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Comment by compsciphd | Hacker News Reader

dockless bicycles have taken over San Jose. They are worse than scooters by far.

The only advantage I can see bicycles having over the scooters is not being "dead" due to battery issues, but plenty of other things can also take bicycles out of commission. They also take up more more room and can't be packed as close together.

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I've seen the same in Berlin and I think they are great. The difference might be that most streets already have a fair amount of bikes, so the dockless bikes are nothing out of the norm.

Is the act of leaving a dockless bike just sitting there on the sidewalk not illegal? Is it not littering?

do scooters require more juice for a short trip, or more current draw, than a portable usb-c battery pack can provide?

if not, scooters should have external ports for BYO power.

It requires ~250W. Most portable USB batteries you can buy put out like 20W or so, this idea isn't really feasible.

I think the Gen2 scooters will have solar panels on the standing pads to slowly recharge during the day when not in use.

No chance. The batteries are 280 Watt hours, solar cells generate about 20 Watt hours per square foot, and the standing pads are probably no more than half a square foot (being generous) so even if you could have an edge to edge panel it would take 28 hours of direct sunlight to fully charge. Even if they were perfectly positioned all day they wouldn’t get more than 7 hours of sun, only 3-4 of those at peak power so it would take something like 6 days to charge. That’s assuming they’re aimed in the right direction and not blocked. Riding them covers the panel and gets them dirty which reduces efficiency and adding the panel increases the cost and maintenance of the scooter considerably.

What if they were free to manually ride but used like 20% of the energy or so to charge the battery until it was full?

Would something like that be feasible?

20% sounds like it'd be a lot of drag. I don't know if regenerative breaking would make sense in terms of cost and energy output but, that seems more feasible than a constant drag of an alternator hooked up to a wheel.

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