gap or improvement that could be made in specific places for a specific purpose. And that let them identify where the bikes should go, and how to keep them there.
Coming at it from the other direction sounds interesting. But its inherently backwards.
I am guessing that there is some variation in the bike businesses. The ones I have seen (Vancouver and Montreal) have appeared well organized and respectful. Then again that has also been where they have their racks, both have municipal regulations and from what I have read in this thread are more expensive.
… I had some other thought but two dogs needed attention… ohh yes both cities also have adequate public transport funding.
The major complaint I see about the Vancouver one is the fact that the helmets keep disappearing.
Folks in my city saw the opportunities of dockless bike-share pretty quickly.
They didn’t last six months, with most of the bikes stolen, dumped in the river or turned into public art, although I saw one on our local buy ‘n’ sell website for $500; it’s price based on it’s value as a “historical artifact”.
I wish someone would do this with all the cars parked on pavements and the sides of the road where they shouldn’t be here in Dublin. Cost a bit more to tow them but you could charge a commensurate fee.
