San Jose unveils proposed scooter regulations
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
What a world we live in, where a company cannot operate as it would like to. As long as no one is getting hurt, why can't a company choose its target demographic? Where does it end? Do all movie theaters have to show films in all languages? Are Whole Foods and starbucks required to open discount price stores for the same goods in "communities of concern"?
I lived in San Jose for 5 years. I was flat broke, and living in a rundown 12-people-in-a-5-bedroom apartment, in the most violent and dangerous part of town. San Jose still has an immense amount of issues with drugs, violence, gangs, and a lack of pedestrian friendly streets. The city's priorities, much like San Francisco's, are laughably backwards.
Ironically, this is exactly what caused the current de facto local monopolies for broadband. Until Congress made the practice illegal in 1992, cities would grant legal monopolies in exchange for funding various community access channels, serving all neighborhoods, and offering a basic tier of service at very low, regulated prices. The legal monopolies are gone, but the effects of that municial-government idiocy persist to this day.
Cities love granting monopolies in exchange for various concessions, because it’s free money to them. The citizens are taxed indirectly through suppression of competition. It’s a practice that is well-intentioned but misguided. Cities do it because it hides the cost from residents. But it also hides the cost from the government—they have no idea how much extra their residents will pay to secure these social benefits.
> The other possibility is a free-for-all, in which companies overbuild (house is serviced by multiple cables from multiple companies) in the densest areas, and the sparse areas get no service at all.
Which is fine. It takes very little competition to outperform a government built or regulated monopoly service in the U.S. Mobile devices are a dynamic market with really just two choices of operating systems, so is ride sharing, search engines, etc. If cities instead made it cheap and easy to hang wire on poles, most urban/suburban areas could probably have at least two choices.
If building service to sparse areas is a concern, the government could step in to do it. What we do now is force providers to build in economically unviable areas in order to get the right to build in economically viable areas. That destroys competition in the economically viable areas by dramatically raising the cost of entering the market. It would be better to just let competition happen where it can, and let the government step in where it needs to.
This even happened in the past with wired phone service in some rural parts of Northern California. It worked just fine, with anecdotally better service and prices than the monopolies (AT&T or GTE).
Some of these success stories are more luck then repeatable solutions.
I think you misunderstood. The tax would be on the private provider (serving profitable areas) and for the benefit of the public provider (serving unprofitable areas).
> If the city service tried to operate city wide, the private company would sue them claiming they can't compete.
The idea of taxation instead of monopoly power is not having the city operate anywhere a private operator would, in the first place.
The argument is that using monopoly power distorts the market to such an extent that it leads to gross inefficiencies and that more overall value can be extracted through competition and taxaction.
> The company may sue even if the city is only trying to extend service to the underserved for the same reason.
That part I don't follow.
Firstly, the notion that lawsuit against an entity that could legislatively preclude one is possible, is questionable at best. We are, after all, discussing, their existing use of monopoly power.
Secondly, even considering suit as a metaphor for seeking any kind of recourse (other than lobbying for not getting taxed at all), why would they want to?
> Some of these success stories are more luck then repeatable solutions.
I assume by "luck" you mean that the eventual circumstances were unforeseen by the original architects of the solution. I admit that I can conceive of a situation where that's at least theoretically possible (unexpected growth "in town" creating enough profitable customers to support an otherwise failing teclo), but I'd say the burden is on you to show that "some" isn't vanishingly few or even zero.
Particularly for low income people, hiring a scooter is often a better solution than buying, maintaining and storing a full size vehicle.
Public transport is another option, but it doesn't effectively solve the transport problem for most people. Scooters are significantly more practical.
As an extreme example, if every well-off bus user switched to using these scooters instead, the only bus passengers left would be the poorest. If the service offered discounted tickets for the poor it would be losing money for every customer.
I'm not claiming that the status quo should be propped up, but that these sorts of consequences need to be predicted and managed. It seems like this example has a ring of truth when talking about cars rather than scooters.
Laws that in my experience the taxi drivers completely ignored with no consequences. At least with Uber they pick you up before they find out the destination.
You can make laws, but self-preservation always trumps some misguided attempts by government to legislate “equal access.” When certain areas of town are higher risk than others, it’s immoral to require someone to service that area. I bet a member of city council never once visited that street at 3am, yet those same jackasses are those trying to require a private business owner/employee to put their life at risk in order to assuage their social justic guilt.
The people that can afford private taxis and Uber generally would have a smartphone. The ultra poor aren’t riding in taxis, but taking the bus. We shouldn’t be designing society around the idea that every single person deserves every single product or service available to the general public. Some people won’t get to ride in taxis; that’s just life. Some people can’t eat in restaurants— that doesn’t mean restaurants ought to be required to have a “low income menu.” Access to a taxi or a scooter isn’t a human right, it’s a luxury.
They can, as long as they're not using public resources or imposing significant negative externalities. On the other hand, if you want to be part of the municipal transportation infrastructure, the stated goal of these scooter companies, cities may want a quid pro quo for that.
But there are a number of important differences between a person driving a private car for personal use and a company operating a business. An important one being that the business can possibly monetize the externalities, while individuals living their lives generally don't.
As an example, when I park my bike at a municipal rack, I don't make any money directly from that. I at most use one space, and on average use zero. But if I can make a profit from putting a rental bike at a municipal rack, I have an incentive to consume as many spaces as are profitable. On average I might use hundreds.
Although an individual might be able to extract value, as you point out, the scale would be small.
A business, especially a VC-funded one, is much more likely to be able to scale this on a massive level, across many markets.
Things sure sound funny either way.
You seem to have missed this line
> San Jose resident Doug Smith said he fell and hurt his shoulder after being hit by a scooter speeding outside Martin Luther King Jr. Library in March.
However, like the proverbial hole in the bucket, this then requires additional pieces of legislation added over time to keep it working. In this case, to stop newer entrants from cherry picking the profitable customers.
The biggest advantage of direct explicit funding (which can be provided through competitive tendering) is that it allows competition to work better. The other advantage is that the cost of achieving the desired social outcome is explicit as a budget line item, rather than hidden as indirect costs, allowing for a more informed debate about what social outcomes the community wants.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
And in NYC, taxis and psuedo-taxis like Uber and Lyft are indeed paying fees: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/02/new-york-surcharge-uber-...
It's politically much harder to impose fees like that when people are used to something being free. But there's no reason for them to repeat that mistake with novel things like scooters.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defe...
Cars don't need to drive on the sidewalks, in other words, because they already took over everything else (and in doing so relegated all other transportation modes to what was left).
In the meantime, levy huge fines on anyone who uses the scooters irresponsibly so we can quickly set the precedent of socially acceptable scooter usage.
Furthermore, if you regulate everything before it has time to flourish, you deny society all the benefits of any tech that would have developed.
Also, it's short sited to shut down bus routes that don't go directly to your house. Just because it doesn't go to your specific neighborhood (yet) doesn't mean you can't benefit. Increasing bus service, decreases pollution for everyone (c02) and may even reduce the amount of traffic on your commute.
Are we talking about the same thing (monopolies on public transport) here? The whole point of granting the transit authority an monopoly is so they can exercise that monopoly to transfer funds from the more profitable routes to the less/not profitable routes. If private companies are allowed to run their own buses, they can undercut the transit authority's fares, because their fares don't include the "subsidy" to the other routes.
>Also, it's short sited to shut down bus routes that don't go directly to your house. Just because it doesn't go to your specific neighborhood (yet) doesn't mean you can't benefit. Increasing bus service, decreases pollution for everyone (c02) and may even reduce the amount of traffic on your commute.
Obviously having some buses is better than no buses, but what the monopoly is trying to ensure is that everybody can ride the bus, regardless if they live in the outskirts or downtown. You can disagree with whether or not it's the government's job to guarantee public transit for everybody, but that's the logic for why the laws were enacted.
As pointed out in a different sub-thread, using monopoly power to effect this transfer can be detrimental to consumers.
The more traditional wealth transfer power of governments is taxation, which seems like a more straightforward method.
so I guess if they damage non-city property, tough shit?