kenhwang 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

      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 5 years ago

        1) Identify hoarders with machine learning.

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

        3) Terminate charging account of hoarders.

    • eeeeeeeeeeeee 5 years ago

      I’m loving how persistent some of these comments are about how Silicon Valley creates a “theft” issue with their own business model and the response is to throw the problem at the police to solve, who have actual real problems to deal with.

      There is no theft. If these companies don’t want those contractors doing that, don’t incentivize it or remove them from the platform. Then if they continue to interact with the scooters after being banned, then it’s probably theft.

      If these docked at a specific location, the case for “theft” might be an easier sell. But they are literally designed to be left ANYWHERE.

    • dsfyu404ed 5 years ago

      More police involvement in a petty civil matter is unlikely to be a net positive for society.

      • erentz 5 years ago

        If your bike or car gets stolen I hope you don’t involve the police in your “petty civil matter”.

        • pjc50 5 years ago

          It's not even clear that these scooters are really stolen - Bird asked people to remove them from the street to their own property and charge them, it's just that people are being slow about it.

          Most theft laws require "intent to permanently deprive" or similar.

          • erentz 5 years ago

            It was my understanding from the article and other commenters that these hoarders were taking the scooters without checking them out on the app, waiting for their charge reward to rise, then checking them out to charge at that point.

            If so it’s the taking them without checking them out part that is clearly the problem here.

            Come to think of it this might present an easier solution for Bird. If the scooter is moved without being checked out, it’s charger reward price should be frozen at whatever it was at that time.

            That can be reset after some period to account for cases where the scooter is moved by a non hoarder, possibly also checking to make sure there are less than N other scooters in a 50m radius to identify those cases where the scooter was moved and dumped on its own and really does need a properly incentivized charger to go find it.

        • dsfyu404ed 5 years ago

          There is a big difference between theft and the "hoarding" described in this article. The scooters are used with permission. It's not much different than bringing a rental back late from a legal perspective. It just so happens that the scooter rental company hasn't set up its business in a way that vies people enough incentive to return them in the desired manner and time frame.

        • kaybe 5 years ago

          Good luck getting the police to do anything about your stolen bike.

          If you're lucky it will end up in the database of stolen bikes and if they come across a stolen bike by accident they might check that database. I haven't personally heard of any bikes retrieved by the police so far.

        • ticmasta 5 years ago

          If your privately-owned scooter got stolen you'd be lucky to get the police do more than give you a case number. Good luck getting a detective to prioritize your case!

          • erentz 5 years ago

            Having dealt with stolen property I know this pain. Certainly if Bird can change the incentives so this behavior isn’t rewarded (which seems feasible, see my other reply) then all the better. But if people are taking 20+ scooters off the street without checking them out I don’t see a problem with reporting this and asking for police assistance. I do think Bird should definitely warn everyone first that they know what is going on and will begin to involve the police if it continues so people can have the chance to avoid that mess.

        • eeeeeeeeeeeee 5 years ago

          You seriously think it’s a good use of government resources to have police tracking down electronic scooters that cost a under $1000? Seriously?

    • sushid 5 years ago

      That’s not a good way to change behavior. You’re essentially hoping that 1) law enformement agencies give a crap about this and 2) chargers learn that there are legal ramifications and change their behavior.

      Alternatively, as others have suggested, you can change the incentives to minimize hoarding.

      What do you think sounds more scalable/feasible?

      • erentz 5 years ago

        Perhaps if the problem is hoarders taking scooters without checking them out first, I think freezing the charger reward price when a scooter is moved is probably the best technical solution. They’ll no longer have an incentive to take them and hold on to them waiting for the reward price to increase which is the problem explained in the article.

    • crankylinuxuser 5 years ago

      > First this is theft, they should assign some folks to track and report this to police.

      Sure looks like a private company dumping their trash on the streets for profit.

      If I was to dump stuff on the street, I'd be cited for littering. And LiIon batteries are hazardous waste.

  • wyldfire 5 years ago

    > * -$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.

    What about giving them a commission on the next day's use of the scooters that they charged? Then they're incentivized to make them available. It might be challenging to balance this against "finding hard-to-spot scooters." Maybe steadily increase the commission on least-recently-used scooters?

andrewla 5 years ago

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.

  • ProblemFactory 5 years ago

    > which means all Bird has to do is provide the police with the address of the hoarder and that's the end of it.

    Literally. Bird can provide the address to the police and they will do nothing, and that's the end of it.

    If you are leaving your property on public sidewalks, and offering a $20 bounty for temporarily stealing it, then you need to fix your rewards system before wasting police time.

  • _rs 5 years ago

    Another thing I don't see anyone talking about is that some people (users) hoard scooters so they definitely have one available to ride the next morning without having to hunt for one (and hope they find one close enough). I've seen this where someone will ride a scooter somewhere and bring it inside behind a locked door so that it will be available in an hour or two when they are leaving. I would expect this same behavior to happen overnight when scooters have a high enough charge left on them to still be useful.

    • reureu 5 years ago

      That's not a new strategy. Car2Go had the same problem. I had multiple incidents where I'd reserve a car, only to go find that it was parked in someone's garage.

  • adrianmonk 5 years ago

    That's how I understand it too.

    As a matter of fairness and good PR, it would be great if scooter companies could find ways to enforce this themselves rather than creating grunt work for the local police.

    One way to do this is with better fraud detection. There are probably many signals, but an obvious one is to look at per-account trends and ask: did the scooters charged by this account have an unnaturally low rate of being picked up and ridden by users? Even after accounting for other variables including demand in that location at that time and charge available on that scooter? If so, that suggests something has prevented people from riding them, so probably hoarding. Then you temporarily suspend or permanently ban the account.

    Of course, it's possible scooter companies know they can solve these things, but they just haven't bothered yet. While they're in growth mode, they may feel their resources should be used solving other problems and Mets prefer just to throw money at the problem by putting more scooters on the street.

    • ticmasta 5 years ago

      I'm pretty confident that

      (A) the police can't barge into a private residence because some tech company points at a phone and says "see! it says my scooter is inside!" - they would still need legal basis for probable cause. When my home was B&E'd and a tablet stolen the police said unless the device reported it was in a public area they explicitly were "not going to go into a private residence to look for it".

      (B) The police should (and probably will) place these complaints at the very bottom of their priority list.

      (C) No current-era start-up that's business model is based around ignoring regulation and existing laws is going to assume responsibility and cost for anything they can displace onto another party or, better yet, society at large 'cause, ya know "disruption".

      • andrewla 5 years ago

        Wow -- that seems really odd; a GPS beacon seems like it is practically the definition of probable cause. I can understand police being reluctant to pursue crimes where the criminal is unlikely to be apprehended, but in this case it seems a straightforward way of boosting arrest numbers since the crime is so clear-cut.

        Regulation and crimes are different things. Regulations are aimed at preemptively preventing potential crimes, usually fraud, by making parties affirmatively establish that they do not have criminal intent before committing an act.

        Crimes are criminal acts -- we added an equal protection clause to the constitution to prevent exactly this scenario, where the police can discriminate on the application of the law. If the police are choosing to deny the protection of the law to a company like Bird then they are liable for a civil suit, in addition to violating their duties as law enforcement officers.

        • stcredzero 5 years ago

          Wow -- that seems really odd; a GPS beacon seems like it is practically the definition of probable cause.

          My anecdote: I was assaulted and had my iPhone taken from me. The police were called, and I had the location pinpointed right in the bedroom of the assailant on "Find my iPhone" on my iPad. No search warrant was issued by the judge, because the judge couldn't understand the information. (Which was being relayed to the judge by the police over the phone.)

        • olliej 5 years ago

          Even if it was worth their time, they would need a warrant. That takes time and resources that would be better spent elsewhere.

          As far as police choosing to deny service: police will always give theft low priority. If the theft is of random items that you’ve left scattered around blocking walkways (in many cases in violation of local ordinances and littering restrictions), then That’s probably going to be way further down the list of their priorities.

      • dragonwriter 5 years ago

        > When my home was B&E'd and a tablet stolen the police said unless the device reported it was in a public area they explicitly were "not going to go into a private residence to look for it".

        That's not because they can't, that's because it would take getting a warrant and your case wasn't important enough to them to justify that even if they had probable cause to take to a judge. (Which GPS location probably would be, with a full explanation including the monitoring services own description of it's operating methids.)

  • stcredzero 5 years ago

    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.

    What if the bounty was influenced by the duty cycle of the scooters? So the more utilized the scooters are, the higher the bounty? What I'm wondering is if there is a way to shape the hoarder's behavior into something beneficial to the user base.

  • mannykannot 5 years ago

    I am not sure that this is a clear-cut criminal matter (Bird knows where the item is, did it make an attempt to recover it? Had it made any attempt to secure said item?), but even if it was, getting the police involved in a problem Bird has brought on itself would just make its already-tricky relationship with municipalities even more difficult.

    • andrewla 5 years ago

      The municipalities have a problem with people committing crimes, namely theft. They can blame Bird for creating an attractive nuisance, but it seems like the security measures they have in place are more than sufficient to give law enforcement the information it needs so that they need to do minimal investigatory work in order to prosecute these crimes.

      Denying Bird the equal protections of the law is a violation of their constitutional duty to, well, not deny anyone equal protection of the law.

  • twtw 5 years ago

    > 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

    This is not my understanding. The scooters I've seen throw an absolute fit if you move them more than ~1 meter without unlocking them via the app.

    I don't know much about this, but I didn't think the scooters had to be returned to any particular place. So hoarders pick them up to charge them and when charged "return" them to their garage/backyard. In which case it's not as clearly theft, they are just returning them to an inconvenient place - but that's fine, they are dockless.

    • andrewla 5 years ago

      What I've seen indicates that after charging they are required to return the scooters to their "Bird's nest", not to an arbitrary location of their choosing.

      It might be that they choose to forfeit the reward for the initial charging by not returning the scooters, but that seems like more of a no-brainer to detect; chargers who routinely do not return their scooters to their nests would be extremely easy to detect.

      Easier might be to check them out as riders, then toss them in the van and "return" them to the charger's backyard or garage; if you have a group of people who are in on this, then it seems like you could make this nearly undetectable by pooling the risk.

  • hndamien 5 years ago

    Is it stealing or is it just dockless?

  • crankylinuxuser 5 years ago

    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.

    • jotux 5 years ago

      Seems easier to fix than that -- just change the incentive. Instead of paying more for scooters that are hard to find or have been dead longer, pay more the faster people pick up, charge, and return the scooters to service. Pick-up, charge, return within 2 hours = $20. If it takes longer than 8 hours, pay $5.

    • eeeeeeeeeeeee 5 years ago

      Just what we need — more sirens. Like car alarm sirens, which are enormously effective ;)

      Which go off randomly and in most cities, you can have one going off next to you and you would think everyone around it is deaf by their complete lack of care over your car being stolen. You think people are going to care more about a...scooter?

    • dawnerd 5 years ago

      I like the sound idea. Could be useful if someone is trying to locate one to rent too. Might prevent people from reserving one. Bird could also offer. Reserved price if you want to have it inside for later use.

    • JetSpiegel 5 years ago

      Just mute your phone, problem solved.

      • yellowapple 5 years ago

        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.

  • cyphunk 5 years ago

    some times I love america

whoisjuan 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

      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 5 years ago

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

        • chrisweekly 5 years ago

          with -> without?

          • amyjess 5 years ago

            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 5 years ago

              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.

      • goobynight 5 years ago

        In my opinion, transportation theft needs to be punished more severely than other theft of the same value.

        Let's put it on the order of years, not just for Bird's sake. bicycles are a unique combination of valuable, vulnerable, and hard to catch the theft of.

        When society does catch someone doing this, we should be putting them away on the order of years. Just my opinion though.

        • dralley 5 years ago

          Years? Are you serious?

          A $500 theft should not put anyone in prison for "years". That's nuts.

          • Scoundreller 5 years ago

            Sure. If it’s your primary mode of transportation and one of your biggest assets, it’s a hard hit to take.

            Setting arbitrary minimums for investigating thefts just means only rich people’s losses are deemed important.

            This is basically a discussiom about negative externalities, and the negative externalities are harsher when you steal 10% for a thousandaire vs. 10% from a millionaire.

          • justtopost 5 years ago

            Stealing a horse used to carry a death sentance. Depriving someone of their transport is more devistating than having your xbox lifted.

    • jedmeyers 5 years ago

      > I came to believe that these negative forces are all around us.

      You mean people putting their own interests first?

      • koliber 5 years ago

        There are many ways of stating what is happening and reasoning why. I tried to shy away from controversy and wanted to point out that there is nothing inherent in scooters that brings bad behavior out. It's just that the scooters arrived so fast caused the bad behavior to also arrive quickly, and that is why it is so noticeable.

        • will_brown 5 years ago

          Well there is something inheriently bad about a private company littering public spaces and walkways with their shitty products.

          I mean if I could litter crap all over the homes of the founders and investors of these companies, what do you think would happen?

  • drpgq 5 years ago

    At the least, there will be plenty of PhD economic thesis material.

  • amyjess 5 years ago

    I find this interesting, because in Dallas the scooters have proven much less problematic than the bikes.

    The bikes could best be described as "a throbbing mass of externalities", but the scooters have largely avoided these problems... except for the issue with people illegally riding them on the sidewalk and nearly running pedestrians over. But that's minor compared to all the problems the bikes had.

    • distances 5 years ago

      I'm not familiar with the bike problem, mind sharing?

      • amyjess 5 years ago

        It started when 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.

        The biggest problem is that bikes were strewn everywhere. People would leave bikes in the middle of the sidewalks, often without even bothering to drop the kickstand. There was a pretty big stink about how a blind guy got injured tripping over a bike that was just laying in the middle of the sidewalk. And they'd throw the bikes down on people's front lawns and all over private property in general.

        And there was this massive glut of bikes. Six companies, hundreds if not thousands of bikes each, mostly concentrated in the middle of Dallas.

        Oh, and then the retaliation started. The population, pissed at the glut of bikes, began vandalizing them en masse. People would saw the bikes in half, throw them into ditches and creeks, and make impromptu art sculptures out of bikes and bike parts. If you weren't tripping over a bike some careless jackass left on the sidewalk, you were tripping over the mangled husk of a bike some vandal threw on the sidewalk to make a point.

        The bikes only stopped being a problem when a) scooters took over most of the demand, and b) Dallas passed a law requiring bike companies to clean up their messes at their expense. A couple of the companies pulled out, and the rest are shrinking their fleets.

  • TheCondor 5 years ago

    Is there an incentive structure that will fix this? Or one that can fix it? I suspect you’d need some sophisticated machine learning that can adjust the incentive model to each users’ specific antisocial behavior. Even then, it’s not clear to me you’d have a net profit, there might be classes of users you just have to ban.

    I wonder how much of the antisocial behavior is subconscious

rcthompson 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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.

    • thousandautumns 5 years ago

      I believe this is related to another principle in Economics called Goodhart's Law, which essentially states that as soon as something becomes a metric for measuring performance, it ceases to be a valid measure of actual performance. Essentially using something as a performance metric creates the incentive to game the system, inflate their values, and generally divorce the metric from the phenomenon it's trying to measure.

    • lordnacho 5 years ago

      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.

    • elvinyung 5 years ago

      Lucas critique is predated by Campbell's law and Goodhart's law.

  • ThePadawan 5 years ago
    • groestl 5 years ago

      A nice, classic variation of this theme, featuring day-care centers: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...

      • ec109685 5 years ago

        Not sure if it's analogous. The day care scenario replaced the guilt of leaving your child at day care too long with a fine that removed that guilt.

        Clearly, you can fix the daycare scenario by 1) communicating to the parents picking up their children late the pain that causes the workers; 2) Ratcheting up the fine so that it is clearly painful to parents; 3) Ban parents who still flaunt the system.

        • yason 5 years ago

          with a fine that removed that guilt

          Rather tha guilt I think the factor in play can be described as cheap overtime daycare. It's actually more valuable to pay $3 and get more flexibility in your day rather save $3 and be on time.

          Need to see the dentist after work but you'd have to first pick your kid and have him sit in the waiting room while you're in? No problem, pay $3, let him play at the daycare and go to see your dentist first, then pick him up.

          • suls 5 years ago

            Isn’t this just a mispriced externality? I.e. if the late pickup fee was actually charged at market rates it would be what, $500? (random guess obviously)

            • owenmarshall 5 years ago

              My child’s daycare prices late pickup at $20 for pickup after time and an additional $10 a minute for minutes 5-10.

              I don’t believe they often use this - maybe only against chronically late parents - but it is in the contract.

            • kaybe 5 years ago

              Mhm, isn't that one of the recommendations for freelancing when you get an offer that you don't really want to do and you don't want to say 'no' to their face?

              Give them a price quote so ludicrously high they either walk away balking or take you up on it, which means that while you're doing the job you didn't want you also get a ton of money and some data on how much your services are valued.

              In this case, apply to the daycarer actually staying late.

        • kenhwang 5 years ago

          My dog's daycare has this system! $35 for a full day of daycare (7am - 9pm). $15 for late pickup (9pm - 11pm).

    • rcthompson 5 years ago

      Yep, that's the example I was thinking of!

  • User23 5 years ago

    This happened in Seattle but with human corpses, back in the early days. It worked out exactly how you’d expect.

    • hopranch 5 years ago

      People hoarded corpses. Weird.

      • User23 5 years ago

        And started making new ones when the supply dried up.

NorthOf33rd 5 years ago

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.

  • aezell 5 years ago

    Thank you for pointing this out. I'm always bemused at the overly complicated technical solutions proffered when a simple "pay a human a decent wage" solves the original problem and lots of other ones, too.

  • dawnerd 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

      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 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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.

    • JamesAdir 5 years ago

      @benji111 Not at all. I'm a casual user and I don't use scooters daily. I think anyone that uses a scooter daily prefers to buying one of his own. Let's say I've taken one from my train station to my home in the evening, charge it, and then ride it back in the morning (creating more income for Bird) and leave it in the train station. It will be used all day long, and I don't expect it to be in the train station when I get back.

      I think that just paying with bird credits reduce the entire "let's make a business out of charging" and will just create a better community.

      As again, I think that this problem is completely solvable by Bird. And in other threads they've mentioned that there are many signals to those "hordaers". I think that Bird just don't want to deal with it since it has enough funding/focuses on market adoption.

      It's the same with Microsoft and piracy tools of Windows. I'm sure they can crack it down completely, but it just don't bother them enough on the bottom line.

    • baybal2 5 years ago

      What I saw in China with Liubike is that middle age people make business "renting" out fully charged Liubikes

    • davnicwil 5 years ago

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

      • sokoloff 5 years ago

        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 5 years ago

          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.

    • JoshuaDavid 5 years ago

      > 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?

      As I recall, Bird uses Xiaomi Mi scooters, which cost ~$500 retail. Even if the credit is high enough that Bird only makes $1 / weekday off the person "renting" the scooter like that, it would still only take 2 years to pay the cost of the scooter, so that "rental" model would probably work fine.

  • goobynight 5 years ago

    Most people don't want to work for credit at the company store.

    • JamesAdir 5 years ago

      It can be completely optional. If someone is doing a great job as a charger for some time, they can be switched to being paid directly.

dchuk 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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.

  • warunsl 5 years ago

    I was in SD this weekend. I did see the pickup trucks you mentioned at night picking up like 15-20 birds/limes. How silly of me. I thought these were the from Bird and Lime distributing the scooters evenly across the blocks!

burlesona 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

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

  • xapata 5 years ago

    Great idea. That'll also motivate chargers to place scooters at useful locations.

stevecalifornia 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

      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 5 years ago

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

  • gscott 5 years ago

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

PeanutNore 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

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

koliber 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

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

      • xapata 5 years ago

        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.

  • IshKebab 5 years ago

    I feel like a better and solution is to see if the scooter is actually used between charges. If it's in their garage obviously nobody can be renting it.

    They may perhaps try and get friends to rent it but if you do it as profit sharing rather than a fixed price then they can't cheat.

    • koliber 5 years ago

      I didn't realize that they are keeping them hostage for that long, through multiple recharge cycles. I thought that people are scooping up scooters, holding them in their garage until the price goes up, recharging them, and freeing them.

      • IshKebab 5 years ago

        Ah maybe they are doing that too - good point. I suppose there is enough information gathered to easily detect those people, though I can't think of a good way to completely stop it (other than not increasing the price over time).

Tiktaalik 5 years ago

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.

  • tapland 5 years ago

    Problem with docked system is that it isn't nearly as handy. We got scooters in my town yesterday and there are multiple in each block already, whereas the bike docks the city has are spaced reasonably close (bus stop distance) but that prohibits people from going to get them since walking to the dock and back takes as much time as the bike commute.

  • adrianmonk 5 years ago

    Hoarding takes a certain percentage of scooters out of play. For purposes of discussion let's say it's 20%. You can solve this problem by adding more 25% more scooters.

    Or you can solve it by adding docks all over the place. But docks cost money to build. And you need them in as many locations as possible; otherwise, your service no longer offers the convenience that is its main selling point. And, like with parking spaces, you can never have 100% utilization of docks. For every scooter, you need multiple spaces in docks.

    So, I would not take it for granted that docks would actually be the most efficient way to solve this problem.

  • sschueller 5 years ago

    Exactly, and it doesn't need to be docked only. Rewards riders if they drop the scooter off at a dock but don't make it a requirement.

  • cycrutchfield 5 years ago

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

    • pavel_lishin 5 years ago

      Works ok in New York. I would obviously prefer a dockless system, but I would also prefer free money, a jetpack and a machine that magically manifests sandwiches on demand.

    • orbifold 5 years ago

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

      • gomox 5 years ago

        Actually the system in Paris barely works anymore.

        • aweb 5 years ago

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

  • randyrand 5 years ago

    Docking sucks. I used to use docked bikes daily and was constantly frustrated.

    I hope they solve this.

  • beerlord 5 years ago

    Who whole point of escooter rental is to be dockless. You need to be able to leave the scooter anywhere.

quickthrower2 5 years ago

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

So much for the environment eh!

codezero 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

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.

kazinator 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

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

    • kazinator 5 years ago

      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 5 years ago

Could you explain a little better on how this works?

  • kristianov 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

      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 5 years ago

        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 5 years ago

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

          • clort 5 years ago

            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 5 years ago

              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.

  • therefore_ 5 years ago

    It seems like Bird has a program that pays people to charge their scooters overnight.

    On paper, it seems like the idea is that if you were in this program and you found a scooter, you could take it home with you, charge it, then drop it off on a curb somewhere the next day and you'd be paid for charging it.

    In reality, they didn't account for how people actually behave. So people are picking up scooters and "keeping" them in their apartments/houses to let the batteries drain more(?), until it gets to a point where charging it would be most profitable.

Waterluvian 5 years ago

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.

  • LowLevelHacker 5 years ago

    A B testing is being done to death here.

    Scooters end up being "left for dead" if they are too far away and the battery is dead.

biophetik 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

    > 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.

    • Normal_gaussian 5 years ago

      Yes, this seems largely trivial for a moderate sized company.

      Will it be perfect? No. Will it be effective? Yes. Will it make a great HN blog post? Absolutely

    • michaelt 5 years ago

        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 5 years ago

        You can catch that too.

        • michaelt 5 years ago

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

          • ApolloFortyNine 5 years ago

            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 5 years ago

                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 5 years ago

                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.

          • SamReidHughes 5 years ago

            From the GPS signal being blocked some time before they charge the scooters.

            • michaelt 5 years ago

              You think vandals never chuck scooters places they can't get GPS signals, like in rivers or metal dumpsters?

  • ec109685 5 years ago

    These hoarders display obviously anomalous behavior. Overtime, Bird will be able to weed out this fraud.

  • CaptainZapp 5 years ago

    The only option I see is banning somehow by law/agreement, and taking legal actions to people who 'steal' them.

    There's something really funny about the libertarian mindset here:

      - Screw regulations! Disrupt! Use public property for private gain, but then
      - Let the hammer of the law crash down and the state deal with those scundrels if there are unintended consequences
    
    Theres' a smidgeon of hypocrisy here, don't you think?
    • dnautics 5 years ago

      The libertarian mindset is pretty clear: There should be a small number of regulations, with a specific scope (e.g. protecting against physical harm and protecting property), which are clearly enumerated so that anyone, across most levels of education, can easily and reasonably determine if the regulation is fair or not.

sizzle 5 years ago

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

  • undersuit 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

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

dalbasal 5 years ago

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

pxtail 5 years ago

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 5 years ago

They should just switch to a docked model.

  • AimForTheBushes 5 years ago

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

alsothrownaway 5 years ago

> 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 5 years ago

    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 5 years ago

      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 5 years ago

        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 5 years ago

          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 5 years ago

            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 5 years ago

              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.

          • adrianN 5 years ago

            I don't see how coordination with the city would have prevented Obike from going bankrupt. As long as the company is still there it can be sued for the costs of removing bicycles. I also don't think that a thousand bikes for a small city is a lot. Surely there are close to a 100k inhabitants in that 90km^2 city?

            • lmm 5 years ago

              > I don't see how coordination with the city would have prevented Obike from going bankrupt.

              They could've been required to put a plan in place (and maybe even some ring-fenced funds etc.) to clear up their potential mess, before being allowed to dump things in public spaces.

      • dagw 5 years ago

        If you can get to wherever you want to go within a 200 metre radius of a city by public transport

        Very few, if any, cities in the world live up to that standard. I've certainly never seen one, and I've been to most major cities in Europe, unless you define 'city' is only a small part of the main city center. And even in cases where there are stops close to where both you are and want to be there is no guarantee that those stops are connected in any reasonable way.

        • CaptainZapp 5 years ago

            Any city > 100'000 pop in Switzerland
            Paris, within the 20 arondissements
            Prague, basically everywhere
          
          Outside of Europe I could think of any Japanese city, as an example

          Yeah, you may even need to take a bus. But then you're moving to those outskirts of town, where scooters anyway can't be found

          • dagw 5 years ago

            Been to both Prague and several cities in Switzerland. You don't have to get far out side the city center before you start finding places with more than 200m to the nearest bus stop.

      • cycrutchfield 5 years ago

        >This argument only holds water if public transportation sucks in a city.

        As it does in most American cities.

    • amyjess 5 years ago

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

      You could also call it "a last-mile role in public transit that's completely inaccessible to the disabled".

      Hell, my disability is relatively minor—I have developmental dyspraxia (a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder)—and I attempted to ride one of these scooters once, and I was so completely out-of-control riding it that I had to stop after a block, drag it back onto the sidewalk, and tuck it in a corner so nobody trips over it. It took me several minutes to stop shaking.

      And they can also cause externalities for people with other disabilities. For example, people throwing them down on the sidewalks can create tripping hazards for the blind (though from what I've seen, this was a much bigger problem with the bikes that predated the scooters than the scooters themselves).

  • gtirloni 5 years ago

    I understand these are faceless corporations but, if you're a concerned citizen and want to make a statement through civil disobedience, why not disable the scooters and leave a note? Why profit?

    I can't see this as poetic justice. Two wrongs don't make a right, as the saying goes.

    • gtirloni 5 years ago

      For the downvotters, I'm not advocating you do any of that. I was writing from the point of view of someone who thinks what's being done is right (people screwing a company that is, in their views, harming their city) and how ripping it off by hiding the scooters and profiting from the charges is kind of messed up.