Electric scooter companies will require permits in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Electric scooter companies will require permits in San Francisco

techcrunch.com

37 pointscoloneltcb55 comments

SF is doing a reasonable job, they should be commended for not coming down hard on the scooters.

The "tech companies are privatizing the streets" meme doesn't make sense. Any scooters are less objectionable than the private cars that killed 14 pedestrians last year. Delivery vans are corporations taking up space on the street. The street has benches, planters, parked bikes, phone boxes, mail boxes, and 20 other "private" things. The public street is for shared use by everyone, not a commercial free zone of only charming activities.

The whole thing is pretty wild. For example the scooters are all unlocked, the app just turns on the electric motor. That seems crazy to me, every kid in the city is going to borrow them. And I've seen a bunch of homeless people kick pushing them down the street. So maybe they all end up in backyards, and the companies go out of business. But maybe I'm wrong and it's a minor problem. They make enough to pay for the loses, and become a nice transportation option.

Long term there's certainly a place for permitting, but it's much better to do permissive experiments than to guess every possible downside.

As a counterexample, NY is still confiscating electric bikes. What a waste.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2298141/are-we-living-golden-a...

Kudos to SF for experimenting.

NY is ticketing motor vehicles operating on bike paths and without the legally required lighting or registration. Comply with the law and ebikes are perfectly fine.

Well the scooters (that I've seen) have GPS, lock the wheels, and audibly threaten you if you try to move them around.

I suspect regulators have learned from Uber and AirBnB that if you take a "wait and see" approach to regulating startups, by the time you decide to regulate they're already big enough they think they can thumb their nose at regulators with impunity.

And while some people might cheer regulators losing power, the regulators themselves are seldom among them.

As a selfish consumer, I LOVE these scooters & want the city to "figure it out" to make them viable ASAP.

Shut up and take my money, ok? ;)

> Yee, noted how he’s heard from seniors and people in wheelchairs who are “being imperiled and inconvenienced because they are having to navigate around scooters and bikes.”

This is one of the more unconvincing statements in this article. The massive convenience win that shared bicycles, scooters, cars etc bring to cities is well worth the "inconvenience" of them being parked on the sidewalk.

I think SF needs to go the route of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen etc and designate MANY, MANY bicycle parking zones on the city's sidewalks.

As long as the companies are decentized to allow their machines to be a public nuisance (fines), they will pass on the cost of poor parking behavior to whomever actually place the scooter in a dangerous / rude / thoughtless place. See the "Mobike Score" [0].

I hate the rhetoric that the streets are being vitiated by shared transportation. There are simple fixes to these problems.

[0] https://mobike.com/us/faq (Mobike Score)

Are you being sarcastic? You really think that Shanghai is a good model for this? Did you not see this photo set?: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversup...

The sidewalk is a public resource. Companies shouldn't be able to use it without paying the public for its usage. A restaurant needs a paid permit just to put chairs and tables in front of their building, why should it be any different for a scooter company?

Perhaps charging companies to put chairs on the sidewalk is not necessary, either.

Well there's an idea...

The public owns the right-of-way, why shouldn’t they be compensated for renting it out for private use?

Only if we do the same thing for cars. And we make sure that the car fine is literally 100 times larger, because cars are much more costly to the public.

We do have many car-specific taxes and fees. Gasoline taxes, registration fees and paid parking all come to mind. That said, I agree with the broader point that we are too car-focused on transportation issues.

More vitally, did you not see this astounding photoset of abandoned dockless vehicles? https://slate.com/business/2018/04/astounding-photos-capture... . They litter virtually every city street, and yet we're somehow willing to ignore the relentless space they waste.

Aside from the fact that one needs to be licensed for them, obey some generally accepted rules of the road, and "abandon" their vehicles in an orderly fashion.

I understand we're going through the growing-pains period with these dockless vehicles, but Lime, Spin, and Bird have no excuses for not taking any precautions against this. Especially Lime since we've seen issues with dockless bikes in China before they were brought here. The reason why these companies don't care is because their bikes/push-scooters are so cheap to manufacturer. They've basically created disposable vehicles.

So I'm glad lawmakers are doing something about this. And yes, of course there are other issues we need to tackle for SF sidewalks with feces and needles.

> and "abandon" their vehicles in an orderly fashion.

Never mind that we set aside large parts of our public space for people to curbside park. If we were to set aside two parking spots per block for bicycles, you wouldn't have any problems with them being left on sidewalks.

I agree, but the point was about the weak comparison in the snarky Slate post.

Like I said, we're in a transition phase in American cities. More people are willing to ride bikes (and e-scooters) these days. And with these changing needs, cities will replace car parking spots with bicycle/e-scooter/motorcycle parking.

Cars are different since 1) they are owned by individual people (if I started a company that purchased a bunch of cars and left them in street parking for people to rent, I think it would be reasonable that I would need a permit) and 2) since they are more expensive, they are far less likely to be abandoned when they fall into a state of disrepair.

oh my god, that looks like the result of a run away bicycle maximizer AI.

Those are photographs of outdoor storage of a bankrupt company's inventory.

If GM went out of business tomorrow, I took can take photographs of lots full of cars, and point out that automobiles are a terrible idea.

> The sidewalk is a public resource.

So is the curb. If we are allowed to park cars on the curb, why can't we park ride-share bicycles there? They take up ~1/10th the space of a car.

In most of SF, curbside parking wastes more space then the sidewalk.

"The sidewalk is a public resource. Companies shouldn't be able to use it without paying the public for its usage."

But they ARE paying for it. Indirectly, by getting cars off the road.

If anything, we should be paying THEM for those overall benefit that they are bringing to society.

I am not being sarcastic. I lived in Shanghai from June of 2017 --> January of 2018 and the pictures you see in that photoset are truly remarkable and thoroughly unrepresentative of the situation on the ground. There are certainly some subway stations at certain times where there are lots of bikes crowded around the stations, but there are also crews of people constantly redistributing the bikes.

Also my intended message in my comment is that companies should indeed pay for the usage of the sidewalk. Users of the equipment should furthermore be forwarded the penalties they incurred on the company's behalf through bad parking behavior.

My buddy with MS would applaud the way you so quickly and callously discarded the concerns of the mobility challenged. I presume you’re able bodied?

This is a think-of-the-children argument. He's not saying it doesn't matter - he's saying that there are solutions to that problem, and that the overall benefit of solving the problem vastly outweighs the inconvenience.

Think of the children arguments are usually fallacies. There were actual complaints made. Solutions like regulations and permits?

This is a “hand wave argument”. Nobody is proposing how to alternatively solve the problem just claiming that there are unnamed “solutions”.

I live in San Francisco. These things are everywhere, the people who ride them leave them anywhere as well. Sometimes just laying flat on the ground even. I hate that they take sidewalk space. Hopefully they'll figure it out... but I'm all in for designated parking areas for these things or taking them off the sidewalk.

We clearly live in a different San Francisco. I see them all over, but have only seen maybe 1-2 (out of hundreds) that are blocking anything or knocked over. And the ones that are laying flat are likely knocked down by someone who dislikes them.

I've found the problem that there aren't enough of them (if you're trying to use them for a practical purpose).

If they're a problem it'll be if someone rides on the sidewalk, but I've personally yet to see that.

Frankly SF has dozens of other nuisance problems such as literal human feces on the street, tents, crack smokers in broad daylight, various types of property crime, before one tipped-over scooter in a 3 block radius would be considered a legitimate nuisance.

I think the main reason why the city is going after these startups is because the startups have money.

Solution is simple: a few big trash trucks going through, picking them up and squishing them like little bugs. As soon as the companies that provide them start losing those multi-hundred to multi-thousand dollar bikes in quantify of hundreds or thousands they ( the companies ) will figure out how to deal with it.

MTA a few years ago dealt with bicyclists ignoring "Dont chain your bikes to X" signs by sending its workers to cut the bikes in addition to cutting the lock chains. This quickly solved the problem.

Everybody complaining about these scooters will get used to it. They're not very inconvenient, they're literally just objects on the sidewalk that you need to walk around. I use them all the time, they're a quick, efficient way to get around. Also fun to ride.

Simple solution: There should be painted areas on the sidewalk to put them, and regulators should be able to fine companies if they're found outside of it, which will then pass that fine onto the user that left it there.

I can physically pick one of these up and move it outside of the box. Who gets fined now?

Where do the boxes get painted?

Your solution is not simple.

Actually Bird just implemented a feature after the cease and desist that requires you to take a picture of your parking job.

Are there unique identifiers that are visible in a photo panned out far enough to show the context in which the bike was parked?

(Leaving aside the fact that you could take the photo at any favorable location within minutes of your destination... or just change the photo metadata.)

It's easy to tell when they are moved, and whether it was moved after the user parked it. The scooters have gyros and accelerometers and clocks in them.

They're motorized vehicles largely operating on pedestrian sidewalks. They're also parked aimlessly on pedestrian sidewalks. That's two steps too far on the 'get use to it' scale.

There's also a need for better hardware security on the scooters themselves; I saw at least two in SOMA this morning missing their batteries.

SF has learned its lessons from Uber (and presumably read up on the bike sharing problems in China).

My take on these scooter startups is that they won't make it very far: https://www.inc.com/alex-moazed/electric-scooter-startups-in...

Carelessly placed scooters are a mild irritation, around the same level of annoyance as over-enthusiastic tree-planting requiring me to duck and weave almost constantly as I walk along the sidewalk.

But the real problem that needs to be addressed is the idiots riding the scooters on the sidewalk, expecting pedestrians to dive out of their way.

i am generally in favor of alternative modes of transportation but these scooters annoy the hell out of me.

everyday i walk down 2nd street there are scooters randomly strewn around. some are upright, some are to the "side" of the sidewalk, but there is also a group of them that look like they're just randomly thrown to the ground.

also sadly sf is just not very friendly to non-car transportation in the first place. so the alternative is people riding these things ride them on the sidewalks, which is annoying for pedestrians.

also a safety issue: i've seen maybe only 3-4 people ride one with a helmet. maybe that's on the user of the scooter, but then again none of the scooter companies seem to address it since that'll probably mean less rides for them.

i support the idea, but they make the city aesthetically more unpleasing than it needs to be and makes my morning walk to work and back more annoying.

Cars are ugly, litter the streets and are exceptionally dangerous.

if you agree with that point why would you continue to encourage that to expand to the sidewalks?

Because every scooter is 1 less uber ride across town, or 1 less car on the road.

What stops people from going around and moving scooters outside of painted areas such that the last user gets a fine?

Motion detectors built into the scooter itself (gyro, accel) with timestamps. Would be very easy to tell.

I just happen to own a helmet, but since these are basically marketed to random people who otherwise don't already have a bike, to be able to grab and go, it's unreasonable to expect people to already have a helmet prepared (unless they start frequently using these things).

The companies really should provide helmets in some way, or we get rid of the cars on the streets.

Undocumented scooters are a problem. They take the work away from us cyclist who haul tourists everywhere.

For those wondering why the permits:

> “This is a basic permitting scheme to allow the professional staff at SFMTA to permit these with sensible, regulatory frameworks and to be able to confiscate unpermitted vehicles or devices,” Sheehy said.

That doesn't really explain the permits except to say they want to be able to take scooters away from people.

That doesn't answer the 'why'.

I have read the article, and still have no idea what specifically the city wans to regulate. What types of rules and requirements are the councilmembers and SFMTA expecting to put in place? Are there specific restrictions that are in the interest of the city's residents, or is this just a money-grab?

Presumably permitting will allow the city to control the amount of scooters on the streets to control public space congestion and ensure that those who operate in the city are following rules regarding placement, education and safety.

Is there an actual problem being solved or is it just a solution in search of a problem?

Title is kind of misleading. They are talking about permits for companies to deploy them for scooter-sharing services, not for a person to operate one.

Ok, we've rephrased it to reflect that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com