
San Diego's Bird Scooter Hoarding Problem - gscott
http://www.scottresearch.com/blog/san-diegos-bird-scooter-hoarding-problem-with-screencaptures
======
kenhwang
I think the incentive structure needs to change to discourage hoarding.
Currently, the payout always increases as you hold onto a scooter. What I
think solves the problem is:

* An small bonus for nabbing the scooter while it still has a bit of charge left (<10%). Essentially a quick turnaround bonus. For the sake of argument, lets say $1 bonus + $4 base to match the original minimum if it's back on the street within 24h and never lost power.

* $4 if the scooter lost power, but is still returned within 48h.

* +$1 for every day it's missing after 48h up to $10 total.

* -$1 for every person that visits it's last known location after 2h and reports that they couldn't find it, down to $2 minimum. This is to encourage users to quickly attach the nabbed bird to power and "claim" them as soon as they pick them up instead of throwing it into their garage for a week then claiming them.

* The scooter gets set to $20 "lost scooter" bounty after a month, which can only be claimed once a month per user.

If the chargers want to play games, make it a game.

~~~
erentz
Make it simpler. First this is theft, they should assign some folks to track
and report this to police. Let that be known and people might start being more
honest.

Second you could just add something to the terms and conditions which allows
them to cancel people’s rewards in these obvious cases. “Oh you happened to
have 20 scooters at your address for two days and then suddenly charged and
returned them. We’re cancelling your account.” Assign someone again to find
these obvious examples of people hoarding scooters then cancel their accounts
or whatever is appropriate.

As this poster shows, the man power involved shouldn’t be all that much.
Browsing on a map. Etc.

~~~
btbuildem
Involving the police and another type of "Bird worker" is not simple, it
complicates things.

I think the parent post has the right idea -- use the existing situation
(consumers and producers) and gamify it in such a way that reduces hoarding.

That said, maybe there's a simpler way yet to do that.

~~~
JackFr
1) Identify hoarders with machine learning.

2) "We believe you are hoarding, and this is why: . . . "

3) Terminate charging account of hoarders.

------
andrewla
Maybe this is all common knowledge; I live in NYC so we don't have Birds yet,
so I'm a little ignorant here.

From what I can tell, each scooter that is low on batteries is given a bounty
(somewhere between $5 to $20) based on how hard it is to find. I assume that
the "hardness" is computed based on how many chargers fail to find the
scooter, but there may be something more sophisticated at work. To charge a
scooter, a charger finds one, checks it out in the charger app, and then takes
it home and charges it, and returns it to its "Bird's Nest" (clever) in the
morning, at which point you get paid.

The scooters have GPS trackers to prevent theft.

So what these hoarders are doing is stealing the scooters -- rather than
checking them out through the charger app, they're just grabbing them and
tossing them in their van, and then keeping them in their home, where other
chargers will fail to find them, thus increasing their bounty, until they
"discover" the scooters, claim them through the app, charge them, and return
them to their nest.

Have I understood this correctly? Given that they are removing the scooter
without claiming it through the app (either as a rider or a charger) that
means that they are stealing them, which means all Bird has to do is provide
the police with the address of the hoarder and that's the end of it.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
This is simple to fix:

Allow a charger-app to trigger a loud horn sound continuously. Make taking
these painful to keep.

And then post a way to report illegally impounded scooters, either with
address or license plate of where they're kept.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Just mute your phone, problem solved.

~~~
yellowapple
I think the idea was for the horn to be in the scooter. I would assume that
there's no mute button on a scooter.

------
whoisjuan
The scooter business it's proving to be a real life experiment of the many
fucked up factors and forces that influence an urban modern society:
vandalism, hoarding scooters for profit, tension between governments,
companies and users, blatant violation of traffic rules, etc...

As you scale something like this the problems become more evident and harder
to manage. These businesses looked pretty solid when they had small fleets,
but now that they are scaling it's pretty easy to see the cracks.

Watching how this unfolds in the next two to three years is going to be a hell
of a ride (no pun intended)

~~~
koliber
I came to believe that these negative forces are all around us. They are
constantly at play. As the landscape changes, they adapt to the new realities,
but are mostly invisible.

When a big company comes is with a sudden alteration to the "environment",
these negative forces respond, with a force that is congruous to the speed at
which the original change happened.

If a change in society happens quickly, it is very visible. All the reactions
also happen quickly and are also very visible.

If the change happens slowly, the reactions also follow gradually and slowly,
and everything seems less drastic and less noticeable.

~~~
Tepix
If you put hundreds of vehicles on the streets that cost $500 each you need to
seriously think about people taking advantage of you, even if it amounts to
stealing. You must not make it too easy and intriguing.

"Gelegenheit macht Diebe" \- "Opportunity makes the thief"

~~~
sschueller
Especially if your headquarters is across the ocean you just dumped theses
things all over a foreign city with permission.

~~~
chrisweekly
with -> without?

~~~
amyjess
If the flood of bikeshare companies in Dallas are any indication, it's "with".

The Dallas City Council passed a law allowing dockless bikeshare, and suddenly
about six Chinese companies all dumped hundreds—if not thousands—of bikes
_each_ in Dallas, causing every kind of externality you can imagine. Dallas
opened the door a crack, and the companies stampeded through hard enough to
break the frame.

~~~
mikestew
Upvote for the metaphor I’m going to steal one of these days. Credit to the
Dallas council for at least the appearance of progress, debit for not thinking
through the externalities.

------
rcthompson
This reminds me of the anecdote where some city tried to deal with their rat
problem by offering a reward for every dead rat turned in. Instead, people
started breeding rats so they could have more to turn in for reward money, and
the rat population actually increased.

Or something like that. I might be mis-remembering some details.

~~~
cyphar
There is actually a term for this in economics. It's called the "Lucas
critique", and effectively states that any metric will be gamed eventually.
It's slightly more subtle and is actually a critique about macroeconomic
policymaking -- that people's actions are not structural and that making a new
policy will affect how people act as they try to (ab)use the new policy -- but
that's the basic gist.

EDIT: To clarify -- I'm not an economist, it's just something I read about in
my spare time. I'm sure that the Lucas critique was pre-dated by other ideas
(it's far too obvious to be entirely novel), and that there's a much deeper
analysis that I wasn't aware of.

~~~
lordnacho
IMO the deeper history in Lucas Critique is the Problem of Induction.

"XYZ has always worked in the past" doesn't work. Imagine doing machine
learning on this problem that Bird has. It could easily suggest that you
should up the fees to get more scooter finders, rather than that you need to
change the incentives.

------
NorthOf33rd
There have been many great pricing models posed in this thread to dis-
incentivize gaming, but I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned the simple
"make bird hunting a full time job with benefits."

Just like uber before them, bird threatens to upend some reasonably decent
jobs in cities with bike share programs- assuming the bike share programs
don't learn from taxi drivers and adapt.

So much of the reason these things work- and that the companies themselves
become massively valuable is the externalization of costs. That doesn't have
to be a given.

~~~
dawnerd
I think Lime does that? In any case Bird should be inspecting their scooters
frequently for safety reasons so really would just make sense to hire teams of
people with vans or trucks to pick them up every night.

~~~
midniteslayr
Razor scooters/eBikes do that in San Diego, and I know Jump bikes also have a
team of people in San Francisco (as it was mandated by the city).

In SD, the Razor Scooters are much nicer and doesn't seem to have as many
problems with their equipment than the Bird scooters do.

------
JamesAdir
The solution is super simple. Stop paying in direct payout and start paying in
riding credits. I sometimes used Bird from the train station to my home in the
evening. I would happily charge it in my home during the night and release it
in the morning for Bird credits. But it seems that at this stage since the
scooter companies raised so much money, they just have no problem to ignore it
and pay directly or just throw more scooters into the pool.

~~~
benj111
Wouldn't you then get to a situation where x gets a bird, takes it home,
charges it, uses it the next day, essentially creating a rental model where
each scooter is used by one person a day?

Presumably the nature of the beast is that these start off the day next to
transport hubs and then spread out from there. It isn't then worth it for some
one to go out of their way to take it back to that transport hub.

If you are travelling against the prevailing traffic what you say would work,
but not for the majority.

As I understand it the bikes it London (and probably else where) vary the
charges depending on where you're going. So if you're taking a bike back to
where it needs to be, the charge is less. If you're taking it out to the edge
of a zone where it will need to be collected by an employee, you pay more.

~~~
davnicwil
Could this be solved by saying you stop getting credit after X days using the
same scooter?

~~~
sokoloff
Seems that just requires switching scooters every X-1 days. Ride up to one;
stop your ride; start a new ride. Net cost $1 and you start a new cheap
rental.

~~~
davnicwil
Well, yes. And then you've increased the transaction costs of such a pattern
of usage, thereby discouraging it, whilst also encouraging regular rotation of
scooters throughout the customer base even when people stick with it. I think
that probably goes some way towards solving the problem of 1-1 hoarding.

------
dchuk
I live in Pacific Beach in San Diego (to the left of that first map in the
post).

Every morning on my drive to work, I pass a few pickup trucks with 10/20/30+
scooters in the back. Seems like folks have created a full time business out
of charging these things, so I'm not surprised it's challenging for a "casual"
charger to make a couple bucks with them.

That being said, I was very bearish on the idea of Birds until it clicked to
me how brilliant the charging program is. They're essentially paying people to
protect these things in their homes overnight, and nicely place them in
optimized locations every morning. Other competitors down here (especially
bikes) who just left their units out all day and night quickly lost them all
to homeless people and vandals chucking them into the ocean. But Birds are
cleanly lined up on every corner every morning.

Very clever.

~~~
aezell
I rode my first Bird in Pacific Beach last week. They don't exist where I
live. I just assumed that those trucks were contracted by the company somehow.
I didn't know this whole charging economy existed.

I also saw a few drunken (or angry) [or both] people smash up a few of them as
they walked down the street. I'd like to know how many they lose in this way.

------
burlesona
A better incentive would be to give chargers a tiny cut of all the riding fees
for the next charge. Make it so the scooter have to be below 50% battery OR
not ridden for a day in order to be eligible to move. That would incentivize
the chargers to get the scooters back on the street ASAP.

If there’s still hoarding, offer riders (not chargers!) some bounty for
reporting hoarding.

As other posters have said it’s a game-design problem to align incentives so
that you get the outcomes you want.

~~~
shazam
Then the charging cost would grow with profit and would no longer be
considered an overhead cost.

------
stevecalifornia
I feel like the obvious solution is to pay chargers based on how much of their
charge was used the following day after releasing the scooter into the wild.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
I don't agree that it's obvious, but I like the idea. Chargers would then be
investing in the scooter's use the next day but with joules instead of cash.

/joules will be the currency of the future!

------
g45y45
Eventually every scooter will be stolen, GPS disabled and board replaced. They
are commodity Xiaomi scooters, retailing for hundreds of dollars. They can be
stolen and rebirthed for <$50. Scooter rental was a terrible idea, and the
assets of the companies will be redistributed to masses.

~~~
randyrand
The same can be said for bikes and bike locks.

I don’t think enough people steal for it to prevent all bicycling. Perhaps
there is still benefit.

~~~
goobynight
It certainly prevents many people from leaving unattended bicycles out after
dark or using them during this time. Not just after midnight or something.

If you do anything except daytime ride, you're liable to get messed with in
some cities. People largely just accept thieves in their society.

------
RangerScience
Seems like a way around this is to not pay for scooters that never moved.
They're all GPS tracked anyway.

~~~
gscott
Maybe after hitting $20 the price goes down for charging after that. Or never
letting the charging fee get beyond $8........

------
PeanutNore
It's practically an article of faith on here that these scooter companies are
providing a valuable public service and deserve to succeed, but I have yet to
see a single halfway decent argument for why that's the case.

From where I'm sitting the whole thing seems like a bad joke. The people
hoarding scooters are probably just waiting until the company inevitably
folds, with the (likely correct) assumption that an already overstretched
municipal police force isn't going to be bothered to help a (fiscally and
ethically) bankrupt company track down hundreds or thousands of lost scooters
across town.

The correct response by cities to the issue of the startups dumping scooters
on public sidewalks is to send them to the municipal recycling plant for
scrapping.

~~~
ricardobeat
Cheap, quick transport on an electric vehicle. More convenient and comfortable
than public transport. What makes you not consider that valuable?

------
koliber
One possible solution is to look at the place where the scooter was charged.
Next, look at the place it has spent waiting to be charged. If the distance is
less than 100 feet, don't give a payout. This can also be gamed, but more
elaborate rules can be implemented. Ultimately, it will not be worth a hassle
to game the system on a wide scale. A sort of equilibrium will be achieved.
Cat and mouse it is.

~~~
chillacy
What if people were paid based on how many users your charged scooters had?
That would incentivize you to also place the scooter in a prime location each
day, optimizing for events, day of week, and competition

~~~
xfitm3
I think this would negatively impact users in low traffic areas.

~~~
xapata
Supply and demand. If the high-traffic areas are oversupplied, the best
strategy is to find an underserved low-traffic market. For example, dentists
in rural areas make more money than dentists in cities (on average), because
most dentists prefer to live in the city.

------
Tiktaalik
lmao.

So many of these dumb problems would be solved if they worked with cities and
created a docked system, but no I guess that's too boring and not ~disruptive~
enough.

~~~
cycrutchfield
Docked systems have been tried and consumers do not prefer them.

~~~
orbifold
It works really well in Paris and where I live as well.

~~~
gomox
Actually the system in Paris barely works anymore.

~~~
aweb
Nope, it took some time but it now works correctly. I use it daily.

------
quickthrower2
> Over the next few weeks I drove more in gas then I would find scooters.

So much for the environment eh!

------
codezero
It sure if it’s related but I learned from my brother in law’s girlfriend that
her little brother had been hoarding scooters because they had some app that
could disable the tracking and let you ride for free.

I guess the fact that these show up on a map contradicts that.

~~~
usrusr
So could it be an alternative client that uses straw-man accounts to cash in
every time the hoarder charges a scooter, occasionally using some of the
spoils to buy them a "free" ride? That would be fascinatingly twisted: make
your accomplices think they are part in an entirely different kind of crime
than they are. Even more twisted (but not as creative) if it's an inside job
to get a larger slice of the VC pie.

------
millzlane
That's exactly what they're doing. There is a dude on scooter talk who isn't
shy about letting us know how he's exploiting the system. He intends to keep
doing it until bird or lime shut him down.

~~~
wheelerwj
whats scooter talk?

~~~
millzlane
[https://scootertalk.org/](https://scootertalk.org/)

------
kazinator
I don't see the problem. Since the scooters are up for grabs, you're allowed
to take one and park it at home. Whether that looks like stealing or just
making sure you have it available later when you need it is a gray area that
requires interpretation on a case by case basis. That's probably why the
police don't care.

If the scooters are indoors, that is good for the scooters, by the way.

~~~
mannykannot
I don't think it could be any more serious a matter than not abiding by the
EULA.

~~~
kazinator
Basically, the EULA should (and likely does) have some terms against that.
That is to say, scooters that are fobbed out by their user should be left in
such a way that their are accessible to other users. Identify the violators
and charge them fines and/or terminate their accounts.

Keeping scooters in homes and garages can be allowed, provided the scooters
are "on the clock": in the middle of a booking that is being paid for.

------
ewams
Could you explain a little better on how this works?

~~~
kristianov
Bird Chargers are people who charge Bird e-scooter for rewards. They take
Birds with low battery from the streets, charge them, and release them the
next morning to collect their rewards. Each Bird has a different reward for
charging. The company's reward algorithm seems to give higher reward for Birds
that have been abandoned for a longer time. So the Bird chargers can just take
Birds, "abandon" them in their backyard, wait until their rewards reach
maximum, finally they will charge them and release them to get max rewards.

Quite like farming, really.

~~~
clort
It rather seems to me that Bird would know where the scooter was being
charged, and where it was accumulating value in a fixed location. They can
correlate this information

Bird really need to structure it better, and make it clear that such actions
are fraudulent. The people involved need to lose their licence to charge and
their user accounts and then they won't have any way to make money or use the
scooters.

~~~
icebraining
_It rather seems to me that Bird would know where the scooter was being
charged, and where it was accumulating value in a fixed location. They can
correlate this information_

Then people will use their grandma's backyard to "abandon" them and charge at
their house.

~~~
dgzl
Better than Grandma, you start a black market scooter trading network with
like-minded folks.

~~~
clort
From the companies perspective they have lots of data to analyze. I am not a
statistician but I suspect that people who game the system in _any_ way that
we can think of will show up at the top of the dataset. The two most important
metrics are the highest total earners and the users with the highest average
charging fee. They get subjected to extra scrutiny. Plot out where they were
getting the scooters from, and who used the scooters last, then if it turns
out they are being fraudulent just kick them out or modify the processes so
that what they do doesn't work.

I suspect in the early days it doesn't really matter, since they will want
fully charged scooters and a rumour you can make lots of money to incentivize
people to join.

~~~
secabeen
They also probably have a shortage of data scientists to do the analysis. The
ones they have are probably working on projects that more directly affect the
bottom line, rather than eliminating externalities.

------
Waterluvian
Why does the pay out have to increase? Have they tested what happens if it
starts at $7 and never changes? I get the theory is to discover and
incentivize less desirable scoot scoots, but I'm skeptical you actually need
that.

------
biophetik
I've witnessed plenty of people nabbing scooters in rental trucks or vans
during the morning in San Diego. Probably 10-30 stacked all over. It occurred
to me how scooters not only are a mode of transportation, but now a resource
that people rely on for extra cash.

Seems completely justified but oddly weird to me. I haven't witnessed it yet,
but I wonder if there have been fights over territory/scooters.

------
mkong1
What is the time scale for increasing the bounty vs how long it takes to
charge a scooter?

If we give the 'hoarders' the benefit of the doubt, could it be the bounty is
increasing while they have a bunch of scooters queued up to charge? They
grabbed 20 in their truck, and it takes 5 hours to charge 1, but they only
have 2 outlets, but the bounty goes up every 12 hours, so they have a backlog?

~~~
kenhwang
They're supposed to scan the QR code the moment they grab them, which
essentially marks the scooter as found and the rates are frozen. Then they can
take their sweet time charging them.

What they're doing instead is grabbing them without scanning them, chirping be
dammed, and holding onto them for a while so the bounty increases. Then they
scan them as found and charge them.

------
jaimehrubiks
This is, indeed, a very hard problem to solve. The only option I see is
banning somehow by law/agreement, and taking legal actions to people who
'steal' them. But in that case they would just stack them outside the house...

You could ban people who charge bikes to use them (it is as weird as if an
uber driver couldn't use uber as a passenger).

~~~
solatic
> a very hard problem to solve

Is it? Honest chargers who go out to the boonies to recover truly hard-to-
recover scooters will pick up scooters which turn red from all over the place.
Dishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters who all turned red
suspiciously in one place (the charger's home).

Developing an algorithm to find the dishonest players should be relatively
straightforward, and after dishonest players are found, they should be banned.

~~~
michaelt

      Dishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters
      who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the
      charger's home).
    

...until the dishonest chargers figure out they can easily block the GPS
signal with a few cents of tinfoil when they grab the scooter off the street.

~~~
SamReidHughes
You can catch that too.

~~~
michaelt
How will you robustly tell apart vandals from dishonest chargers, when the
latter are incentivised to emulate the former?

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
Well you just ban them. You might catch some innocents but that's their right.
If someone has a habit of turning in a whole bunch of scooters that didn't
have GPS available for X days before, ban them. A legitimate charger should
have a certain percentage of scooters where the GPS was available up until
charging (1-2 day turn around I'm guessing, or there's some fundamental flaw
with the charging system), so I'm sure there's an algorithm that can remove a
majority of the abusers with minimal casualties.

You can never solve gaming the system entirely, the goal is just to make it
harder than it's worth, and hopefully the abusers move to some other scheme.

~~~
michaelt

      If someone has a habit of turning in a whole
      bunch of scooters that didn't have GPS
      available for X days before, ban them.
    

You've just banned your best guy, Wader Wayne, the only guy in the city who
was retrieving scooters that vandals had chucked in the river.

Now he's complaining on your employees' subreddit everyone said he was doing a
great job and his numbers were really good, that no-one else should invest in
equipment to do the same work, and that you've ruined Christmas for his family
by cutting off their only source of income. The Guardian is going to interview
him for their article on job insecurity in the gig economy.

~~~
solatic
All of these parameters are tunable. You don't have to get rid of 90% of the
dishonest catchers, if even 50-70% will make a big difference. Your argument
would have more merit if the majority of unrecoverable scooters were due to
vandalism, but the facts bear out that the vast majority are due to hoarding.

------
sizzle
Anyone well versed in game theory know an optimal solution to hedge against
the problem of hoarding?

~~~
undersuit
The hoarder finds some value in hoarding. In extreme cases of hoarding where
you find the house is filled with items often the value comes from the hoarder
not having to worry about inadequate supplies. A person who hoards food
because of previous issues with having adequate food is sating their need for
security.

This isn't an extreme case but the same reasons still exist, hoarding the
scooters is providing value. Take efforts to reduce value. Like start letting
the scooters talk to each other and you'll be able to find the cycle in the
graph where the hoarded scooters only talk to each other until one pays outs
handsomely and it joins the rest of the public scooters. Or make a scooter pay
out less if it has been idle for an extended period of time even with low
battery value. Or the opposite, make a scooter pay out more if it's getting
higher than average use.

------
pingmurder
Seems obvious the scooters need to be able to transit themselves to a charging
station, like a rhoomba

------
dalbasal
You might sum this up with "markets & incentives are hard"

------
pxtail
Very simple solution: just set additional reward for rescuing poor birds, it
will create new jobs, whole new caste will arise: bird hunters. They will just
roam cities with smartphone in hand, rifle (for safety!), maybe loyal dog and
set free flocks of birds.

------
wffurr
They should just switch to a docked model.

~~~
AimForTheBushes
The best part is being able to ride directly to your destination though.

------
alsothrownaway
> Company litters thousands of billboards all over streets and sidewalks,
> creating city-wide eyesore / road hazard

> Citizens remove hazard from streets, profiting at company's expense

Isn't this the definition of poetic justice?

~~~
lazerwalker
Only if you only view the scooters as a "hazard" and an "eyesore". An
alternate interpretation (even if you're rightfully skeptical of for-profit
venture-funded startups like these) is that the scooters are a fairly
sustainable and scalable form of individual transit compared to cars, and a
world where scooters (or similar devices) fulfill a useful last-mile role in
public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure.

~~~
CaptainZapp
_is that the scooters are a fairly sustainable and scalable form of individual
transit compared to cars, and a world where scooters (or similar devices)
fulfill a useful last-mile role_

This argument only holds water if public transportation sucks in a city. If
you can get to _wherever you want to go_ within a 200 metre radius of a city
by public transport (which is the case in a lot of European cities to begin
with) then this argument does not make any sense.

 _fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that 's beneficial
for society and civic infrastructure._

That's at least debatable. If it's really part of public transport
infrastructure then this should be coordinated with the cities. But the
mindset seems more a : "We shit 500 of those things throughout a relatively
small city and disrupt the holly bejeezus out of this town". As long as this
attitude prevails I neither see this as a valid argument.

~~~
adrianN
I live in Berlin, a city with relatively good public transport. Being able to
go where ever you want to go using public transport doesn't mean that the
connection is good. Often it's a lot faster to ride a bike than to take a bus
from a train station to your ultimate destination. Scooters can reduce that
inconvenience and thus increase the share of trips that are done without cars.

I don't really see how coordination with the city is better than just making
the things available and seeing what happens. The city often has poor
visibility into where people actually want to go and by which criteria they
choose the mode of transport. And adding bureaucracy without clear benefits
doesn't seem smart.

~~~
CaptainZapp
_I don 't really see how coordination with the city is better than just making
the things available and seeing what happens._

It would, for example, avoid that you have 1'000 defunct OBikes in a
relatively small city (~90km2) basically cluttering up everything, but being
of so bad quality that they're borderline useless. Even if you're stupid
enough to cough up the required deposit and download their dodgy app.

Same bikes which need to be removed not even a year later on the taxpayers
dime.

It would help to not make entire town districts unafordable and unhabitable in
some cities by the likes of AirBnB waltzing in for fun and profit.

I could come up with more examples, Uber being the most obvious.

I see a city as a rather complex organism, with a lot of competing factors and
variables, which require careful balancing and calibration. There's a reason
that cities prepare master plans about development for the next two decades.

If the burghers believe that change is required it's up to them to initiate
such change. It should not be up to some venture capital fueled SV companies,
which use public property for private gain, to make such decisions.

~~~
lazerwalker
If a specific implementation of a bikeshare or scooter share program is
borderline useless because the hardware is junk, that sounds like an
implementation detail rather than the sort of philosophical argument you seem
to be making.

I've been in cities where the bikeshare was borderline useless. I've also
spent lots of time in NY, where its bikeshare is both at least as useful as
the subway within Manhattan and legitimately the fastest way to get e.g. north
or south within Brooklyn.

I'm currently based in Berlin, where I agree with the parent to your comment.
Berlin's metro is generally great, but there are a large number of places I go
to regularly that are ~10 minutes away by bike but ~30 minutes by public
transit, purely because of the way the system is laid out.

If you're going to complain about bikes or scooters cluttering up sidewalks,
perhaps the answer is they should have dedicated space on the streets (as with
docked bikeshare programs like NY). I'd love to see studies about the effect
on number of transportation trips that e.g. a dedicated scooter stand the size
of a car parking space has on the flow of traffic as compared to letting that
single parking space be usable by cars.

I totally get your point that this is something that should be handled at the
civic planning level rather than at SV-funded startups. Copenhagen is probably
the clearest example where the city government was able to make massive
improvements to the way people move around their city, encouraging non-car
transit. That doesn't change that bikes and scooters are arguably a more
effective way to move individuals than cars (either private ownership or
rideshare), and a shared system has transportation benefits that are unique
from the benefits offered by traditional public transit.

~~~
CaptainZapp
Interesting reply. And I agree with a lot of your points. Starting from the
premise that cars are not really a good mode of transportation to get around
in a city.

It would be awesome to massively reduce private car use in cities and use the
space gained for other modes of transportation and uses (bike, scooter,
walking, leisurly get togethers of the neighborhood) and reclaim the space for
actually useful things and efficient transportation.

One of my current issues with the scooters (apart from the philosophical
objections, which you correctly point out) is that they zip around pavements
with speeds, which are definitly uncomfortable (and depending on the riding
style menacing) to the actual users of pavements, which are pedestrians. Being
able to provide dedicated space for scooters would be a huge leap forward for
their use.

I'm privileged enough to have Zurich's public transport system at my disposal,
which literally gets you everywhere in 10 minute intervals and that this
slightly skews my perspective (Tokyo is also pretty awesome, but I digress).
But I do believe that such shifts in policy should be debated and planned and
not just brute forced by some outsiders, whose main interest is profit and
certainly not the best interest and well being of the citizenship they claim
to serve.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

