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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

There’s no way to profitably run a company like Bird without foisting the externalities on someone else. Their model is literally to dump a bunch of electric scooters on the side of the road with QR codes on them and just hope for the best. Of course they’re going to get fined when their property is left blocking driveways, of course they’re going to be expected to clean up the piles of scooters that get thrown in the bay, of course their scooters are going to get stolen. Yes, all of that is ruinously expensive to deal with - it’s not a viable business plan. It’s not “onerous regulation,” it’s holding the company accountable for the costs of its business model.

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There are places in the world where citizens have high levels of concientiousness.

Obviously there's a threshold problem in most of urban USA. There's sufficient pedestrian concientousness maybe in Salt Lake City or some small New England city. Definitely in Japan. Probably most Swiss communities, but beyond that there's just too many sketchy people. It only takes 1 in 100.

"foisting the externalities on someone else" is how all profitable transportation works though. Uber clogs the streets with circling cars waiting for pickups. private cars are scattered all over the streets and are the single most dangerous thing in a city. cars, trains, taxis, buses, everything all create huge amounts of noise pollution. airplanes and gas powered cars create air pollution.

just pushing through and providing enough value to the demographics who make the laws until people accept your negative externalities as "normal" or "acceptable" is totally a viable business strategy, and holding companies accountable for the costs of their business is definitely not the norm. i don't necessarily like it, but you can't say bird has more negative externalities than any other private transport option in the city. they're just new and different.

Bird's big mistake is they chose a particularly stupid variety of a business plan here - if they'd done something like selling the scooters for cost but making people pay a subscription to use it or something, they'd be free & clear, because what people did with their scooters wouldn't be Bird's problem. Bird's mistake is that every Bird scooter is owned by Bird Inc., which means Bird Inc. is held accountable for every stupid thing someone does with a Bird scooter.

Why would anyone buy a scooter that they have to pay a subscription to use? Scooters without subscription fees are available for purchase.

I don’t care, that’s not the point. The point is Bird retained ownership of all its scooters, and so it retained liability for its scooters, which is why it’s having to pay fines. If they’d managed a business model that doesn’t maintain a giant scooter fleet and all the liability on their books, this’d be a different story.

not to mention, there's a method for solving this problem that exists. Bird probably just didn't want to do it because of cost.

I'm nyc, citibikes don't have this problem; because you have to park them in a dock, thus releasing the bike back into the care (and liability) of the citibikes program (which isn't a problem, because now the bike is in a dock and not strewn about like trash).

These scooter companies are a menace, and the model they operate on is "take it as far as we can get away with at lowest possible dollar wherever will allow us to get away with it".

Makes me wonder how much they paid the chronicle for this piece, frankly.

Ever notice how bikes parked into docks has been an attempted business model since like the 1960s? Note the absence of such bikes today in pretty much all cities worldwide ...

Docks make the business model unrealistic too.

I mean, I'm French, I know we're weird. I'm also from La Rochelle (half of me is) and our most beloved mayor decided to dump 350 yellow bike all around the city in 76. Free to use.

I've lived in Paris, La Rochelle, Rennes, Lille, Nantes. I do not remember one city I've lived in without docked bikes. And La Rochelle is quite small, with a population of 80k.

> Note the absence of such bikes today in pretty much all cities worldwide

I do not note this. My city has docked bikes, and has for a decade. They’ve been in NYC for the same period, Portland has them as well, and I seem to recall seeing them in New Orleans, too. I believe Boston also has a system. Hell, even Riverside had one, last time I was there. Come to think of it, I’m struggling to think of a city I’ve been to recently that Didn’t have a docked bike share.

Chicago has them.

And yet, I see twenty Lime bikes in London for every Boris bike I see. Docked bikes are not a popular business model, not even when heavily subsidised.

People lease cars all the time. Is that not essentially the same thing?

Too bad. The state puts its thumb on the scale in every market. Others have commented on cars below. If the city wanted to encourage scooters it would have. In America people actually try to build a Bird. Elsewhere they just don't bother. Thankfully there are other states in America that don't take the existence of business, innovation, or material prosperity for granted.

Not to mention the extra costs to the healthcare system. These things are not safe!

In SF, _what_ healthcare system? Wouldn't surprise me if some HMO is bankrolling Bird and waiting for those sweet, profitable trauma cases.

How does an HMO make money from trauma cases? My understanding is a member of the HMO seeking medical treatment will cost the HMO money, and their only source of revenue is insurance premiums.

The business model of health insurance it's generally about minimizing the amount of avoidable medical care dispensed, not maximizing it.

We talking about cars or scooters? :D

Yeah, I guess they do add costs to the healthcare system since they only injure their drivers instead of outright kill them like cars do to 46,000 people in the US every year.

Falling from an electric scooter is often fatal.

The lack of helmets is totally absurd.

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