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Comment by ASinclair | Hacker News Reader

> I'm surprised that it was warmer climate cities that underperformed in the US, because I would have expected those to have a much better chance for profit, as cold winter seasons dramatically reduce scooter usage. Too much competition?

I was surprised about this too. Though, from my anecdotal experience, there are a ton of micromobility companies operating in San Diego.

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I recently visited San Diego and was absolutely blown away by how many scooter companies were operating there, and how many unused scooters I saw lying around.

There’s a ton in Denver that’s for sure.

Bird, Lime, Uber/Jump, Razor, and Lyft just off the top of my head. There’s pretty much at least one or so parked on every corner in the downtown area.

I wonder how much of this is because warmer climate cities have greater homeless and/or drug addict problems.

Here in Seattle, I saw lots of trashed Lime bikes and lots of unsavory folks using them, often with enough stuff piled onto them to imply they had forcibly unlocked them and were using them long-term. I ran into a couple of managers at Lime once and they said vandalism and theft was a big problem.

They get junked pretty fast in LA too. Sometimes the bike or scooter will be spray painted to hide the branding, sometimes not at all. They ride well enough unpowered to be useful, at least useful enough to ride back to a better place to start taking it apart. The encampment by my parking lot has a half a dozen of these stacked up in a pile with other peoples bikes. Police don't care, and neither do the companies it seems.

> Police don't care

The problem right there. It doesn’t have to be that way, its a choice.

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