I live across the street from a nice park. People have taken to leaving the damn things right in front of my apartment complex by the half dozen or more, where they either fall into the bushes on the property and damaging them… or they fall over onto the sidewalk, making it into a hazardous obstacle course… sometimes, they topple onto the parked cars of my neighbors, dinging their doors and fenders.
Then there’s the fact that the scooters often emit an annoying beeping noise when they are being pinged, or tracked, or whatever signal is being sent.
Lastly, I saw a Lime employee finally coming to collect the 8 scooters that have most recently been crushing the bushes, and I complained to him.
His response was to lie to my face and tell me that he “comes to collect the scooters every night,” and the exact same number of scooters just happen to be sitting in the exact same positions when I get up at seven am.
I called and complained, and later, I ended up dragging all 8 across the street to the park myself, one by one.
I wouldn’t mind if the damn things had actual established docks where they could be stored, and if people didn’t just leave them lying willy nilly all over the place… but deciding to use my front stoop as a parking lot without permission is some inconsiderate bullshit.
Unfuck Bird and unfuck Lime; if they’re losing money, then I’m glad.
Wheeled suitcases (or backpacks) FTW, yes. The rest of it should be handled by swiped minitransactions. Swipe my card, get a scooter. Dock scooter, swipe my card again, get a small refund.
eta: And issue tickets for scooters illegally parked. Split the fine between the company and the jerk who abandoned it in the middle of a fountain.
Same thing happens at my apartment complex, and some jackass left one in a parking spot and stayed there and on the sidewalk for a week or two before disappearing. I’ve actually thought about tossing them in a nearby dumpster.
The fundamental problem with scooter sharing, SmarteCartes, and, to a lesser extent, bike sharing, is that they all fall under the Shopping Cart Alignment Rule:
It’s too late to save me. I’ve gone full adult. All i can think when watching this is “56 miles per hour … down a rough looking road … with bare legs?”
I’d actually find chainsaw-sharing a useful service. I do need a chainsaw, but only a few times a year. Maybe a dozen times, if I’m really using the patio fire pit a lot.
Which is to say, much more useful than a scooter-sharing service.
Of course, if you mix the two, you either get chainsaw-users tripping over scattered scooters, with gruesome results, or people who try using both at once, with, you guessed it, gruesome results.
The pitch used to get venture capital firms to invest in the scooter company would be:
Introduce a new transportation service.
Lose money on it for a year or so until while growing your customer base.
Once using scooters to get around becomes really popular, profit!
The actual business model in practice:
Start up a new company that jumps on the latest hot trend. Get lots of VC money because you are white and male and have a slick sales pitch and your company ticks all the hot new trends and buzzwords that are this week’s catnip for VC investors.
Enjoy a munificent salary and spend your days in a really cool tricked out corporate HQ built using other people’s money.
Once you run out of other people’s money and can’t get any more by using your white male slick sales pitch on a new batch of suckers, shut down the company and start a new one, go back to step one.
I think I should link to the canonical explanation of the “investor storytime” business model (the linked page is mostly focused on startups that plan to go all in on surveillance capitalism once they get big enough, but the idea of “investor storytime” applies just as much to startups that don’t depend on serving ads to their users, like scooter startups):
The days when public transit was a profit making enterprise are long, long gone. Here in Toronto, transit was profitable back in the 30’s and 40’s. Today, it gets half its budget from government subsidies, and Toronto’s public transit is woefully underfunded - it should be more like 2/3 from government and 1/3 from fares.
Because most cities have regulations about bicycles. Electric scooters were a new enough thing that there were no regulations regarding them, so the startups could do whatever the fuck they wanted (like litter the city with their scooters instead of paying for racks and requiring people to park them in a rack when they are done renting them).
There are of course lots of dockless bike shares around, in most cities of the world. The same debate is simultaneously happening in all of them. When I was in Paris we used the dockless bikes everywhere we went, but interestingly the bike company said they’d fine us 50 euro if we left one near the Seine. And that was because pissed off locals had been throwing them in the river… But of course lots of other locals were using them daily, hence the debate.
That reminds me when I was on jury duty. They had explicit instructions to not bring a chainsaw to jury duty. The guy reading the instructions elaborated. On a lunch break a juror went shopping and saw a great deal on a chainsaw, bought it, and tried to bring it into the courthouse. So now, he said, we have a rule for chainsaws.
