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Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> This is quite important.

I'd go a step beyond and claim that e-bike sharing services like Lime are extremely detrimental to an urban space while adding nothing to mobility and sustainability. They are mainly gimmicks used to litter urban spaces whose only purpose is to serve as a kind of coin-operated joyrides. These operators come in and dump truckloads of things onto the public space, scatter them around, and pretend that this is ok.

This ban has nothing to do with e-whatever, environment, mobility, or even economy. It's getting rid of an abusive practice that was a net loss for everyone involved.

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Here in Romania, THE CARS litter the urban spaces. There are cars parked everywhere: on the sidewalks, on the side of the road in parallel with those on the sidewalks, in bus stops, on all the green spaces, on no-access markings of the roads, etc. I wish people would use more e-scooters & e-bikes. 8-10 rental e-scooters fit in the same sidewalk space a car would occupy and a car can't be moved if the owner isn't there.

> Here in Romania, THE CARS litter the urban spaces.

Cars are indeed a cancer on all urban spaces, and one which has been granted too much privileges for decades.

The Netherlands' Jokinen Plan[1] is widely used as the epitome of idiocy that we get by designing cities around cars.

But the fact is that services provided by multinationals like Lime do nothing to address this issue. People do not drop their cars for ebikes just because a multinational dropped one on the sidewalk.

Also, it's a red herring to portray services provided by multinationals like Lime as synonyms for replacing cars with alternatives. They do nothing of the sort, and it misrepresents the problem. Companies like Lime scatter crap around cities with impunity and expect the public to just suck it up. Any small business owner who did a fraction of the abusive practices of occupying the public space would be fined into bankruptcy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan

> People do not drop their cars for ebikes just because a multinational dropped one on the sidewalk.

I own a car. About 2 years ago I bought a an escooter and since then I almost never used the car, even in winter (with snow and below 0°C cold).

I was hoping that car users would at least try a rental ebike/escooter, see how easy it is to ride anywhere, park anywhere, and then buy and start using their own.

It didn't happen. It seems there is some very important reason they prefer cars, despite how much it costs and how difficult it is to find a parking spot. I really don't know what that reason is. Someone please enlighten me!

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