
SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters? - in3d
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/SF-wants-startups-to-behave-so-why-did-it-reject-14903323.php
======
argonaut
Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are
saying.

But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight
on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.

That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules
should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You
won't be rewarded for it. Most tech entrepreneurs already know this: Airbnb
and Uber proved this point long ago.

~~~
mstade
> But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight
> on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior.

This has been my experience with pretty much _any_ bureaucracy, regardless of
locale. E.g. when I incorporated my company, I had to send in the same
application four times, each time paying an additional fee. Reason was I had
minor, pointless really, mistakes in the application, a box I didn't realize
had to be ticked, name in the date field and date in the name field, that sort
of thing. The data entry people at the government agency could have easily
resolved any mistakes with a phone call, but instead I get a letter in the
mail a couple of weeks later, saying there's an error but not what the error
is. So I have to call and ask, and of course they had no record of what the
error was so we had to go over the application on the phone and find them.
You'd think they'd tell me about the other errors then, but no, I had to do
this _four_ times. It took almost two months to get a simple form approved.

I wish that was my only story of wasting time on bureaucracy, but there are
plenty more where that came from.

~~~
reaperducer
_This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of
locale._

It doesn't have to be this way.

I incorporated my first company in Chicago, and was stunned with how helpful
the bureaucrats were.

Yes, it was a little complex, especially in the years before "startups" were a
thing, and you could do stuff online. But each department I had to work with
had people who would sit me down at their desk and explain what they did, why
I should care, and how to fill out the forms properly.

Maybe the difference is that back then, you were _expected_ to form a company
in person, and not do everything online all by yourself and be an expert from
day one.

A massive thanks to the Illinois Department of Revenue people in the basement
of the Thompson Center for all their openness and hand-holding.

(In spite of all this, I still moved the company to another state a few years
later because of Chicago + Illinois taxes and corruption.)

~~~
yebyen
Echo this sentiment from another Midwesterner, ex-pat former New York State
resident. I moved to Indiana and have not had the experience of incorporating
a business entity, but the experience I had at the Indiana Bureau of Motor
Vehicles has been one to make me question whether bureaucracies are really
necessarily horrible all of the time.

Starting with the experience of moving to the state, to contrast (Upstate)
Western New York vs Indiana:

My New York insurance provider determined that I was no longer residing in the
state, so mailed me a letter of notice that my vehicle insurance was being
cancelled. In truth this was the best thing that could have happened, because
Indiana insurance is so much cheaper, and I got a deal through my new
employer. I was dragging my feet on this because I did not know better about
it, and knew it would be painful. So I went to get new insurance, and learned
I would need to re-register my car...

Visiting the Indiana BMV was like no other auto vehicle registration
experience. They were able to take care of me same day, and with no long wait
– I waited up to at most 15 minutes to the desk. I was not shuffled from one
desk to another, we completed the process in a single desk visit. On the other
hand...

New York requires you to surrender your plates when you leave the state. If
you fail to surrender in a timely fashion, you will be fined punitively.
Indiana has no such requirement, they trust you to destroy the plates when you
drop a registration for a vehicle. In fact, when I brought plates for my
second vehicle to the BMV to surrender them, as the lease was being grounded,
not only did they let me know that they actually don't do that at all, I don't
need to do that, but also that I was entitled to a credit for the portion of
my registration that I had not used (which is fairly substantial, as it is
based on the worth of the vehicle and paid annually, like a use tax.)

The desk attendant was able to help me fill that form out before I left, and
about 45 days later, two checks came in the mail. Being from New York, I found
this kind of experience at a bureaucracy to be quite pleasant and seemingly
impossible, (and from what I hear asking people who are born and raised here,
it has only just become this way recently because of many reforms that have
been applied in the past 20 years.)

~~~
lenkite
Isn't this simply a population problem ? One state is ~5x more populated than
the other.

~~~
yebyen
If it was simply a population problem, then why do long-time residents tell me
that it wasn't always this way?

Specific reforms intentionally undertaken to solve known problems with the
system, made the system work better.

As a life-long New York resident until about 4 years ago, I can also tell you
that I probably wouldn't disagree if you told me you thought this was "not
possible in New York."

(And intuitively I'd say, it's not because of population numbers, but I can't
put my finger on exactly what it is. There is a different mindset, whatever
causes it I can't say, but I noticed immediately when I moved here, I still
tell folks this place really just isn't like New York.)

To elaborate a bit more, I felt like part of the New York mindset was
basically psychologically planning oneself around not getting robbed. There
were plenty of ways to get robbed that people just don't worry about around
here (and some of this can surely be attributed to population issues.) I'm not
just talking about general common-sense things like making sure that valuables
are not left visible in your unlocked, parked car. I mean up to and everything
including neighborhoods which don't have enough driveway space for everyone in
large duplex houses to park their cars, where the streets are marked for
opposite-side alternate day parking.

So I don't have a private place to park my car at my rented house, and I have
to park on the street, but I can't park my car on the street and leave it for
48 hours time without getting a ticket. This makes sense in Upstate New York
as a condition required for Winter road maintenance, so that plows can get in
and clear the snow off of the road. Only it's not just a condition required at
Winter time, and when you point this out, people just accept it and say
something like "yeah, well, they gotta make their money somehow..."

------
eddyionescu
To add more context, Skip wouldn't have been chosen even if its application
were formatted perfectly, you can see the scores here:
[https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-
docume...](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-
documents/2019/10/final_revised_summary_table.pdf)

And the completed rubrics of each of the applications here:
[https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-
docume...](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-
documents/2019/10/final_revised_permit_application_evaluation_-
_all_applications.pdf)

With other related documents here:
[https://www.sfmta.com/reports/2019-scooter-application-
evalu...](https://www.sfmta.com/reports/2019-scooter-application-evaluation)

While the rubric grading might have seemed overly strict and bureaucratic,
keep in mind that at the end of the day it's intended to stand up in court
because the SFMTA could get sued given how high the stakes are and would have
to demonstrate that it was a fair and transparent process.

As well, the priorities are very different now compared to 2018. The initial
pilot accepted open-ended proposals and had the goal of determining whether
scooters were in the public interest at all - Scoot and Skip won because their
applications addressed concerns that none of the other applicants did
([https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share-
permit-...](https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share-permit-and-
pilot-program)).

This process was essentially an RFP where the SFMTA was clear on what they
wanted, meaning that the firms with more operating experience, better
equipment, and a stronger financial position had an advantage.

~~~
Drunk_Engineer
Looking at the application, Skip appears to have been screwed over on other
categories too. They got a low score on "sustainability" even though they
rebuild/repair broken scooters instead of throwing in the trash (like many of
the other applicants). And they have actual employees instead of contractors,
yet they scored low on the employment metric.

The broader issue is why even have an artificial limit for scooters? Imagine
if SFMTA limited roads to just 2 car manufacturers and a set number of
vehicles...

~~~
Jommi
You need to limit scooter players because otherwise it because a game of
funding and attrition, multiple companies dumping city full fo scooters in a
competition for availability. All other qualities will be overlooked.

~~~
catalogia
Just legalize the scrapping of scooters that have been in one place on public
property for more than 24 hours. Let the general public hunt these things down
tear them apart and sell them as scrap and spare parts.

The problem would sort itself out real damn quick.

------
kd5bjo
The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application
had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of
mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world,
which is exactly what happened, and there’s an ongoing appeal right now.

The founder’s take-away from this should have been “double-check the details,
especially when dealing with a bureaucracy” instead of “optimize for the short
term”. This was an unfortunate but entirely preventable outcome.

~~~
IshKebab
Classic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this
bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make
_trivially_ fixable mistakes.

~~~
mrighele
Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it
exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single
quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is
quite clear what you meant.

In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to
unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you
open yourself to lawsuits, corruotion charges and lenghty trials

~~~
ulucs
I don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more
than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX
details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless
we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.

~~~
Retric
Local governments are independent in the US and don’t operate at huge scales.
Further, their independently implementing laws written by a separate group so
correctness is placed well above UX.

Sadly, politics only cares for people actively involved. If you want different
behavior, communicate with an elected official, try to elect different people,
or run for office yourself.

------
souterrain
Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved.

If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential
client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements?

Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal
submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail
to deliver on other requirements.

I have worked for a company where I had spent 80 hours building a demo for a
potential client. We did not make it to the demo phase due to a failure of our
proposal writing team to address some technicality in the written proposal. I
don't hold this against the client we lost; this falls on those whose jobs are
solely writing and submitting technical proposals.

~~~
xvector
I think this is ridiculous. Formality to the absurdist extreme. Any mildly
competent human being would overlook the letters “A3” not being above a
certain safety paragraph.

If a robot were processing these applications then the error might be
forgivable. But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the
reasoning skills of a human.

I think the sort of person that would reject Skip’s application is someone
that society would be better off without them in their current position.
Hopefully one day they realize how their incompetence is hurting both people
and progress, and either work towards using those reasoning skills or find a
position better suited towards them.

~~~
marcinzm
>But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning
skills of a human.

Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject
to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down
voted comments jumped right to bribery for example.

Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually
wants it to be.

~~~
xvector
I really think that no one would judge a reviewer for adding a heading where
it needed to be. This is trivial, there isn’t really a political connotation
here.

If a reviewer cannot do something trivial like this, then we don’t need them
anyways. If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated,
just run the application through a software that checks for word count and
header presence and call it a day, and use those tax dollars towards a cause
that would actually benefit society.

~~~
kd5bjo
I would not be surprised if they had a safety specialist assigned to evaluate
paragraph A3 of each proposal, in isolation from everything else. For
fairness, that specialist may not have even been given access to the other
parts of the applications.

In this case, the employee tasked with separating out the application pieces
and sending them to the relevant specialists is likely not highly-trained, and
there may be no-one in the organization competent to do this: the people that
process the application as a whole aren’t qualified, and the people that are
qualified can’t look at the whole application for fear of introducing bias.

> If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated...

I saw no indication that the contents of properly-formatted applications were
being ignored. I believe it’s more likely that they set up a complicated
review process that relied on applications being formatted as requested, so
Skip’s application couldn’t be put through the pre-planned approval process.

------
joshe
A lesson for entrepreneurs, it really is better to go around the bureaucracy.

Uber and Lyft would not exist if they had "played nice". We can imagine a
world where certain regulation would have improved their service for riders
and drivers. But in the real world, if they had complied with every ask,
cities would have crippled them with requirements when they first started.
(Ok, you can do your Lyft thing, but let's start with 100 cars, for say, the
first 3 years).

A lesson for regulators, regulation creates environments where the people who
succeed are the ones who work the refs and skirt intent. These are probably
less likely to be the best companies or the nicest people.

So a quick call, like "hey, put A3 in here or we can't count it" could make
the world a little better. And if you would prefer to regulate people who
follow the intent and not the letter of the law, you need to govern that way.

~~~
tempsy
Eh. To me the whole VC e-scooter industry is a “stupid game, stupid prize”
sector that won’t be around in a few years anyway.

I hardly ever see anyone riding scooters in SF. The scooter companies keep
raising their prices in lock step because they have to, but it’s now gone from
$.15/min to $.32-.33/min, which is more than $20/hr with tax. It’s cheaper to
just use an Uber.

Have no idea who they are targeting with those prices. Kids can’t afford that.
Adults would rather take an Uber at those prices.

~~~
llampx
What do you mean? I've always wanted to perch precariously on a machine that's
statistically much more likely to leave me bruised and bleeding on the side of
the road than the other "fresh air" alternatives, bicycling and walking, and
be a hazard to others while I am at it. :)

------
chubot
Huh I had been wondering what happened to Skip. They were the first scooter I
tried and I had a great experience.

After they stopped servicing SF, I tried Uber's red scooters and they really
sucked. There was not enough torque to get up 90% of the hills in SF.

I downloaded the Spin app in frustration but on one attempt wasn't able to get
a scooter.

Skip indeed seemed to be doing the best out of all these companies.

------
ozzyoli
This article is anthropomorphising a company. The journalist has no way of
knowing if everyone at Skip was a nice guy.

I had to complain to the city twice about a Skip distributor’s aggressive
strategy of tying their scooters in the early morning to every available bike
hoop (and even trash cans) around the Twitter building.

The city has rules about how many scooters can be tied to a public bike hoop
and at least one person at Skip was not nice and was ignoring that rule.

------
nabdab
Sounds like standard bureaucracy.

They didn’t submit the required information in the required form. SF wants
startups to behave, that doesn’t mean that behaving startups get to ignore the
standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.

~~~
isoskeles
Sounds like they made a mistake in their submission, rather than they wanted
to ignore something or get an exception.

For such a large city with a huge amount of tax revenue, I would expect the
bureaucracy in SF to do a little better with processes like this one. It would
have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance or to give
companies time to submit corrections. Obviously this isn’t how it works, like
you stated “standard bureaucracy”, but I’d love to see certain parts of
government move further away from this mentality of being some punishing Old
Testament god to serving the community.

~~~
nabdab
> It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance

Absolutely. It is trivial! And the company making the submission is expected
to do that. Which I think is very reasonable, considering that they know the
requirements and make the actual submission in the first place.

It’s silly to want the reviewers to take on an additional burden in the
process just because this one company made a dumb mistake which as you say
would have been trivial for them to review and catch.

~~~
xvector
Reviewers are human. If they can’t use their human reasoning skills deal with
something trivial like “Heading A3 should be above this paragraph” then
frankly society would be much better off without them, and we should just
automate them away rather than wasting our tax dollars on them.

------
asah
Comments in this thread are missing the actual takeaway: when interfacing with
legacy systems and bureaucracies, get help and don't DIY. Experience counts
and experienced people know what to do when the form talks about "A3" which
doesn't exist - or they know who to call.

------
quotemstr
In lots of arenas of life --- this one included --- if you naively follow the
advice that nice and well-meaning people give you, you're going to get hosed.

~~~
ryloric
I'm sorry, give you what?

~~~
lopmotr
advice

------
baby
As a non-driver I’ve been following the adoption of e-scooters closely and SF
has been full of corruption and anti-scooter behavior since the beginning.
It’s been hard to watch.

------
m0llusk
It would be nice to have a linter for government forms.

~~~
reaperducer
There is. It's called an attorney.

~~~
edflsafoiewq
You can hire a program to review code too, but that isn't a linter.

------
donarb
I was surprised back when Segways were first sold, San Francisco was among the
first cities to ban them on sidewalks.

------
artsyca
There's a story about a bowl of M&M's that made up a famous rock act's rider
it was a heuristic to determine the fitness of the venue if they couldn't get
a bowl of brown M&M's ready how could they be trusted with the safety of an
entire soundstage?

------
say_it_as_it_is
It's surprising that e-scooters get more attention than the multi-billion
dollar cannabis industry on Hacker News. State regulators are playing the same
games with cannabis entrepreneurs all over the United States. They do it
because they can.

------
imp800388
Start ups and tech companies that want to innvoate definately need a new city
to go to. SF is not a good place to start something new and innovative.

Why not start a new city say, in an open spot somewhere with minimal
regulations and let tech companies build and innvoate as much as they want?
Sure, in the beginning you need to provide incentives for some companies to go
there. but once the jobs are there, people will definately follow.

~~~
themagician
Like California City?

SF and NYC are hotspots because that’s where the money is. That’s where the
rich people are. They like to invest locally when possible. They like to see
the billboards of “their” companies on the way to the airport. It’s an ego
thing.

Obviously this is a generalization and not true in all cases. But it’s true
enough and that’s why it’s the way that it is.

------
umeshunni
Probably because they didn't pay off whomever in city hall was in charge of
these licenses

------
tempsy
FWIW I hardly ever see people riding scooters in San Francisco anymore.

They all more than doubled their prices in the last year to $1 + .32/min +
tax, which works out to more than $20/hour! At that price, it’s cheaper to
just use Uber.

~~~
rsanek
I use them frequently and see people on them all the time, especially during
commute hours.

What Ubers have you taken in the city that work out to less than $20/hour?
Even for Uber Pool that's significantly less expensive than what I've
experienced.

~~~
tempsy
The distance you can cover in a car is obviously much greater than that with a
scooter in the same amount of time.

And it kills the use case of keeping the same scooter rented for a few hours
while you hop around and do errands or go around the city since it’s too
expensive now.

------
acd
Seems like these scooters ended up else where to cities which were not clever
enough to say no. Sweden got Bird scooters the city could have said no to buy
and throw scooter companies. Scooters litter the streets which makes it hard
for people with vision disabilities. Scooters tend to ride to fast for other
pedestrians safety etc.

Frankly I do not like these scooters. We have bicycles made from iron and
aluminium they are fully recyclable vs this electronic plastic e-waste ie
scooters.

------
wallace_f
What's the end game of all of this corruption with governments picking winners
and losers?

I mean there is a difference between reasonable regulations and just outright
picking 1-2 cheaters who bribed you for the right to offer a service that
supposedly free people are willing to pay for out of pocket.

We get stories about this in Russia and China and call it Putinism and
Corruption all the time.

~~~
jessaustin
We've lost the ability to evaluate behavior as it is in itself. Before we
judge, we have to find out whether it was a "good" or "bad" person who did it.
If that doesn't help, we can perhaps find some innuendo to the effect that the
actor acted as an "agent" or even "asset" of some known-"bad" "foreign" power.
When we fill our brains with garbage, only garbage can come out of them.

~~~
trophycase
In an extremely complex modern society it's nearly impossible to tell the
effects that certain actions and policies will have. Popular discourse around
politics and economics support this theory, since almost nobody can seem to
agree. This leads to one of the best heuristics for evaluating the merits of
an action as the intention of the actor or the ethics of the actor.

~~~
tsimionescu
That is possibly the worst heuristic for evaluating an action. You may be
right that it is somewhat natural to arrive at it, but it is by no means a
good heuristic.

And why is it bad? For one, real intentions are inscrutable, so it is very
easy to ascribe whatever intentions you want to an action. For another, the
intentions behind an action have essentially no correlation with the effects
of the action, at least insofar as the intentions are not explicitly malicious
(e.g. 'hurt people').

~~~
harimau777
Is there an alternative that you feel works better?

The most common alternative that I can see is "you can do whatever you want as
long as it follows the letter of the law". However, that doesn't seem to work
well either.

~~~
tsimionescu
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The question I was essentially
answering was 'how can we tell whether an action was "good" or not?'. Rather
than looking at the intentions of the author, I think you need to look at the
effects, or some proxy thereof (are people I know poorer/richer? How many
people died because of this action? Or whatever else is easily measurable and
pertinent)

------
randomsearch
And what a disaster Airbnb and Uber have been for the cities they have
invaded. That’s why people legislate against them.

~~~
jimmaswell
Yes, what a disaster having affordable car transportation that doesn't turn
you away for being a minority and having cheaper alternatives to hotels
available that let people make money renting out extra rooms.

~~~
parthdesai
> having cheaper alternatives to hotels available that let people make money
> renting out extra rooms.

Yeah, in that case, all the long term residents living in popular cities must
be insane to hate Airbnb. Have lived in a city and a building infested with
Airbnbs? If you did, you would how fucked up it is for a long term renter.

~~~
jimmaswell
I've stayed in AirBnB's. The only way any other tenants would even know I was
there was that I was taking up a parking spot. Someone would have been insane
to be mad about my being there, yes.

~~~
jakobegger
The problem is that investors buy up cheap apartments and put them on AirBnB
to make insane profits.

This drives up prices for locals.

The other tenants are mad because landlords prefer renting apartments to
tourists for 5k a month instead of renting to locals for 1k a month.

~~~
jimmaswell
Some price controls and restrictions on renting out whole domiciles would be
nice but the aspect of renting out a portion of an already-occupied space like
I used it for is great.

~~~
jakobegger
If that's all AirBnB was used for, nobody would complain. But at least 90% of
listings on Airbnb are for whole apartments that nobody lives in.

If people just rented out their guest room, or rented their apartment out
while they're on vacation, I don't think anybody would complain.

~~~
cortesoft
Hotels would

------
aurizon
competitors felt fear = bribery - as usual...

