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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

> Baltimore used to have a bike share, but I've heard it's being shut down and even when it was up they had a hard time keeping bikes in all the stalls.

Sorry if these are stupid questions, but isn't this a problem with Bird? I see random birds all over the place. Can someone explain why bikes can't be left around randomly like a bird can?

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Not a stupid question! The bikes in the Baltimore bike share (and I think also the NYC bike share) had electric motors that would work with the rider to make peddling easier. Thus they had to be left in charging “yokes” when you were done with them.

As for why a non-powered bike couldn’t just be left around, here are a few thoughts:

- As some people have mentioned, bikes are just bigger, and take up way more sidewalk space. If Bird and Lime have gotten unpopular, a “Bird for Bikes” would probably make people livid.

- Honestly, the fact that Birds and Limes come with Anti-theft mechanisms and GPS transponders (which run on the same battery as the motor I think) makes them a bit harder to steal (and there aren’t easily removable parts or a viable black market for selling them). Even a non-powered bike would need a charge every once in a while if it relied on power for its transponder.

- I think the “we supply’em, you pay us to ride’em, we pay people to charge’em” business model is just a straight up new thing that happened to be first successfully done by a scooter startup. I imagine it would be hard for a person in a minivan to pick up tons of bikes for charging without having to remove their minivan’s seats. Again, scooters being small is a big advantage, which is probably also why bigger “sit down” vespa-style scooter startups don’t seem to be a factor right now.

Dockless bike share is a thing. They had them all over the East SF bay area for a while but a contract with the existing docked bikes got rid of them in most of the areas. I think they still have them in SF. As you guessed, many people hate them but honestly, parked cars take 100x the space, just allocate some parking spaces to bikes, problem solved.

I suggested elsewhere in the thread, it'd be neat if they included a fourth class in the model: hub owners, in addition to the existing classes of supplier (Bird), riders (customers) and the chargers. The hub owners would register their places (private residence, business, campus, city area, etc.) as bird hubs, and people would only be allowed to ride birds between hubs. This would solve the "trash/get-off-my-lawn" problem.

The hub idea isn't feasible unless tons of people are already riding birds and creating a mess everywhere, because people probably wouldn't sign up as hub owners unless the demand was already deemed high. They are probably just ramping up usage right now until people start complaining, at which point Bird will be big enough to start issuing out hubs.

You know bike shares with docks is a super common existing model, and dockless bike share is specifically built as an improvement to that?

I would imagine it would be a lot easier for civilians to host scooter waypoints at their residence. Bike docks seem like more effort, I can't seem them being a popular option for homes. At scale, the idea is that half of the houses in a neighborhood would host hubs for scooters. At high hub densities, the distinction between docked and dockless becomes negligible, however the hub solution has the added benefit of people not leaving vehicles at random locations.

I don't understand why you think anyone would do this, but I am also not sure that it would be any more legal to run a scooter rental hub at most homes than it is to put a pile of scooters on the sidewalk.

Sorry, why do you think it's a rental hub? It's not a rental hub, you're simply giving Bird riders consent to use your property to drop their scooters off (as opposed to them dropping their scooters off on a random person's property, which bypasses consent and is far worse). All of the rental happens between Bird and the rider, you're just giving people permission to leave scooters on your lawn. It's an opt-in rather than opt-out system, which is how it should be.

It is a hub for people to collect rental bikes. You are giving people permission to use your private property only if they have a specific commercial relationship with a business that you also have a specific commercial relationship to, which has a lot of differences to residential use. I'm not an expert, but I'd be pretty stunned if e.g a standard home insurance policy was willing to cover you under those circumstances.

There are services that will credit your account if you leave the bike in a designated dock area, but you can still leave it in other areas.

This improves on docks in that the "dock" can just be a geofence with a few lines painted on the ground, whereas traditional docks are very sturdy and hence expensive.

This improves on dockless in that it's a more reliable place to pick up bikes, and still gives you the freedom of leaving your bike in other places.

Shameless plug: we've got a map of dockless scooters & bikes available in cities across the US over at https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/mapping-the-impact-of-d...

Neat, although I was optimistically hoping your map aggregated all the actual GPS positions of all the different brands of dockless bikes and scooters onto one map. Since all the bikes (or scooters) are effectively equivalent it would seem useful for the customer to have an aggregated map app (less so for bird/lime/whatever).

Also, I wasn't aware South Lake Tahoe has scooters!

Thanks, this a great answer, and it makes sense now. The size matters because it enables the three-pronged business model: Suppliers-Riders-Chargers, and it would be infeasible to do such a thing with bulky bikes.

Uhh the antitheft devices don't actually do anything, the police won't follow up on a good theft report, and passers-by don't care either. Literally all of the Chinese ebikes and escooters have standardized parts, so it's easy to sell parts or buy cheaper replacements. The lipoly cells themselves are also nice. I've personally converted birds back to stock xiaomi scooters for about $20usd per scooter (replace the "dashboard" board), which then sell for about $300. A few friends strip them for parts which is lucrative if you don't have much else going on

Do you not subscribe to the idea stealing=bad?

Is it ok to steal from the rich (nation-state and ultra-wealthy investors) to help the poor (me)? If I could steal a million dollars out of YC's checkbook I would do it in a heartbeat, wouldn't you?

No, stealing is wrong. No one is going to kill you, right? If you are going to die unless you do it, that might be different, at least arguable. Just cause you want to steal someone else's stuff and sell it for money - that's clearly wrong.

I am pretty surprised to see comments like this on HN. Advocating theft and robbery is not ok.

This thread is full of oddities. Some people here think it's OK for you leave your scooter/bike on a private business's property without consent, because the "businesses should like having a signal attracting people to their property". Like, when did consent stop being a thing, and who is anyone to tell me what I want or don't want for my own business?

Yet, reading another point of view that you don't necessarily agree on is good

Where can I find details on how this is accomplished? I'm curious how the GPS/Brake is wired in, and what you would replace the front panel with. For science.

I have heard the anti theft devices have gone off while people try and pick them up and move them out of the way from blocking the path

Well, a scooter is much smaller than a bike therefore less of a nuisance (though the last bit depends on who you ask/how much of a NIMBY you are).

Also there are dockless bikes, see Jump in SF.

I've seen birds left around private property around campuses (e.g. businesses). Why would a business complain about a bike leaning against their wall but not a bird? They are both foreign objects leaning up against their wall. Is size really important here?

Shouldn't a business like having a signal attracting someone to their store?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm. You don't get to decide what goes on someone else's property, it's simply not your property.

Honestly, the downvotes here surprise me a lot. I always thought the HN community was in support of private property laws.

... until someone trips over a scooter left on your property, leaving you liable.

Bikes are a lot bigger, for starters?

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