Bird Scooters Ditch SF
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Excerpt1:
> “It’s difficult for us to justify operating in a city where we don’t make money,” Maggie Hoffman, Bird’s vice president of city growth and strategy, told me, adding San Francisco’s fines are five to six times higher than in any other city in which Bird operates. “San Francisco has the most onerous regulations and is the most difficult to operate in of the hundreds of markets we operate in globally.”
Excerpt2:
> Hoffman cited cities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and the Middle East that are far easier to work with and more encouraging of scooter companies and business in general.
>
> “San Francisco,” she added, “is very much the anomaly.”
Excerpt3:
> The city’s treatment of scooters compared to far more dangerous and obstructive cars is particularly stark.
>
> Take wrongly parking a scooter versus a car. Leaving a scooter on its side or not properly locked to a bike rack can cost the company that owns it $150, a fine that can double if it’s not moved in two hours. Even in the middle of the night.
>
> Parking a car across a sidewalk, blocking passersby far more than a scooter, risks just a one-time $108 fine. In fact, parking a car in a fire lane, a crosswalk or an intersection won’t cost as much as badly parking a scooter.
Excerpt4:
> “It was hard to tell whether the city was really serious about Vision Zero and about reducing car usage when there were so many obstacles to car alternatives like ours,” he said.
Big company = easy target