The answer (supposedly) is due to widespread anti-littering campaigns and the new ubiquity of trash cans. Why can't there be similar measures for scooters? Painting lines on sidewalks saying "it's OK to park a scooter here!" (painting lines being an option that costs almost nothing and is completed extremely quickly) combined with signage saying "you must park dockless scooters only in the lines or else $250 fine" (akin to only throwing trash in trash bins or else fine).
Scooters aren't inherently problematic, it's the sclerotic municipalities which refuse to adapt to changing circumstances who are the real culprits.
This is why I hate the things.
Let's just say that I disagree.
Sure, ideally, the scooter company should pay some kind of tax or fee to help pay for the infrastructure, but I'm not convinced that it needs to be a special tax or fee, applied only to the scooter companies, beyond typical general corporate income taxes etc. that the scooter company is already paying. Particularly because the infrastructure costs involved are cheap. In my opinion, society is better served by government moving quickly to provide needed services out of a general fund, than it is by delaying action for months or years just so that expenditures are 100% just instead of 99.9999% just. There is a balance...
As for the specific solution you suggested, I think that sounds great, although it isn’t obvious to me that it would “cost nothing”. At the very least, deciding on parking spots for them seems like it would take a lot of a bunch of government employees’ time. It certainly seems reasonable to me to start with a permitting system on the handful of companies, which seems like it would take much less time to implement.
Because when your only hammer is regulation everything else is a nail.
Edit: this isn't meant negatively. If you ask a painter what will make your house nicer they'll tell you to paint it. If you ask an organization that creates and enforces legislation to solve a problem they'll try to legislate it out of existence. Problems are solved with the tools at hand.
PS: A much better solution IMO is to simply pick them up and sell em for scrap. Problem solved.
Pretty sure they're not more unpopular than the human feces and used needles people are also stepping over, yet those haven't been addressed in SF yet. By comparison, Vancouver, New York, Chicago, Miami, and many other big cities don't have such problems, and SF is getting worse every year.
Personally, I'd be fine with scooters if they were never used or stored on sidewalks. Which will happen right after bicyclists start obeying traffic laws...
New York is dirty. It's very dense for the US and the trash collection is on the sidewalk in front of businesses, meaning you are walking around trash on a daily basis.
Chicago is one of the cleanest cities in the US, largely because of the alley system built after the Great Chicago Fire.
I think it’s definitly more of a case of NIMBYism and tech hate than anything else.
With that said, I have heard very few people voice such completely reasonable concerns. Most of the complaints about scooters I've encountered from actual people seem to hinge on them looking funny, especially when in use. And even those are rare. Most people don't seem to care, suggesting that scooters are not genuinely unpopular.
Your concerns are real, and very important. Yet, they don't seem to bear much on scooters in the public consciousness. Have you considered that there may be other factors at work in the minds of most?
If it's one thing entitled early adopters and east bay commuters have in common, it's that they DGAF about the sense of community in SF. So they park these things in the most selfish ways possible. I swear some of them have to be doing it on purpose. I've seen them blocking turn styles at embarcadero station before.
I had a friend visiting from out of state and usually the first criticism of SF I hear is something about homelessness as we pass through the 'loin. But this time we were by embarcadero and it was "did a scooter gang of children all get raptured at once?"
No, feces and shattered glass are not a major impediment; wheelchair tires can usually go over them, and additionally, area taken up by individual instances of feces on the street is measured in square inches, so wheelchairs can typically be navigated such that the wheels avoid touching them.
Yes, tent cities are also an impediment, which is why the city actively works to get rid of them, even implementing short-term solutions that do no good and possibly harm in the long run like having the police and community workers forcibly clear them. Not to mention the literal hundreds of millions of dollars a year the city spends on homeless programs, which is many, many orders of magnitude more than they’ve spent on any kind of regulation of scooters.
It's likely not entirely about the scooters themselves but what they represent and how the process has been implented. The city streets are funded by public money and the companies didn't treat residents with adequate respect or forethought before dumping scooters all over the city.
To me it is a physical manisfestation of startup culture and that's why many people hate them. Why consider the problems in advance, let's just do it and see what happens.
my reaction is perhaps a little overheated, but it's frustrating to see a city that is completely inept at solving its many real problems so quickly and effecively squash something that is at worst a minor inconvenience and at best actually a signifcant boon.