SFMTA Offers Two Permits for One-Year Powered Scooter Pilot | Hacker News Reader

SFMTA Offers Two Permits for One-Year Powered Scooter Pilot

sfmta.com

40 pointscoloneltcb27 comments

> In its application, Scoot demonstrated a strong commitment to safety. For example, the company proposed to educate and train its users in safe scooter operations with mandatory instructional videos, helmets included in rentals and free in-person trainings.

I've often wondered what would happen if bicycles were invented today. Surely cities would ban them immediately for being unsafe ("exposed chains and gears? what if a child put their finger in there?!") and they would completely fail to gain traction, right?

Not really an accurate comparison. A better one would be if people left their bikes randomly all over the street & sidewalks at scale.

Welcome to Dallas: https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/19/dal...

>I've often wondered what would happen if bicycles were invented today. Surely cities would ban them immediately for being unsafe ("exposed chains and gears? what if a child put their finger in there?!") and they would completely fail to gain traction, right?

It just comes down to power. Bicycles are fundamentally different because they are human powered. A powerful adult cyclist can produce maybe 500 watts at a full sprint for a few minutes. Compare this to an electric scooter which gives even a small child nearly 1 kilowatt of power, making it quite easy to hurt themselves or others. It's just a different level of responsibility, like the difference between firearms and archery.

The city / journo complaints about them don't really seem to be about the electric part of the scooters & bikes, but the dockless nature of them.

Dockless bike shares in China have had similar problems as scooters in SF. This isn't about scooters vs bikes. It's about clogging public spaces with private property, and how a sudden influx of new vehicle operators need to be trained to not constantly violate traffic laws (like riding on the sidewalk).

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversup...

Helmets! What a joke. How many people get injured on a freaking scooter because they didn't have a helmet on?

SFMTA boss Ed Reiskin hates uber/lyft/bird/lime/jump etc. as an afront to his authority so this is outcome (Skip, Scoot) is unsurprising.

anyway I suppose its good they are allowing 1k to 2k scooters in a city of <checks google> 500,000 cars.

Between NIMBY antics with housing development and absurd levels of gov overreach in situations like this, SF is going to end up cannibalizing its tech industry.

So many cities would kill to be the center of such a fast growing and high paying industry, and they're squandering it because their old guard is a bunch of gate-keeping snobs.

Oh well. NYC, LA, Austin, and other cities will gladly grab the fruits of tech talent.

I don't think NYC is much better in that regard. Look at how they created taxi 2.0 recently with driver limits, how e-bikes are illegal and a lot of downright hostile reactions in the press to citi bikes a few years ago.

At least the taxi thing was meant to curb road congestion. SFs scooter regulation seems like the intent is "how dare you run a business without our oversight?".

Regulation surrounding bikeshare/scootershare isn't specific to SF, many cities want a piece of the pie

After a thorough review of 12 applications and more than 800 pages of proposals received, the SFMTA will offer permits to Scoot and Skip.
The SFMTA’s decision is based on the strength of the proposals submitted by the two companies, combined with their experience of owning, operating and maintaining a shared mobility service in the public right-of-way. The agency looked for applications that prioritized the city’s concerns around safety, disabled access, equity and accountability.
...
In its application, Scoot demonstrated a strong commitment to safety. For example, the company proposed to educate and train its users in safe scooter operations with mandatory instructional videos, helmets included in rentals and free in-person trainings. Furthermore, Scoot’s model was unique in its proposal to use swappable batteries instead of manually taking the scooters off the street for regular recharging. This method could help the city reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled on San Francisco streets, which helps reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions.
...
At the tail end of March, three companies -- Bird, Lime and Spin -- unloaded hundreds of motorized scooters across San Francisco. While they were operating, several concerns were raised by the city and our communities.

From April 11 to May 23 alone, San Francisco’s 311 Customer Service Center received nearly 1,900 complaints regarding scooters. Complaints ranged from scooters blocking sidewalk access to unsafe riding in the public right-of-way. San Francisco Public Works had to impound more than 500 scooters that were blocking sidewalks or otherwise improperly parked.

So looks like Bird, Lime, and others are out on the sidelines. And it also looks like the era of brazenly ignoring the regulatory environment profitably a la Uber is over.

In the mean time there are already 100 million (!) electro scooters in use in China:

https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2010/electric-two-wheele... .

Quoth: "Having lived in China for the last year it’s pretty much 99.8% ebikes. Petrol motorbikes don’t make an appearance except in very poor areas."

I never thought I'd say this, but I think I'd like to see an increase in parking garages in San Francisco.

Then we could convert on-street parking into parking for bikes and scooters, as well as bus lanes and bus stops (both for tech shuttles as well as for public transit).

We should make it as easy, cheap, and convenient to use an alternative transportation method as it is to call an Uber.

You can do both. First floor parking garages can be bikes, scooters, floors above that can be auto parking, and the remainder can be residential/commercial/office space. Its all about the upzoning. Ground level shared infra (roads, sidewalks, etc) is very expensive (arguably infinitely so compared to lots for structures), don't waste it on parking.

Disclaimer: Not a SF resident

There really is an awful lot of street parking in SF. In the neighborhoods I'd like to see some project to turn some of the on-street parking into lawns/gardens. I believe at one point, in the 60s or 70s, most homes (at least in my neighborhood) paved over their front laws for additional parking space. There's a lot that could be done to improve land use in SF. The street parking in particular seems unnecessary, especially when you're a 10-minute walk from BART.

You don't need to sacrifice a lot of on street parking to accommodate scooters & other bike sized objects. 1 spot per 0.1 mile / large-ish block is about 7000 spots, out of the approx 200'000 parking spots available is about %3 of total parking spots. 1 car spot can accomidate about 10 bikes, and 70k scooters could probably fulfill most demand in SF.

Or.. just remove car parking from the city center. It's a waste of space, and of limited utility (because it's so hard to find a spot due to the limited supply). Adding more bikes/scooters/mass transit is much more efficient for moving people around than allowing more cars.

tl;dr Scoot & Skip were selected.

The PDF[0] outlining SFMTA's evaluation criteria for each company application is interesting. A lot of them were rated pretty poorly, even Lime & Bird (especially) which both had a large presence before the shutdown.

[0] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

Can’t help but think that spite factored in significantly in the decision. There’s a row that conflates “applicant’s history in complying with city regulations” with “applicant’s experience in operating and maintaining shared mobility systems”. Bird, Lime, and Spin all got “poor” for this row, even though they obviously have experience operating and maintaining such a system.

Bird, Lime, and Spin were only operating for a short time (at least in SF, not sure how long they were operating in other cities). Versus Scoot which has been operating in SF since 2012 (I know nothing about Skip; I assume they've been operating elsewhere).

This also isn't just "length of time operating", the same row covers "applicant's history" and "history of their users", and Bird/Lime/Spin all have a very poor history here:

> From April 11 to May 23 alone, San Francisco’s 311 Customer Service Center received nearly 1,900 complaints regarding scooters. Complaints ranged from scooters blocking sidewalk access to unsafe riding in the public right-of-way. San Francisco Public Works had to impound more than 500 scooters that were blocking sidewalks or otherwise improperly parked.

Bird/Lime/Spin have a very poor history only because they’re the only ones with any history at all. They just happened to be around when the controversy started. It seems unfair to penalize them for that, and give them zero credit for previous experience. Scoot’s been around, yes, but with a very different service.

But they only have history because they flaunted the regulations, no?

Operating a scooter service was not illegal at the time. It was only made illegal as a retaliatory response. SFMTA and the supervisors would have liked those companies to proactively ask for permission, hence the retaliation. Skip is the only company (AFAIK) that made it a point to ask for permission first – and they’re getting rewarded for it – but I’m pretty sure they only did that with the benefit of hindsight. They were late to the game, saw the backlash against the early players, and saw that as their opportunity.

This is not true. AIUI the SFMTA told these companies that they were working on regulations governing these scooters and that they couldn't deploy them yet. Then one of the companies (I forget who) jumped the gun and deployed them anyway, so the others rushed out to deploy them too.

I don't know if this was strictly illegal, but it was certainly flaunting explicit instructions from the SFMTA.

> I forget who

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/28/san-francisco-will-regulat...

ISTR it was Lime, and this article from March seems to back that up. The other two launched shortly after because they were afraid to lose first-mover benefits. Woopsie.

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