Cars are at least parked in designated spots/areas. Dockless bikes and scooters don't have a designated space to park in; they have to be left on the sidewalk, and they can be dropped anywhere.
Most people, generally speaking, are good people. They put bikes where they're supposed to be, they put scooters where they're supposed to be etc. It isn't just enlightened tech commenters who know that a bike should go in a bike rack.
These scooters need docking stations and the users parking them illegally need to be handed hefty fines, just as a motorist would be fined for parking their car illegally.
The last time I was over there, it seemed like someone was going around and purposefully knocking them over: https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/vp/1cd4296b10424b53...
People just couldn't help throwing the bikes on train tracks, or in the river, or in trees, or basically anywhere that wasn't a bike rack. I don't think I ever saw an oBike in a bike rack.
They pulled out because too many people were dumping bikes in rivers and train tracks, and they weren't making enough money. They were reasonably popular.
Melbourne is a car addicted city though, and it is difficult to get anyone here to see an alternative.
I wouldn't say oBikes were reasonably popular. The only people I ever saw riding them were tourists in St Kilda, and homeless people who had broken the locks off them.
I honestly think we are just used to seeing idle cars all over the place that we don't "notice" them. There's no reason scooters won't be able to "blend in" in the same way over time.
Gotta solve the point-to-point problems of mass transit if you want to kill demand for cars.
I think docking stations are the better solution. Portland has docked shared bikes and they work well. It prevents the littering problem almost entirely, and it could provide a way to keep these scooters charged.
> I think docking stations are the better solution. Portland has docked shared bikes and they work well. It prevents the littering problem almost entirely, and it could provide a way to keep these scooters charged.
I strongly disagree. Docked bikes have been around for a while in most cities, and scooters have been a lot more popular because they are everywhere. If I use a docked bike to go 2 miles I'll spend half my time on either end walking to and from a dock.
The only way to make the docked model work is to have many small docks - several on every block, which isn't going to happen. My suggestion is essentially this (multiple docks on every block) without the need for infrastructure. Cars (which are way less space efficient) have more parking options that docked bikes, which makes 0 sense.
That's probably the root of the disagreement: ubiquitous docks seem perfectly possible to me. I wouldn't advocate for several on every block but I think there's a feasible level where they remain pretty common. Here in Portland the bike stations are close enough that you don't often have to walk more than 2-3 blocks [1]. It would be even easier to create scooter stations, since they're less than half the size of a bike -- small enough to put a 10-12 scooter station on a sidewalk corner without much fuss. That compares pretty favorably with bike stations, which usually need to take up street space (which I'm fine with, but it can create political/logistical barriers).
You make a fair point about the scooters' pervasiveness being important for their popularity. Looking again at the system I know best, Portland has a hybrid system: in the highest traffic areas you can leave a bike pretty much anywhere at no cost, and you can leave one anywhere at all for a $2 fee. To prevent bikes from being strewn about and/or poorly distributed they offer a program where you earn account credit if you return a bike to a station [2].
I think that kind of thing would work pretty well with scooters, since they need to be charged every so often. Bird already has their Charger program [3] that pays you to pick up and charge their scooters. Users could instead earn account credit for returning scooters to stations, especially if they need charging and/or that station is low on scooters. That would allow people to leave them around but would keep them charged and "crowdsource" the effort to cut down on scooter clutter.
[1] https://www.biketownpdx.com/map
[2] https://biketownpdx.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600011157...
If Bird had to pay a fee to get scooters out of impound, I’m sure it would find a customer-friendly way to encourage its users to keep the scooters out of impound to begin with.
It seems like this problem is already solved with cars. If you leave a car in the middle of the street, it will get towed. Then the registered owner has to pay a fee to recover it. No worrying about whether to give a ticket to the last driver, or the owner, etc.
Given that photos of the scooter are required by the apps anyhow, enforcement via a small fine should be trivial.