I guess the question is: what problem is this permitting process solving? Is it there to insure the company has some kind of insurance and a process for cleaning up messes they make, or is it there to protect the local version of the services from competition?
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I just can’t fathom how this can be a viable business. You’ve got to buy these things and I guess maybe eventually if you rent enough hours on them, and if the novelty doesn’t totally wear off, and if the city doesn’t ban you, you might get your investment back and then some. But that’s the best case and there is no way IMO that a handful of companies trying to all do this in the same location are all going to make profits. And even if said profits do appear, I don’t see how you get the sky-high valuations most startups aspire to.
Personally, too, I am a few decades above the age where this is going to be appeal to me. I have a car, and if I’m going somewhere in the neighborhood, I have legs.
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i think their major target is tourist that need to zip here and there seeing the sights that are far enough apart to make walking a hassle but near enough to make a taxi or car rental overkill. Of course the problem with a lot tourists riding motorized vehicle for the first time in a city they are unfamiliar with leads to a lot of chaos for everyone. That’s before factoring in some people drink more than normal while being tourists.
I’ve wondered the same as I walk past all the bikes in downtown Seattle. How many $1 rides does it take to break even? How many to replace all the broken bikes I see laying around?
There are people here that gather up the bikes daily at the lower elevations and drive them in a truck back up to the higher locations. As I am walking to work I like to imagine someone figures a way for the bikes to pick themselves up and then self drive themselves back to the top. Yes, driverless bikes would probably be a bigger mess than tourists but I just like the visual of a fleet of ghost bikes early in the morning silently migrating. [Que B-roll and glitchy music]
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Santa Monica, CA is overrun with them. People zipping in and out of traffic, without helmets or bothering to look. Also folks on sidewalks. Scooters piled up on corners.
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It’s a perfect storm of bad variables which is unfortunate as on paper they seem to be a better option than all of these people renting and polluting with cars. But every city with them seems to have the same problems. And permits make money for the city but won’t solve the problem of stupid tourist being stupid.
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If people could only not be assholes, really is the problem.
If we rode it like a bike and followed bike traffic rules, and bike parking rules, they’d be fine.
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You just have to maintain market share until someone else (Uber? Google?) buys you out for megabucks and changes the model to something workable.
Here in Honolulu they’ve been classified as mopeds (2 wheels + motor), and have to follow moped rules.
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And in bike lanes
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In Seattle I have only seen the bike rentals not these scooters. The bikes are often tipped over blocking the sidewalk. But as far as people riding them I mostly see people here riding in the street follow traffic rules as much as an other bike rider here.
But in cities with the scooters I hear a lot more about reckless driving on crowded sidewalks and in busy traffic and going the wrong way on one way streets. I wonder what it is about that form factor that seems to bring out worse behavior than the bike rentals? Or maybe both are equally bad and I am just misinformed?
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They just last week dropped a couple hundred Bird scooters in our mid-size city, and people here are going ape shit
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Bummer. I hope people can figure out the dockless bike and scooter share systems, they’re a joy to use. Sure there’s a bit of an inconvenience when they’re occasionally left where they shouldn’t be, but the same can be said for pretty much everything in the public space, starting with cars. I loved Bird and Lime, and continue to love Jump. I pay for Ford Bikes (the dock bike service here in San Francisco) but it absolutely sucks ass in comparison since there has to be a dock where you’re going. And Ford’s electric bike share has proven to be pretty much a farce since they’re always out of juice.
But we have pretty strictly defined rules for where people are allowed to leave their cars and hefty penalties for people who violate those rules.
A business model based on “eh, just leave the car wherever” wouldn’t survive long.
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Good point, but something tells me when cars were first being driven on San Francisco’s streets, before parking regulations existed, the horse and buggy set was trying to ban cars for these same reasons. So maybe there’s a solution short of removing the service entirely. For example if the city fined the company when a scooter was parked in a way that met certain criteria, the company would induce their customers to park them better and would probably hire people to move badly parked scooters.
If there’s an area where scooters or bikes are a frequent problem, the company can easily forbid their customers from parking there. In Paris for example the main dockless bike share company (Mobike) charges users €50 for leaving their bikes within 2 blocks of the Seine. Granted it’s possible that regulation exists to keep people from throwing the bikes in the Seine!
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I recommend Charles De Lint’s story Freewheeling (in Dreams Underfoot, one of his collections of short stories).
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Assuming bike lanes exist, which in many places they do not. I live in a college towns, and bike lanes are way less common than they should be, and where they do exist, they’re often weird. There’s one right outside where I live that extends for roughly a block and a half. It doesn’t really lead anywhere. In one direction it cuts out right when you get to a high traffic road where you’d actually want a bike lane. In the other direction it just kinda peters out for no apparent reason.
There are bike lanes on more high traffic roads. Unfortunately, right turn lanes tend to go through the bike lane, which I find terrifying as a driver, and absolutely no way am I trying it as a cyclist.
It’s a shame because I understand why people don’t feel safe using the few bike lanes that exist, but, on the other hand, I’m really fucking tired of getting run off the sidewalk by people on bikes.
DingDingDing!! We have a winner!! Wouldn’t hurt to check up on the graft campaign contributions, either.
Good point. The history of bike share permits in San Francisco is super shady:
With the bicycles… for the most part people are familiar with rules and customs that have developed; so we’re faced with just adjusting to where and how to leave them; in a way that’s not a nuisance. It will take a bit of time and it will be shame if they ban this form of transit. We’ve used the dockless bikes in Berlin and the experience was just perfect. Personally, it cut down my Uber/Taxi rides by 2/3 while there. (I still used the U-bahn for long distances)
Like most of Europe, Berlin bicycle owners mostly lock just the wheels and to a fixed object; so they already have the custom of parking directly in front of their destination, but in a way that doesn’t interfere with pedestrians. So while these dockless bikes were everywhere, they weren’t ever a bother. We’ll get there too, if we give it a bit of time for people to suss proper behavior.
The scooters are a whole other story. We have little experience with them as a real mode and its going to be a long time before people get a handle on using them responsibly.
I hope the scooter issues, dont smother the dockless bike program.
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Correct. If the city doesn’t have a process in place, it can’t expect businesses to comply with imaginary demands.
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“Don’t leave private property littering public streets and sidewalks” was already established policy long before Bird and Lime showed up.
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