30% of the US can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any number of other reasons. Why don't you hold the current system of "motorized transport" to the same impossible standard of solving all transportation needs as you expect of bikes?
Because your groceries are delivered by truck. Your houses are built with materials delivered by truck. In fact your entire lifestyle and the existence of the services which support those people, is provisioned and delivered by local road transport.
If you abandon a car in the middle of the road across two lanes, you'll fairly likely see relatively hefty fines, possibly lose your car. This hurts you, the abandoning party directly.
If you abandon a rental e-scooter in the same way, you'll most likely have no repercussions, and at worst the cheap e-scooter is forfeit which doesn't impact you, the abandoning party at all, and not really the e-scooter company either since they're most likely on a VC funded mission to try to flood the market with cheap e-scooter rentals until the competition drowns.
There's some seriously skewed incentives at the root of the rental e-scooter plague.
This seems trivial to address. If you misuse HN, you get your account banned and can no longer post on HN. If you mistreat an Uber driver, you get your account banned and can no longer hail a ride. What stops this system from working with e-scooters?
Suppose you rent a scooter, park it "properly enough", I come by and move it a few feet into an improper parking place. Do you want your account banned for that?
If not, this might not be as "trivial to address" as you first think.
The scooter has gps as well as your phone and they require a photo anyway. The company can check that you ended your ride correctly, what happens after that isn't your liability.
GPS won't help you here, though the photo will. GPS simply isn't anywhere near accurate enough to verify you placed the scooter in spot X, and not 1-2 meters away from spot X where it's now a hazard.
A gyroscope on the scooter and location awareness of the renter’s device seems to take care of that. If the scooter’s gyroscope indicates movement after the renter has returned the scooter and left the premises, then assuming the renter didn’t move it seems pretty safe.
They are super convenient. Cars are the nuance. We will figure out how to deal with scooters the same way Asian cultures figured out theirs. And the same we we figured out how to socially deal with cell phones.
Straight banning them because a bunch of fuddy duddies who never took one don’t like them is pretty short sighted.
The simplest solution is to let scooters have priority in the streets. Aggressively police the aggressive vehicle drivers that are pushing scooters onto walkways. Especially as the car drivers already have a license system.
Cars don’t drive randomly around pedestrians on a sidewalk. Thanks for the concern though, I got knocked out by one of these things and it wasn’t pleasant.
Plus, these things usually stand right on a sidewalk, right in the way of pedestrians.
Edit: I can think of a way. These things move in a regular traffic. To drive a car, I had to do a driving license. 40 hours with an instructor, a theory test, and a practical exam. How come any clueless chimp can get one of these and ride in traffic? They are dangerous to themselves and others. It’s a celebration when they wear a crash helmet.
So here are my ideas:
1. Require a license for these things.
2. Collect and remove illegally parked scooters. Rental companies know who rode one, they can claim the cost of a scooter removal fee from the rider who parked it illegally. If they are concerned about people randomly moving scooters into illegal parking positions… well, come up with dedicated parking areas where the rider has to bring them back and lock them.
A license for an electrical scooter... It's like getting a (hypothetical) license for a bicycle. Completely unnecessary. No special skills are needed to ride one of these, it's super simple. You should try it sometime. A license won't fix stupid anyway, you just said so yourself.
I don't tell people what they should be doing. Everyone so entitled to tell others how they should go about their lives. But there you go: you should try to understand my argument about these things moving in between the traffic.
But it's interesting you mention a bicycle license. In the 1990s I did one in Poland as a young teenager. It was called "karta rowerowa". Not exactly a license but it taught me about traffic rules and probably saved me from trouble. It was worth it. Some cyclists in Aachen could make use of something similar, maybe they'll know that cycling 5kph in the presence of the StVO VZ 277.1 just aggravates everybody.
Furthermore, I have learned today that in Poland until the age of 18 one is required to have the cycling card (karta rowerowa), or a moped driving license. „Karta rowerowa” is a one day training where one learns traffic rules, signs, and proper technique in navigating the traffic. Of course barely anyone checks for it. But if one gets involved in an accident, there will be financial and insurance consequences.
A big part of licensing is that you can take it away. Cyclists and scooter riders often ignore traffic controls that apply to them. We ignore it because the likelihood and impact of injury to others is low.
Unfortunately, 2 cannot make the difference between a renter who parked illegally and a renter who parked well but a random person kicked the e-scooter on the ground. I see this a lot with e-bikes in my neighborhood.
I did read to the end but in large European cities those dedicated parking spaces are in contact with the sidewalks and the other parking spaces. Apparently some people enjoy dragging all the nicely parked e-bikes into the ground.
In Aachen these things stand right on the sidewalk, often sideways. I’m still young and can easily walk over them but a mother with a stroller or a person on a wheelchair doesn’t have it so easy.
This is nothing but blogspam of the embedded Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99_h30swtM. This article adds nothing that is not already included in the video itself.
spam is advertising; blogspam is a blog that appears to be about something, but it's not really (and as a result, it's very thin, regurgitated, etc), it's an attempt to lure you into a relationship with a predator
this particular article is not a good replacement for the video, it adds nothing, it subtracts some things... but the video also doesn't say all you want to hear either. The article could have used a small animated gif like one might see in a wikipedia article. It would be very nice to see what simple patterns when overlaid would give you >> and << from different angles.
Not everyone can watch youtube videos, it could be blocked in your country or they could be blind for example, and I'm sure there's more reasons. Some people also just prefer to read instead.
I threw this in some AI to have it summarized. I’m not sure what this has to do with watch watching videos on YouTube. Care to explain your key point, rather than hoping people can glean it from a 30 page metaphor?
someone that's a quarter-of-the-way proficient at speed reading can read a short article like this in seconds -- without the time investment or the need to buffer video data to read the transcript.
every media has a place, generally speaking the trivia and background included in a YT video is interesting -- but in the end it's Jeopardy answers and brain-candy for me 90% of the time.
[1] In the web (desktop) version of youtube, if you expand the description, there is a "show transcript" button near the bottom. Not sure about mobile or other versions.
You could say something similar about most books. But padding isn’t totally pointless; longer videos are probably more memorable in the long term, and so are longer books that repeat themselves ad nauseam.
Here is total employment for "Computer Systems Design and Related Services" going back all the way to 1987. This is the best category I can find that includes data over a decade+ time frame.
This category is defined by the BLS as "establishments primarily engaged in providing expertise in the field of information technologies through one or more of the following activities: (1) writing, modifying, testing, and supporting software to meet the needs of a particular customer; (2) planning and designing computer systems that integrate computer hardware, software, and communication technologies; (3) on-site management and operation of clients' computer systems and/or data processing facilities; and (4) other professional and technical computer related advice and services."
>Transit should be free, like sidewalks and parks.
And most similarly, roads. The theoretical 'farebox recovery ratio' of most roads is 0, but this is never part of the conversation. Maybe if it were, transit would look much better in comparison.
Another way of saying this is that because physical space in the city is a scarce resource, the allocation of infrastructure for cars and infrastructure for people is a zero sum game.
yeah, the US solved this by expanding out to suburbia. Because we just have so much damn space and cars let us utilize more of that space.
Of course, the other thing people in this community may look over is that suburbs are often a fallback when you can't afford a dense urban area. I'm in an LA suburb and renting in LA would be over twice as expensive if I moved down there. Even if downtown LA became walkable, most of the LA county wouldn't be able to afford that living.
Buy Now Pay Later is growing very quickly and taking market share from credit cards, especially for younger consumers. The introduction of FedNow is going to make it even more convenient to use these apps to make purchases and avoid the credit card infrastructure entirely.
>Buy Now Pay Later is growing very quickly and taking market share from credit cards, especially for younger consumers.
One of our greatest failings as a society is our abject failure to teach people finances. It's as critical to our lives as breathing, eating, and crapping, yet the vast majority of people can't even count change let alone understand credit.
Incidentally, anyone telling you BNPL is good for you is trying to milk you. Please just don't and stick to cash/debit or good old credit cards, for your friends' and family's sake if not yourself.
BNPL is often free to the customer [1], to whom it amounts to a free loan. The merchant, however, is soaked for the interest/fees. So merchant prices will rise slightly, for everyone, to cover those costs..... much like credit cards do now. Cash and debit users subsidize this scheme without getting the free loan.
The downside for the customer is that it promotes overspending, which could be argued as a net negative on the whole. A careful consumer could make use of the free loan, investing the cash elsewhere during the loan period.
Yes, much like credit card benefits and cashback, if you don't take advantage of it, you're effectively subsidising those who do. (In fact, if someone ypu buy from starts offering it and you disagree with it, you should switch to using it, since this will oncrease their fees on existing revenue and maybe make them consider it not worthwhile.)
The operative quote in support of this from the link, in support of subsidizing those who don’t and almost more damning because even cash users are subsidizing it as the overall price gets raised to roll in the cost of all the people who do use CCs: “Credit card issuers explicitly and directly charge the rest of the economy for the work involved in recruiting the most desirable customers.”
This, like so many other issues, is an issue that a small but powerful contingent of moneyed interests (e.g. the debt industry, also known as the financial industry) works very hard and spends lots of money lobbying on, in order to ensure we're not solving the problem.
This is not much different from Microsoft fighting open source, Apple fighting right to repair, or Google fighting the CCPA.
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