[tetromino_]

> If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?

First, businesses which attract antisocial asshole clients do get extra scrutiny and burdensome regulation; the classic example is bars.

Second, the difference between Hertz and Bird is the rate and visibility of antisocial behavior. The overwhelming majority of Hertz clients park their rentals no differently than any ordinary car driver; and a Hertz rental parked illegally is hard to distinguish at a distance from any other car. By contrast, a very large fraction of rental electric scooters appear to be parked illegally, and they are very visible (due to the color scheme, and because privately owned electric scooters are not very common in most parts of the US and never get dumped in the middle of a road, lest they get vandalized or stolen).

[noirbot]

Sure, but to the OP's point, isn't that because the US has subsidized car parking to an insane level? Most parts of the country have literal legal minimum amounts of parking spots for cars you have to have to be able to run a business or build a house there. There's none of that for bikes or scooters.

I'm not trying to excuse Bird here - I'm annoyed by scooters parked in the sidewalk like anyone, but going "car people are so nice and not antisocial" is kinda pointing at the underlying unfairness. If we spent/regulated billions of scooter parking spots, Bird wouldn't have an issue either.

[Semaphor]

I live in a historical city center in Germany. There aren’t many parking spaces, and sidewalk parking is illegal anyway. Scooters still end up on the sidewalk and in my way. I really wish there were some stronger regulations.

FWIW, I don’t own a car at all.

[noirbot]

Sure. I'm not trying to say people can't be assholes or aren't being assholes. If the area is walking only with no place to park anything, then that should be enforced. But excusing car drivers just because everything has bent in their favor legally seems to miss the point.

Practically speaking, at least in the US, there's rarely any good or approved place to park anything but a car anywhere. I'm upset with the scooters, but I'm also upset with bikers locking their bikes to trees, or people parking motorcycles in unexpected places. Half of the time there's dedicated motorcycle or bike parking, some asshole parks their car there and isn't fined/towed.

Point being, there's a lot of money behind making it incredibly easy to take a car to anything in the US, and while other options are regularly annoying in parking places that aren't allowed, I've seen some moves over the last few years to make dedicated scooter parking or expand bike parking to accommodate, and that's a net good. It's certainly not that Bird is part of some righteous civil disobedience program by leaving scooters in the middle of the sidewalk, but the scooter plague has done more to improve bike/personal scooter parking than years of pressure from bikers, so I'll take it.

[nytesky]

Bird users are welcome to pay for parking like most cars.

But the biggest difference is rental cars need to be returned to a designated place like an airport or car dealership. Or they get picked up. They are never just abandoned on city streets, and even more rarely parked illegally.