Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I can tell, it is exactly the Uber "I do what I want and fuck you" model. It's really disheartening to see startups still cargo culting that.

I honestly didn't have a big issue with powered scooters until they turned into VC-funded litter all over my city. They were clearly in the category of "experimental vehicle", like e-bikes, the tourist GoCar things, Segways, and whatever those one-wheeled feet-wrapping things are called. They were small in number, their users were responsible participants in traffic, and it was interesting to see where they went to. And I'm a big fan of the Go Bike bike sharing program, which worked closely with the city to integrate well into the urban environment.

But suddenly, a few different startups seemed to believe that they could turn the sidewalks into their place of business, turning a lot of untrained goofs loose with a powered vehicle. Even if I were chill about the probably-illegal taking of public space for private profit (and I'm not), the sudden rise in dangerous idiots on the streets is a big deal for me.

Now my general feeling with these clowns is "Oh, fuck me? No, fuck you." I'm generally very pro-entrepreneur, but if my city bans these clowns, I will shed no tears. Let them serve as a warning to future overly entitled entrepreneurs.

I think absolutely the opposite: this is a hugely positive disruption in North American cities. Car-centric urban design is such a disastrous problem in so many ways: land use, pollution, cost and so on, that we need massive and immediate disruption that's not going to happen from government fast enough.

The amount of land used and traffic problems caused by these scooters is nothing compared to how much public space is dedicated to moving and storing cars for personal use and is a actually a massive improvement. Additionally, if you've seen their actual use patterns in cities like Washington D.C., because of their dock-less nature and ease-of-payment they are being used by lower-income populations that don't use bike share or other similarly centrally planned options.

Scooters are hugely benign civil disobedience that are helping with what is probably the biggest problems in the world: pollution from personal transportation, whether carbon or localized exhaust. I am cheering them on completely and hope to see more similar disruptions that help the world and make investors rich.

Car-centric urban design certainly needs a change. I haven't owned a car in 20 years, and would love to see improvement. But I don't think you can have "massive and immediate disruption" to urban design. It's literally set in concrete. And as I said, I'm all for people trying out scooters.

That scooter-spam startups are a smaller problem compared to cars does not make the problems not exist. It especially does not remove the problem of entrepreneurs shifting negative externalities of their business models on to anybody who doesn't protest loudly enough.

> I'm generally very pro-entrepreneur, but if my city bans these clowns, I will shed no tears. Let them serve as a warning to future overly entitled entrepreneurs.

Whoever comes up with a solution that puts both business that externalize their costs and governments with a penchant for heavy handed regulation on the losing side will get my vote.

Honestly, I have a lot of hope that heavy-handed regulation is on its way out. I was at Code for America for a while, where I got to see how leading governments are starting to adopt a lot of the user-focused, iterative techniques that are common in the tech world.

It will take a while, and it should. Governments can't go bankrupt, and they can't just serve the easy customers. That means they can't take as many risks. But part of the reason that user-focused, iterative approaches are now so dominant in the tech world is that it's a great risk-reduction approach. Computers and digital communications make it possible to have much more nuanced regulation, and to be more experimental. Even for governments.

The people riding these didn't just show up to your city. You likely also share the road with them when they're driving their car home from work. We don't ban cars because some people are bad at driving.

We certainly ban cars from driving and parking on sidewalks. We ban people turning sidewalks into commercial parking lots. And we have a whole evolving system of rules and customs worked out over the last 100 years around how to make sure cars interact safely with everything else, including licensing and policing.

Also, quite a few of these people literally did just show up to my city. Some of the most hazardous users are pretty obviously tourists.

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