What It’s Like to Be Part of Bird’s Scooter-Charging Workforce in Atlanta

This website has a lot of attention grabbing popups =( It's pretty irritating to be reading an article and get interrupted.

> in other Bird-seeded cities, muggers have followed chargers heading into less-populated areas. Some chargers reported being victims of theft

Reminds me of Craigslist scams. The solution for CL scams was to only meet in public/safe areas, what is the solution for these muggers? Send a officer sometimes to sting sketchy bait scooters?

I wish Mexico City's Mobike[1] had someone running around at night finding bikes - I swear, every day there are less and less on the streets. I've given up even bothering to look for any near me and have gone back to walking to the nearest ecobici stand or calling an uber.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-crime-mobike/bike-...

"Mobike, which recently changed hands for $2.7 billion, equips its bicycles with an electronic alarm that alerts the company when one of them leaves its operating zone."

Yeah that doesn't work - I always rode one to neighbouring areas without even thinking about it, and there is no disincentive. Reporting a bike that says it's on the street, but is actually in someone's yard behind a fence, takes 3 days to get a response in the hope that the bad actor gets their account revoked.

What i do not understand is how these collectors are expected to enter non-public areas to retrieve company property. Railway tracks? Id punish the person who left it there. The rule should be that you leave it in a safe public place. Then again, leave anything in public place for too long and you should be charged with littering. Seeing these things lying around waiting to be picked up is depressing. I wish i could just leave my stuff in the city park and pick it up a few days later.

I've seen an uptick in the city of different pedestrian-ish modes of transit: bikes, e-bikes, skateboards, electric skateboards, unicycles (at least near GT), roller blades, all kinds of other stuff, and now Bird scooters are part of the mix. Anything that helps Atlantans get from here to there without a car is a net positive in my book. The Bird scooters being electric also help combat the downside of navigating a hilly city in the summer heat. I really hope that Bird users can continue to be and/or learn to be good citizens: staying off the Beltline, not ditching the scooters on train tracks or private property, etc.

In Atlanta the scooters are only scattered throughout a small section of Midtown, so while they are a kind of novelty in that area, I've never encountered one outside of that 1-2 mile radius which is mostly comprised of park and Beltline.

Does anyone in ATL know if people are using these on the Beltline? I'm almost certain it's 'not allowed' but the beltline does make for an interesting pairing with the scooters if it wasn't so crowded in the midtown part.

I hope these go away fast. Read about them first on HN and how they were cluttering streets in SF. Now I can see what they mean. I ride public transport to work in Atlanta and find them all over the sidewalks in Midtown. The past month has been much worse. They are literally laying sideways on sidewalks blocking people.

The Atlantic did a good article about this a few weeks ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/charg...

>“It’s pretty funny — there’s a place where someone keeps putting them on train tracks, so there’s like 20 on these random train tracks,” [Shahid] says.

Should put 20 on the tracks and one neatly parked off to the side, so the chargers take the one with least risk. It doesn't look like they're paid more to retrieve scooters in dangerous locations.