[joosters]

Bird talk about making transportation more environmentally friendly, yet it turns out people are driving the scooters to and from their locations every day... it wouldn't be surprising if the scooters are traveling more miles in the back of a gas powered vehicle than they do each day in actual rides.

[CalRobert]

Even if the _only_ thing Bird does is enable people not to use parking spaces, and thereby permit the land for such to be allocated to other things (housing, retail, parks, etc.) that is a huge boon. It should also mean reduced vmt (for cars at least) meaning more lives saved, especially those of people walking or cycling since these scooters are in city centres, where cars are especially dangerous.

Similarly one van making grocery deliveries to 20 people is generally a _lot_ better than 20 people driving to the grocery store.

[joosters]

I challenge you to find just one example of land that has been repurposed from parking spaces into something else, because of Bird or some other scooter company.

...and will this land, if it even exists, be larger than the amount of sidewalk space that Bird has repurposed into scooter parking spaces?

[lambda]

Every person who is riding one of these scooters is someone who could have been using some other form of transportation.

Now, some of them may have switched from walking; in which case the small amount of sidewalk space taken up by a scooter not in use is an increase in use of space over the status quo; but not a very big one.

But many of them may have changed from driving. A car takes up far more space than a scooter. For each person who switches, you free up that much more space both on the streets while they're driving, and in parking at their final destination.

Having scooters available won't generally mean people will give up their cars. But a combination of scooters, bike facilities, car shares, buses, trolleys, commuter rail, and so on can make it possible to live in a city without a car, or by reducing a family from two cars to one.

One thing that bike and scooter share systems can help do is solve the "last mile" (or more likely "last quarter mile" or so) problem of public transportation. Walking to the nearest bus stop or train stop, coupled with the wait and then time to reach your destination, is a big factor in how efficient public transit is. Having options for being able to get to and from these places more quickly and conveniently can be a big benefit.

And parking spaces are being reclaimed, especially in cities with high levels of foot, bicycle, and public transportation travel: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/business/when-the-parking...

Anything that reduces the number of people who haul around a couple of tons of metal wherever they go, while burning black gold that funds crazy religious monarchies and failed democracies to do so, seems like a good tradeoff to me.

[saalweachter]

Hell, solving the last mile problem enables a previous failed suburb-car-city pattern, where you drive to a parking garage on the perimeter of a city core and go on foot from there.

[moltar]

In Montreal, restaurants rent curb side parking slots and convert them to a terrace. Very popular.

[CalRobert]

Unfortunately this isn't the sort of thing where you're going to have an obvious answer because the causation chain is really long.

1) Person sits in traffic getting to work

2) Person notices Bird scooters zipping by them

3) Person ALSO notices that their company has to pay them the cost of their parking space if they don't use it (in California at least - see parking cashout law)

4) Person starts taking Bird, and enjoying the cash from their company

5) Person's office now has an extra parking space

6) Person tells coworkers about how great it is getting to work 20 minutes faster and making a couple extra grand a year

.... (wait a year or two)

7) 20 of person's coworkers are now doing the same

8) Office building has more open parking spaces

9) Business leasing office space says "I actually don't care if my office has loads of parking, most of our employees take scooters/walk/transit/whatever"

10) Office building developer says "wow we can make more money if we build the office with more units instead of more parking"

11) Office building development petitions city to reduce legal minimum requirement of parking spaces

12) (couple years later) FINALLY gets the parking minimum reduced after overcoming the screams of NIMBYs who think only a few weirdos are the ones riding scooters "because the scooter/bike lanes are empty". (Related - this is a problem with people thinking bike lanes are unused - turns out a bike lane with 500 bikes an hour will LOOK emptier than a road with 500 cars an hour because, well, bikes are faster (in congestion) and smaller)

13) More of that space can be used for offices, homes, or just not built on, etc.

So if we can design an experiment that can track all of that, awesome, but in the meantime it's messy.

If nothing else, just making parking compete like any other land use reveals that there are people who would happily repurpose the land for other things. You can park your car in the absolute most prime land in downtown Santa Monica for $525 a month. That is CRAZY. I would pay ~$1600 a month for a few of those spots and build a studio in an INSTANT because you could rent that out to a human for about $5,000 a month.

But instead we use taxpayer money to subsidize sleeping spaces for cars, even though there are humans who would happily pay to sleep there instead. It must really suck for the person who can barely afford their $3400 rent at 16th and Santa Monica blvd that their taxes are helping provide affordable housing for cars right on the beach.

[lajhsdfkl]

>I challenge you to find just one example of land that has been repurposed from parking spaces into something else, because of Bird or some other scooter company.

These companies have existed for how long? The point is that if more and more people switch from using cars to using alternative transportation options we may move away from being a car centric society.

[joosters]

These companies have existed for how long?

It was you who chose it as a measure of success for the company! It'd be difficult to find any examples even if the scope was widened to include bike hire schemes, which have been around for almost a decade.

I agree that it'd be great if we could switch from using cars, however I'm not sure that scooter hire companies are the way to do this. Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters? The answer isn't clear, but I'm worried because of the excessive waste generated by the cycle hire companies like Mobike and Ofo. I expect we'll see the same problems with the scooter hire companies too.

[weber111]

> Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters?

Isn't the, well, _whole point_ of the sharing economy to reduce waste by not having everyone own things they only use some of the time?

[joosters]

Yes, but the costs might prove to be too high. For example, if people owned their own, they wouldn't need people driving around town collecting scooters to recharge, and then driving them back to a drop-off point. Likewise, rented scooters probably have a far shorter lifetime due to theft, harsh treatment, abandonment and so on.

[newfoundglory]

It could still be environmentally friendly, depends on the total truck distance vs total scooter ride distance across the fleet (since a truck carries multiple scooters). Harder to work out what kind of transport the scooter miles are replacing, though - if it's walking, then it's obviously not helping.

[eriken]

This is an awesome example of how tricky it is to innovate and regulate towards cleaner environmental behaviour.

[isostatic]

Tax the fuel to cover the total externalities

[usrusr]

Doesn't work if it's teens converting family money into personal money. That is a situation with some surprising similarities to money laundering.

[isostatic]

Why is that a concern to anyone other than the person who pays the bils (presumably the parents)

No different to someone mining bitcoin using their parent's electricity, or someone delivering pizzas using their parents car

[gambiting]

Going forward we'll have to figure out how to tax electricity used for charging electric cars(probably special chargers that have a car-taxed tariff).

[isostatic]

Why? Does electricity used by cars have more externalities than electricity used by a washing machine?

[gambiting]

No, but at the moment(at least over here in UK) the tax on petrol and diesel covers road building/maintenance for the entire country. With this tax slowly disappearing, we will have to find another way to tax people who use the roads, and the best way to do that is to tax the fuel they use as it's directly proportional to their use.

Same reason why heating/farming oil doesn't have this tax, even though it's technically just diesel and your diesel car would happily run on it. Yes, the electricity used in your car is the same as the one used in your washing machine, but it should be taxed more because of its use, exactly the same as we do with oil already.

[lambda]

It seems to me that taxing something based on its use is a pretty much just a way to set up exactly these kinds of loopholes that continually need plugging.

Instead of taxing gasoline to help fill in the road budget, why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight? Then you don't have all of the "electric cars and bikes don't pay gas taxes" stupid debates. An electric car uses just as much (if not more, due to weight) of the road as a gasoline car, while a bicycle uses so much less (and pretty much equivalent to any use of public space like walking, using a scooter, etc) that it makes the most sense for that to just be accounted for out of the general fund.

You could do this based on odometer, or based on automatic toll collection devices, or whatever. Automatic toll collection devices are probably better, because you could also include congestion charges for places where roadway real estate is low and congestion is high, like big cities.

The main reason to have taxes on something like fossil fuels would be for emissions reasons, as there is an external cost being imposed on everyone else by their emissions, and that money could go towards paying for health care costs, providing tax breaks for HVAC systems with air purification, carbon offsetting, and the like. But such a tax should be imposed regardless of use, as any use is going to wind up with the same or similar emissions.

[isostatic]

Petrol tax goes into the exchequer, it's not ringfenced for the roads. Most roads are funded from council tax in any case.

Petrol and VED raises £33b a year, but total road spending (including local councils) is under £10b.

The solution to rationing road usage and paying for their use is road charging (with heavier vehicles paying proportionally more based on axel weight, and different charges depending how congested the roads are) which should pay for the maintenance of the roads, new road building, and renting the land to have the roads on.

[chriswarbo]

This is kind of a perverse incentive though:

- Discourage "bad" thing (driving, drinking, smoking, sugar, ...) by applying heavy taxes

- Occurrence of that thing goes down

- Complain about falling of tax revenue

I'm generally in favour of applying taxes like this, but they need to be based on the actual harm/externalities, and be targetted effectively. Taxing electricity-used-for-vehicles seems easy to game, and only indirectly related to harm. It might be more effective to tax fossil fuels, both for transport and electricity generation, due to their environmental problems; and tax ownership of vehicles to cover expenses (infrastructure, medical care, ...) and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? (Although it's currently perfectly legal to alter odometers, as long as it's not used to defraud someone when selling the vehicle)

[s73v3r_]

Wear and tear on the roads done by driving cars.

[usrusr]

Washing machines don't use roads.

[isostatic]

So you want to tax the usage of roads, not the fuel.

Tax the fuel to cover the externalities of that (pollution) Tax the road use to cover the externalities of that (cost of using the road)

[pjc50]

Why? We're still in the phase of giving out huge subsidies for them. More likely would be a general weight-miles tax to cover repairing the roads.

[isostatic]

How much money do we pay to keep the middle east from devolving into all-out war and keeping a stable oil price?

[pjc50]

Eh? Currently or in the future? The war is mostly already there; while Iran and Saudi aren't directly shooting at each other they've on opposite sides of the wars in Syria and Yemen.

[jorleif]

This is commercial enterprise, not regulation. Taxation could simply make driving them around too expensive.

[jonknee]

The article also notes lots of scooters in the car at the same time, which pretty much negates this issue.