[lazerwalker]

Only if you only view the scooters as a "hazard" and an "eyesore". An alternate interpretation (even if you're rightfully skeptical of for-profit venture-funded startups like these) is that the scooters are a fairly sustainable and scalable form of individual transit compared to cars, and a world where scooters (or similar devices) fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure.

[CaptainZapp]

is that the scooters are a fairly sustainable and scalable form of individual transit compared to cars, and a world where scooters (or similar devices) fulfill a useful last-mile role

This argument only holds water if public transportation sucks in a city. If you can get to wherever you want to go within a 200 metre radius of a city by public transport (which is the case in a lot of European cities to begin with) then this argument does not make any sense.

fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure.

That's at least debatable. If it's really part of public transport infrastructure then this should be coordinated with the cities. But the mindset seems more a : "We shit 500 of those things throughout a relatively small city and disrupt the holly bejeezus out of this town". As long as this attitude prevails I neither see this as a valid argument.

[adrianN]

I live in Berlin, a city with relatively good public transport. Being able to go where ever you want to go using public transport doesn't mean that the connection is good. Often it's a lot faster to ride a bike than to take a bus from a train station to your ultimate destination. Scooters can reduce that inconvenience and thus increase the share of trips that are done without cars.

I don't really see how coordination with the city is better than just making the things available and seeing what happens. The city often has poor visibility into where people actually want to go and by which criteria they choose the mode of transport. And adding bureaucracy without clear benefits doesn't seem smart.

[CaptainZapp]

I don't really see how coordination with the city is better than just making the things available and seeing what happens.

It would, for example, avoid that you have 1'000 defunct OBikes in a relatively small city (~90km2) basically cluttering up everything, but being of so bad quality that they're borderline useless. Even if you're stupid enough to cough up the required deposit and download their dodgy app.

Same bikes which need to be removed not even a year later on the taxpayers dime.

It would help to not make entire town districts unafordable and unhabitable in some cities by the likes of AirBnB waltzing in for fun and profit.

I could come up with more examples, Uber being the most obvious.

I see a city as a rather complex organism, with a lot of competing factors and variables, which require careful balancing and calibration. There's a reason that cities prepare master plans about development for the next two decades.

If the burghers believe that change is required it's up to them to initiate such change. It should not be up to some venture capital fueled SV companies, which use public property for private gain, to make such decisions.

[lazerwalker]

If a specific implementation of a bikeshare or scooter share program is borderline useless because the hardware is junk, that sounds like an implementation detail rather than the sort of philosophical argument you seem to be making.

I've been in cities where the bikeshare was borderline useless. I've also spent lots of time in NY, where its bikeshare is both at least as useful as the subway within Manhattan and legitimately the fastest way to get e.g. north or south within Brooklyn.

I'm currently based in Berlin, where I agree with the parent to your comment. Berlin's metro is generally great, but there are a large number of places I go to regularly that are ~10 minutes away by bike but ~30 minutes by public transit, purely because of the way the system is laid out.

If you're going to complain about bikes or scooters cluttering up sidewalks, perhaps the answer is they should have dedicated space on the streets (as with docked bikeshare programs like NY). I'd love to see studies about the effect on number of transportation trips that e.g. a dedicated scooter stand the size of a car parking space has on the flow of traffic as compared to letting that single parking space be usable by cars.

I totally get your point that this is something that should be handled at the civic planning level rather than at SV-funded startups. Copenhagen is probably the clearest example where the city government was able to make massive improvements to the way people move around their city, encouraging non-car transit. That doesn't change that bikes and scooters are arguably a more effective way to move individuals than cars (either private ownership or rideshare), and a shared system has transportation benefits that are unique from the benefits offered by traditional public transit.

[CaptainZapp]

Interesting reply. And I agree with a lot of your points. Starting from the premise that cars are not really a good mode of transportation to get around in a city.

It would be awesome to massively reduce private car use in cities and use the space gained for other modes of transportation and uses (bike, scooter, walking, leisurly get togethers of the neighborhood) and reclaim the space for actually useful things and efficient transportation.

One of my current issues with the scooters (apart from the philosophical objections, which you correctly point out) is that they zip around pavements with speeds, which are definitly uncomfortable (and depending on the riding style menacing) to the actual users of pavements, which are pedestrians. Being able to provide dedicated space for scooters would be a huge leap forward for their use.

I'm privileged enough to have Zurich's public transport system at my disposal, which literally gets you everywhere in 10 minute intervals and that this slightly skews my perspective (Tokyo is also pretty awesome, but I digress). But I do believe that such shifts in policy should be debated and planned and not just brute forced by some outsiders, whose main interest is profit and certainly not the best interest and well being of the citizenship they claim to serve.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

[adrianN]

I don't see how coordination with the city would have prevented Obike from going bankrupt. As long as the company is still there it can be sued for the costs of removing bicycles. I also don't think that a thousand bikes for a small city is a lot. Surely there are close to a 100k inhabitants in that 90km^2 city?

[lmm]

> I don't see how coordination with the city would have prevented Obike from going bankrupt.

They could've been required to put a plan in place (and maybe even some ring-fenced funds etc.) to clear up their potential mess, before being allowed to dump things in public spaces.

[dagw]

If you can get to wherever you want to go within a 200 metre radius of a city by public transport

Very few, if any, cities in the world live up to that standard. I've certainly never seen one, and I've been to most major cities in Europe, unless you define 'city' is only a small part of the main city center. And even in cases where there are stops close to where both you are and want to be there is no guarantee that those stops are connected in any reasonable way.

[CaptainZapp]

  Any city > 100'000 pop in Switzerland
  Paris, within the 20 arondissements
  Prague, basically everywhere

Outside of Europe I could think of any Japanese city, as an example

Yeah, you may even need to take a bus. But then you're moving to those outskirts of town, where scooters anyway can't be found

[dagw]

Been to both Prague and several cities in Switzerland. You don't have to get far out side the city center before you start finding places with more than 200m to the nearest bus stop.

[cycrutchfield]

>This argument only holds water if public transportation sucks in a city.

As it does in most American cities.

[amyjess]

> a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure

You could also call it "a last-mile role in public transit that's completely inaccessible to the disabled".

Hell, my disability is relatively minor—I have developmental dyspraxia (a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder)—and I attempted to ride one of these scooters once, and I was so completely out-of-control riding it that I had to stop after a block, drag it back onto the sidewalk, and tuck it in a corner so nobody trips over it. It took me several minutes to stop shaking.

And they can also cause externalities for people with other disabilities. For example, people throwing them down on the sidewalks can create tripping hazards for the blind (though from what I've seen, this was a much bigger problem with the bikes that predated the scooters than the scooters themselves).