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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

What law did they break?

Use of powered vehicles on sidewalks is illegal, as is blocking entrances with vehicles. The city accused Bird and Lime of doing both.

That is a dumb law that was made when motorcycles were the only vehicles competing inside walks.

There is very little traffic on sidewalks and using it for pedestrians and scooters and bicycles is much better. Especially considering that cyclists can pause or go around pedestrians when necessary.

Having an absolute law rather than an adaptive is not useful to the community.

Tell that to the wheelchair bound person who now have to deal with a scooter blocking their path every 20 yards.

I use a wheelchair. It would certainly suck to have a scooter blocking my path.

But I don’t think scooters parked in the sidewalk apply to me very much. If we’re moving, they or I move around each other.

I encounter cars blocking sidewalks all the time. Cars haven't been banned yet.

> There is very little traffic on sidewalks

lol. i guess the plebs who can't afford uber don't count as people. SF sidewalks have seem pretty packed to me whenever I am there.

In that case, Toyota is currently breaking that law on my street.

For that to be analogous, it would have to be "Enterprise" or "Hertz" doing it. Not Toyota. If Hertz (Or CityCarShare) just went ahead and just put their cars willy-nilly anywhere they wanted, then you'd have a point.

Maybe this would all be fixed if every Bird scooter had a license plate and you needed to be licensed to drive them?

In contrast to Bird, Scoot hasn't attracted that much criticism in SF despite being a pretty similar service.

Whatever law it may be it was most certainly not designed in the era of these scooters being a thing.

unfortunately the city itself - for example streets, sidewalks, etc. - also wasn't designed in the era of these scooters being a thing.

The ADA, for one. Scooters left haphazardly in the middle of sidewalks are a menace to blind people.

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