Taxify is entering the e-scooter game
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I have found it interesting that some of my left-leaning friends oppose these scooters on the grounds of them being a public nuisance. For anyone who wants to curb global warming, these scooters are a darn good way to do it. The tradeoffs are easily worth it. Some people want to act like the tradeoffs don't exist/ if they just wish for something hard enough, the solution that has no tradeoffs will appear, despite institutional inertia.
Those little stand-up electric scooters mostly substitute for walking, not driving. And in that sense they are worse for global warming because they actually use electricity, in many places generated by coal.
And consider the warming impact of making the things. Metal forging, paint, tires, batteries, electronics.
Consider the cases where someone has the option to take a bus or train, but there's a mile gap on both sides of their commute (or even just one side). So instead they drive the whole distance. If they can hop off the bus/train onto a scooter to close that gap, it can tip the scales to public transit vs taking a car.
This is a great early analysis on the roll out of jump bike shares on the uber platform. During business hours / commuting hours, uber usage dropped by 15% in favor of jump bicycle shares. Many of the trips seem to replace commutes within the city, and this is while the number of bikes is limited.
If the number of bikes explodes, and they can politically shift the landscape to enable safer biking/scootering etc., then that can make a huge dent in denser cities in America.
IMO, they’re also an Attractive Nuisance, in the legal sense of the term. They encourage people to ride them who are not adequately trained or equipped, by virtue of their stunningly low price and easy availability. Then those people are much more likely to hurt themselves or someone else, thus driving up trips to the ER and local healthcare costs.
The old method of drug dealers giving away the “first hit for free” seems to be very apropos here.
If the scooter companies were required to provide health and liability insurance for every rider, and get a hefty fine every time one of their riders was seen using the sidewalk and/or not wearing a helmet, at least those costs would not be externalized on society.
The original Segway device had large wheels that were set horizontally, and incorporated software and hardware to make them as stable as possible. We’ve thrown out all of those advantages in the name of chasing a “cheaper” device.
Disclaimer: I am currently recovering from my own accident from riding a scooter, and so I may be a bit biased. Or maybe That gives me a unique insight that many others in this discussion do not. You decide.
That's...not the legal sense of “attractive nuisance”, which refers to an object on land likely to attract children which makes the landowner legally responsible for injuries by the object to trespassing children so attracted in circumstances in which they otherwise would not be, provided the children are unable to understand the hazard posed.
At best, you are referring to a very loose analogy to the legal sense of the term.
> Then those people are much more likely to hurt themselves or someone else, thus driving up trips to the ER and local healthcare costs.
I understand the intuitive attractiveness of this, but is there any empirical evidence for it?
How is this a better solution than biking?
If you leave convenient, eco-friendly transportation options all around the city, people will use eco-friendly transportation more than if they were not there. These scooters do in fact substitute for cars. Cities that have good public transportation are still enormously polluting, just a little bit less, assuming the darn buses operate at decent capacity. There is no panacea. Virtue signalling doesn't matter.
The existence of these scooters does not prevent buses and bikes from existing at the same level of service/ convenience as they did before. If anything they make the city more bike-friendly.
Do they? Is there good evidence of that? I'm pretty skeptical, and from a google search I don't see that - and others seem to be similarly skeptical (outside of companies that own scooter companies...). It actually seems likely that the same people that would bike or take public transit would ride scooters - and that seems like the wrong direction to go.
probably because opposing scooters is a squarely conservative stance? as in, let's keep things the same as before, nevermind the death rate or noxious emissions of cars (for the record, i like cars too).
but we're all like this, particularly when we state an (simple) identity but live real, complicated lives. we'll figure it out eventually, but not without working through our collective hypocrisy once again.
Do your health a favor and buy a regular commuter bike instead.
I haven't factored in other parts of the economy, like oversupply, theft, premature damage, and payroll for the employees including chargers, but seeing they're in 100 cities with at least 3 million scooters on the streets being ride. I also based my guesses from https://www.bird.co/blog/birdyearone.
I had a training class on lean manufacturing about a year ago. The low cost enabled by production-line mentality of scooter production combined with the ad-hoc resource allocation enabled by the app for both riders and chargers makes this so darn efficient it is crazy. Very lean.
are you saying the scooters electric part dies after 20 rides?
"The owner of this website (www.bird.co) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (BR) from accessing this website."
i understand them not shipping stuff to brazil, but full on block? c'mon. what if i wanted to see this and recommend to a friend that lives in the us?
Maybe Portsmouth harbor. For the past century or so the people of Boston have been generally welcoming to taxes, nosy government and all the other things the Bostonians of the 1700s resented the British for. Their northern neighbors, not so much.
That still doesn't make "tax-$anything" a good company name for any business that doesn't have to do with taxes. Better to have a neutral and boring name than a name that some people associate with bad things.
I'm guessing they'd like everyone to pronounce them as taksēfi, not taksifi