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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

This is litter and vandalism. Why aren't people calling the police/city to remove this junk from the streets, and fine the owners for illegal dumping?

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There seems to be no problem, however, with devoting a majority of most city streets to the abandoning of unoccupied passenger vehicles, and littering the sidewalks with signage of instructions to motorists regarding the lawful abandonment of their vehicles. That is more offensive than pay-to-unlock scooters on the sidewalk and should be addressed first.

>There seems to be no problem, however, with devoting a majority of most city streets to the abandoning of unoccupied passenger vehicles, and littering the sidewalks with signage of instructions to motorists regarding the lawful abandonment of their vehicles. That is more offensive than pay-to-unlock scooters on the sidewalk and should be addressed first.

This is a nonsensical, straw man argument that is propped up over and over in these threads. I pay taxes and registration fees to the state every year for the privilege of using public roads (and parking on them). I pay the city for parking. I pay CDOT to use the bridge. We have laws regarding the proper and improper usage of motor vehicles, with appropriate law enforcement to implement those rules.

None of this exists with these scooters. It's just another bullshit VC play at making money off arbitraging public safety and wellbeing in an environment they don't have to deal with. The hubris has become absolutely disgusting.

I pay my share of the burden for your bridges, roads, traffic cops, traffic lights, parking spaces, and the public health cost for your parking too. It's no straw man- the burden of automobile traffic on our society for the benefit of a few auto manufacturers is hugely out of proportion. I applaud any dent that any public or private entity can make into alternative modes of transportation. Is it a cash grab? Sure, in some respects. But if it results in a widened bike lane that scooters can share too, or a way for me to bike around the city without getting a car door to the face or worse, bring it on.

Dodging a parked scooter on the sidewalk is no more burdensome to me than having to step around every parking meter that crowds the sidewalk presently.

I live in Nashville and the city just impounded 411 Bird Scooters which effectively caused them to halt operation temporarily[1]. While Tennessee the state is conservative, Nashville the city is quite liberal.

The biggest concern that citizens and the city has is the mentality that when your done with the scooter you can just leave it in the middle of the sidewalk or anywhere you please. Bird needs to be proactive about it, and start charging fines and fees to users who don't properly put the scooters away. Ultimately Bird needs to setup "nests" pod that are designated pickup and dropoff points to fully address the problem.

[1] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2018/06/07/bird-scoote...

building off beenBoutIT's comment later on down the thread, someone in a city with an eager police force could maybe in theory - not giving any suggestions - kick over a stand of Lime scooters and run away, making them flood the police with calls, and irritating them enough to pull strings and make the city ban them. Just try to do it all at once, so the calls are bunched up temporally and interfere as little as possible with legitimate 911 calls.

Just in theory. I have no opinion on these scooters.

No it isn't. We give free space to cars, trucks and bicycles. Why not scooters? Is it because they are owned by a corporation? If so should rental cars and car shares be banned?

We, as a society, have decided to give space to cars, trucks, and bicycles, generally in a controlled fashion.

If I randomly leave any of them in the middle of the street or sidewalk, they'll be ticketed, towed, or removed.

> We, as a society, have decided to give space to cars, trucks, and bicycles, generally in a controlled fashion.

Exactly. To be fair though this was only after a fair amount of vehicular chaos.

In the last 24 hours I've had to dodge 5 illegaly parked cars in the bike lane. Only one had a ticket. If you randomly leave any of them in the middle of the street or sidewalk there are very narrow odds that they'll be ticketed, towed, or removed.

Typically individual people are limited to ~1 free car and bike space, and many cities treat commercial vehicles differently from privately owned ones. If you park your ten cars on the street, or if you park your ten cars on the street and start a car rental company, or if you park your commercial-plates delivery truck on the street overnight, you will quickly run into conflict with your city government. Rental cars and e.g. Zipcars have their own dedicated parking spaces, usually on private property, and docked bike rental companies rent curb space from the city.

Amortized over the full usership, each scooter-user is using far less than one-scooters-worth-of-sidewalk.

You want to treat any space hogging the same way you treat tail latency. Not as p50, but as p999.

So the question is not "how many people are inconvenienced on average?" but "how many people are inconvenienced during peak times?" If the second figure is non-insignificant, you have a problem.

Gamers and UX designers understand this. ANY latency peaks or waiting time hikes are detrimental.

> Why aren't people calling the police/city to remove this junk from the streets

This is the Oakland police we are talking about here, who are recently coming off a number of major controversies including child sex trafficking. Getting them to show up for a robbery is a challenge. 0% chance they show up for dumping calls (there is a dumping spot a few blocks from our apartment people have been trying to get OPD to watch for months, to no avail).

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