
New Scooter Removal Service Appears - themark
https://www.scootscoop.com/
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danielvf
This has been a thing with cars in the US for a long time.

If you leave your car for days in some business's parking lot, then they will
call a tow service who will pick up the car at no charge to the business
owner, then charge the car's actual owner an exorbitant set of fees for towing
and storage.

You can read the California laws on "Removal of Parked and Abandoned Vehicles"
here:

[https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&sectionNum=22658)

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mmanfrin
The difference being that these scooters are typically if not always left on
sidewalks which are _public property_ , not land the business has paved over
for a parking lot.

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usaphp
Public property does not mean you can obstruct it and use how you want. You
have to be respectful to other public property owners, people

~~~
cjensen
Right. But that's a city issue. Private businesses can't have legal stuff
removed from public city sidewalks just because they don't like it. In this
case, the city of San Diego has chosen to not regulate this issue. Contrast
this with San Francisco which was clear and unambiguous in rejecting this type
of sidewalk litter.

~~~
rcw4256
> Private businesses can't have legal stuff removed from public city sidewalks
> just because they don't like it.

Yes, they can, if they are impeding the use of a public right of way. When
someone parks a car on the (public) street outside of your driveway, blocking
you in, you can call a tow company to have it removed, and they would be
legally justified in removing it and charging the owner for the impound.

~~~
bigiain
I think this is an interesting comparison.

It's kinda established that if you park like an asshole, someone might call a
towing company, and they'll charge you a fee to release your car. In that case
you've got a potentially shady towing company and their legal people lined up
against an individual who owns a vehicle that was parked somewhere problematic
enough that the tow company was prepared to risk towing it.

There's a different power dynamic when it's small local shady towing company
versus VC backed "growth hacking" disruptive startup, who potentially have
some fairly high powered legal services if not on retainer themselves, quite
like available to them via their investors or stop accelerator...

I read recently Uber were talking about getting into the bike/scooter rental
space? Pretty sure I'd advise against local small business towing
company/franchise from risking getting into a lawyer fight with Uber...

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Fzzr
This is like the circle of life for startups, I swear. Next up will be "legal
services for someone interfering with your disruptive business model as a
service".

~~~
xkcd-sucks
The world is an ecosystem of stuff eating other stuff, so it's not surprising
human enterprise is no different

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anonytrary
We were talking about this exact problem in a HN thread about Bird scooters
several weeks ago. Some people legitimately thought these scooters could never
be a problem for businesses, and that businesses should be "happy to have
scooters left on their property" without their consent. How this ridiculous
sentiment emerged, I have no idea, but finally there's a service out that
realizes the issue.

If anything, I hope Bird learns from this service and starts implementing
hubs/waypoints in their business model. In addition to chargers and riders,
there should be hub owners, who get a payment for signing their property up as
a hub for scooters to be safely parked at. Hubs are a piece of the puzzle I
think Bird desperately needs if they want to avoid this gray area stuff.

~~~
microdrum
Bird learns from this issue? They’re just going to go out of business. They
have no tech and a bunch of depreciating Chinese scooters. No one needs to buy
that company.

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ggcdn
Doesnt surprise me, I was in San Diego last week and it was funny seeing all
these scooters littered around every street corner. In some instances they
clogged up sidewalks. I could see how it might spark the ire of some business
owners.

Scooter companies could offer incentives to normalize the distribution of
scooters around the city (for example, a discount or credit for taking a
scooter from a densely covered area to a sparse one).

~~~
MattPearce
The idea of them is they pay regular people to pick them up at night, charge
them, and drop them off in the morning - and they can use this process to
direct the scooters each day to the most appropriate location.

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agrippanux
For those not living in San Diego, scooter pollution is real. I have seen
several times 20-60 scooters in piles littering parking lots / outside
businesses / blocking sidewalks at intersections. It seems to happen
frequently in the area surrounding UCSD, in Pacific Beach, and in Old Town.

~~~
mgalgs
Yeah it's pretty bad... But I also LOVE using the scooters. Hopefully a
solution is found so that we can keep the scooters.

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ShakataGaNai
This is amusing and not at all surprising. If they only remove from private
property & not public right-of-ways, everything will be fine - but you know it
won't.

Most importantly "Scoot Scoop" for a name? I imagine they will be get getting
a C&D for the use of the "Scoot" name in very, very, very short order.

~~~
jessaustin
How is "Scoot" problematic? "Scooter" has been a generic term for, uh,
scooters for decades.

~~~
mikeryan
There’s nothing preventing someone from trademarking a common word. Apple, for
example. In fact multiple orgs can trademark the same word in different
fields. In Apples case they were sued by “Apple Corp” the Beatles publishing
arm and we’re okay (for the most part - they paid 80k initially) until they
started making larger forays into the music space and suddenly they had to pay
24M for use of the name.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer)

~~~
jessaustin
GP seemed a bit more _certain_ than "someone somewhere might have trademarked
the word 'scoot' at some time"?

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mmanfrin

      Companies notified and Invoiced to pick up at our facility
    

So, picking up scooters sitting on _public sidewalks_ and then sending
Bird/Lyme bills to pick them up.

Seems a little bit like stealing. Not unexpected from a tow company.

~~~
etxm
Leaving their trash on street corners and door steps seems like littering.

~~~
mmanfrin
Calling scooters "trash" and then using that extreme hyperbole to stretch
meaning to "littering" contributes nothing to a discussion. This is not
reddit.

~~~
afandian
I'm in Oxford, UK (not GP poster).

We have half a dozen smartphone-operated bike schemes on the go. The bikes do
literally litter the pavement sometimes. On occasion you have to climb over
them (or carry them out of the way). They end up in the river and chucked into
hedges. They end up mangled by the side of the road after people try to remove
the locks. Some of them do objectively end up as 'trash'.

Yes, the blame lies squarely at the door of inconsiderate cyclists. But I
can't help but think that the vendors (and licensing authorities) should have
seen this coming. Is it stealing to personally take that rusy Ofo bike from
the side of the road and re-use the materials? I think the answer is yes. What
would the local authority do if I took it to the recycling station. They
probably wouldn't want to touch it. So it's up to to the vendor to clean up
their refuse.

I haven't seen scooters first hand, but if they're like the bikes, then I
don't think that's a hyperbolic stretch to use the word 'littering'.

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dwighttk
haven't even changed the links on their social media buttons from strikingly

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ckemere
How often is the sidewalk publicly-owned versus privately owned with a right-
of-way?

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ytjohn
Depends on the city I guess, but I'm pretty sure privately owned is the norm.
Someone owns the building and land including the sidewalk. Most cities and
towns have rules regarding the sidewalk that applies to the property owner.
These would be rules for things like snow and ice removal, proper maintenance,
and even keeping it clean.

Now.. one company may own the building + sidewalk and the businesses inside
the building are just leasing space. In that case, they would probably need
the building owner to call the towing company, or have some sort of agreement
to do so. For instance, the owner may delegate some sidewalk responsibilities
to the round-level tenant in the lease. I have a rental property and I
delegate snow removal and lawn maintenance to the tenants. (Though legally, if
the tenants don't keep up with it, it would ultimately come back on me).

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soared
How is it legal for them to take scooters then charge scooter owners for them?

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VoiceOfWisdom
"24/7 Free Removal of Unwanted Scooters or Bikes on your Property"

Looks like they only remove scooters that are being left on private property.
I would think its completely legal for the land owner to remove the scooter,
therefore having another service remove them for you and charge for storage
would be fine as long as the rate is not extortionate.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Interesting.

Because anybody can use and park the scooters, I would think it's in
somebody's incentive to move scooters from pubic sidewalk onto patrolled
private property to get scooped up.

~~~
CaliforniaKarl
I don't know how often scooters ping back to HQ, but it may be often enough
for them to log the move from public property to private property.

TBH, I'd also trust an established towing business to handle scooter pickup,
because scooter pickup would not be their only line of business, and they
presumably wouldn't want scooter shenanigans to affect their towing business.

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myth_buster
In a gold rush, sell shovels... or... a service to move earth.

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ykevinator
Scooter bubble bubble?

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dsfyu404ed
Normally this service is provided by some dude with a compact pickup
overloaded with old washing machines and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

I guess this service is targeting people with scrap removal needs but are too
high class to call a "traditional" scrapper.

