San Diego's Bird Scooter Hoarding Problem
scottresearch.com
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* An small bonus for nabbing the scooter while it still has a bit of charge left (<10%). Essentially a quick turnaround bonus. For the sake of argument, lets say $1 bonus + $4 base to match the original minimum if it's back on the street within 24h and never lost power.
* $4 if the scooter lost power, but is still returned within 48h.
* +$1 for every day it's missing after 48h up to $10 total.
* -$1 for every person that visits it's last known location after 2h and reports that they couldn't find it, down to $2 minimum. This is to encourage users to quickly attach the nabbed bird to power and "claim" them as soon as they pick them up instead of throwing it into their garage for a week then claiming them.
* The scooter gets set to $20 "lost scooter" bounty after a month, which can only be claimed once a month per user.
If the chargers want to play games, make it a game.
Second you could just add something to the terms and conditions which allows them to cancel people’s rewards in these obvious cases. “Oh you happened to have 20 scooters at your address for two days and then suddenly charged and returned them. We’re cancelling your account.” Assign someone again to find these obvious examples of people hoarding scooters then cancel their accounts or whatever is appropriate.
As this poster shows, the man power involved shouldn’t be all that much. Browsing on a map. Etc.
I think the parent post has the right idea -- use the existing situation (consumers and producers) and gamify it in such a way that reduces hoarding.
That said, maybe there's a simpler way yet to do that.
2) "We believe you are hoarding, and this is why: . . . "
3) Terminate charging account of hoarders.
There is no theft. If these companies don’t want those contractors doing that, don’t incentivize it or remove them from the platform. Then if they continue to interact with the scooters after being banned, then it’s probably theft.
If these docked at a specific location, the case for “theft” might be an easier sell. But they are literally designed to be left ANYWHERE.
Most theft laws require "intent to permanently deprive" or similar.
If so it’s the taking them without checking them out part that is clearly the problem here.
Come to think of it this might present an easier solution for Bird. If the scooter is moved without being checked out, it’s charger reward price should be frozen at whatever it was at that time.
That can be reset after some period to account for cases where the scooter is moved by a non hoarder, possibly also checking to make sure there are less than N other scooters in a 50m radius to identify those cases where the scooter was moved and dumped on its own and really does need a properly incentivized charger to go find it.
If you're lucky it will end up in the database of stolen bikes and if they come across a stolen bike by accident they might check that database. I haven't personally heard of any bikes retrieved by the police so far.
Alternatively, as others have suggested, you can change the incentives to minimize hoarding.
What do you think sounds more scalable/feasible?
Sure looks like a private company dumping their trash on the streets for profit.
If I was to dump stuff on the street, I'd be cited for littering. And LiIon batteries are hazardous waste.
What about giving them a commission on the next day's use of the scooters that they charged? Then they're incentivized to make them available. It might be challenging to balance this against "finding hard-to-spot scooters." Maybe steadily increase the commission on least-recently-used scooters?
From what I can tell, each scooter that is low on batteries is given a bounty (somewhere between $5 to $20) based on how hard it is to find. I assume that the "hardness" is computed based on how many chargers fail to find the scooter, but there may be something more sophisticated at work. To charge a scooter, a charger finds one, checks it out in the charger app, and then takes it home and charges it, and returns it to its "Bird's Nest" (clever) in the morning, at which point you get paid.
The scooters have GPS trackers to prevent theft.
So what these hoarders are doing is stealing the scooters -- rather than checking them out through the charger app, they're just grabbing them and tossing them in their van, and then keeping them in their home, where other chargers will fail to find them, thus increasing their bounty, until they "discover" the scooters, claim them through the app, charge them, and return them to their nest.
Have I understood this correctly? Given that they are removing the scooter without claiming it through the app (either as a rider or a charger) that means that they are stealing them, which means all Bird has to do is provide the police with the address of the hoarder and that's the end of it.
Literally. Bird can provide the address to the police and they will do nothing, and that's the end of it.
If you are leaving your property on public sidewalks, and offering a $20 bounty for temporarily stealing it, then you need to fix your rewards system before wasting police time.
As a matter of fairness and good PR, it would be great if scooter companies could find ways to enforce this themselves rather than creating grunt work for the local police.
One way to do this is with better fraud detection. There are probably many signals, but an obvious one is to look at per-account trends and ask: did the scooters charged by this account have an unnaturally low rate of being picked up and ridden by users? Even after accounting for other variables including demand in that location at that time and charge available on that scooter? If so, that suggests something has prevented people from riding them, so probably hoarding. Then you temporarily suspend or permanently ban the account.
Of course, it's possible scooter companies know they can solve these things, but they just haven't bothered yet. While they're in growth mode, they may feel their resources should be used solving other problems and Mets prefer just to throw money at the problem by putting more scooters on the street.
(A) the police can't barge into a private residence because some tech company points at a phone and says "see! it says my scooter is inside!" - they would still need legal basis for probable cause. When my home was B&E'd and a tablet stolen the police said unless the device reported it was in a public area they explicitly were "not going to go into a private residence to look for it".
(B) The police should (and probably will) place these complaints at the very bottom of their priority list.
(C) No current-era start-up that's business model is based around ignoring regulation and existing laws is going to assume responsibility and cost for anything they can displace onto another party or, better yet, society at large 'cause, ya know "disruption".
Regulation and crimes are different things. Regulations are aimed at preemptively preventing potential crimes, usually fraud, by making parties affirmatively establish that they do not have criminal intent before committing an act.
Crimes are criminal acts -- we added an equal protection clause to the constitution to prevent exactly this scenario, where the police can discriminate on the application of the law. If the police are choosing to deny the protection of the law to a company like Bird then they are liable for a civil suit, in addition to violating their duties as law enforcement officers.
My anecdote: I was assaulted and had my iPhone taken from me. The police were called, and I had the location pinpointed right in the bedroom of the assailant on "Find my iPhone" on my iPad. No search warrant was issued by the judge, because the judge couldn't understand the information. (Which was being relayed to the judge by the police over the phone.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/26...
https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cell-phone-apps/when-f...
As far as police choosing to deny service: police will always give theft low priority. If the theft is of random items that you’ve left scattered around blocking walkways (in many cases in violation of local ordinances and littering restrictions), then That’s probably going to be way further down the list of their priorities.
That's not because they can't, that's because it would take getting a warrant and your case wasn't important enough to them to justify that even if they had probable cause to take to a judge. (Which GPS location probably would be, with a full explanation including the monitoring services own description of it's operating methids.)
What if the bounty was influenced by the duty cycle of the scooters? So the more utilized the scooters are, the higher the bounty? What I'm wondering is if there is a way to shape the hoarder's behavior into something beneficial to the user base.
Denying Bird the equal protections of the law is a violation of their constitutional duty to, well, not deny anyone equal protection of the law.
This is not my understanding. The scooters I've seen throw an absolute fit if you move them more than ~1 meter without unlocking them via the app.
I don't know much about this, but I didn't think the scooters had to be returned to any particular place. So hoarders pick them up to charge them and when charged "return" them to their garage/backyard. In which case it's not as clearly theft, they are just returning them to an inconvenient place - but that's fine, they are dockless.
It might be that they choose to forfeit the reward for the initial charging by not returning the scooters, but that seems like more of a no-brainer to detect; chargers who routinely do not return their scooters to their nests would be extremely easy to detect.
Easier might be to check them out as riders, then toss them in the van and "return" them to the charger's backyard or garage; if you have a group of people who are in on this, then it seems like you could make this nearly undetectable by pooling the risk.
Allow a charger-app to trigger a loud horn sound continuously. Make taking these painful to keep.
And then post a way to report illegally impounded scooters, either with address or license plate of where they're kept.
Which go off randomly and in most cities, you can have one going off next to you and you would think everyone around it is deaf by their complete lack of care over your car being stolen. You think people are going to care more about a...scooter?
As you scale something like this the problems become more evident and harder to manage. These businesses looked pretty solid when they had small fleets, but now that they are scaling it's pretty easy to see the cracks.
Watching how this unfolds in the next two to three years is going to be a hell of a ride (no pun intended)
When a big company comes is with a sudden alteration to the "environment", these negative forces respond, with a force that is congruous to the speed at which the original change happened.
If a change in society happens quickly, it is very visible. All the reactions also happen quickly and are also very visible.
If the change happens slowly, the reactions also follow gradually and slowly, and everything seems less drastic and less noticeable.
"Gelegenheit macht Diebe" - "Opportunity makes the thief"
The Dallas City Council passed a law allowing dockless bikeshare, and suddenly about six Chinese companies all dumped hundreds—if not thousands—of bikes each in Dallas, causing every kind of externality you can imagine. Dallas opened the door a crack, and the companies stampeded through hard enough to break the frame.
Let's put it on the order of years, not just for Bird's sake. bicycles are a unique combination of valuable, vulnerable, and hard to catch the theft of.
When society does catch someone doing this, we should be putting them away on the order of years. Just my opinion though.
A $500 theft should not put anyone in prison for "years". That's nuts.
Setting arbitrary minimums for investigating thefts just means only rich people’s losses are deemed important.
This is basically a discussiom about negative externalities, and the negative externalities are harsher when you steal 10% for a thousandaire vs. 10% from a millionaire.
You mean people putting their own interests first?
I mean if I could litter crap all over the homes of the founders and investors of these companies, what do you think would happen?
The bikes could best be described as "a throbbing mass of externalities", but the scooters have largely avoided these problems... except for the issue with people illegally riding them on the sidewalk and nearly running pedestrians over. But that's minor compared to all the problems the bikes had.
The biggest problem is that bikes were strewn everywhere. People would leave bikes in the middle of the sidewalks, often without even bothering to drop the kickstand. There was a pretty big stink about how a blind guy got injured tripping over a bike that was just laying in the middle of the sidewalk. And they'd throw the bikes down on people's front lawns and all over private property in general.
And there was this massive glut of bikes. Six companies, hundreds if not thousands of bikes each, mostly concentrated in the middle of Dallas.
Oh, and then the retaliation started. The population, pissed at the glut of bikes, began vandalizing them en masse. People would saw the bikes in half, throw them into ditches and creeks, and make impromptu art sculptures out of bikes and bike parts. If you weren't tripping over a bike some careless jackass left on the sidewalk, you were tripping over the mangled husk of a bike some vandal threw on the sidewalk to make a point.
The bikes only stopped being a problem when a) scooters took over most of the demand, and b) Dallas passed a law requiring bike companies to clean up their messes at their expense. A couple of the companies pulled out, and the rest are shrinking their fleets.
I wonder how much of the antisocial behavior is subconscious
Or something like that. I might be mis-remembering some details.
EDIT: To clarify -- I'm not an economist, it's just something I read about in my spare time. I'm sure that the Lucas critique was pre-dated by other ideas (it's far too obvious to be entirely novel), and that there's a much deeper analysis that I wasn't aware of.
"XYZ has always worked in the past" doesn't work. Imagine doing machine learning on this problem that Bird has. It could easily suggest that you should up the fees to get more scooter finders, rather than that you need to change the incentives.
Clearly, you can fix the daycare scenario by 1) communicating to the parents picking up their children late the pain that causes the workers; 2) Ratcheting up the fine so that it is clearly painful to parents; 3) Ban parents who still flaunt the system.
Rather tha guilt I think the factor in play can be described as cheap overtime daycare. It's actually more valuable to pay $3 and get more flexibility in your day rather save $3 and be on time.
Need to see the dentist after work but you'd have to first pick your kid and have him sit in the waiting room while you're in? No problem, pay $3, let him play at the daycare and go to see your dentist first, then pick him up.
I don’t believe they often use this - maybe only against chronically late parents - but it is in the contract.
Give them a price quote so ludicrously high they either walk away balking or take you up on it, which means that while you're doing the job you didn't want you also get a ton of money and some data on how much your services are valued.
In this case, apply to the daycarer actually staying late.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/21/jakartas-rat-...
[2] - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
Just like uber before them, bird threatens to upend some reasonably decent jobs in cities with bike share programs- assuming the bike share programs don't learn from taxi drivers and adapt.
So much of the reason these things work- and that the companies themselves become massively valuable is the externalization of costs. That doesn't have to be a given.
In SD, the Razor Scooters are much nicer and doesn't seem to have as many problems with their equipment than the Bird scooters do.
Presumably the nature of the beast is that these start off the day next to transport hubs and then spread out from there. It isn't then worth it for some one to go out of their way to take it back to that transport hub.
If you are travelling against the prevailing traffic what you say would work, but not for the majority.
As I understand it the bikes it London (and probably else where) vary the charges depending on where you're going. So if you're taking a bike back to where it needs to be, the charge is less. If you're taking it out to the edge of a zone where it will need to be collected by an employee, you pay more.
I think that just paying with bird credits reduce the entire "let's make a business out of charging" and will just create a better community.
As again, I think that this problem is completely solvable by Bird. And in other threads they've mentioned that there are many signals to those "hordaers". I think that Bird just don't want to deal with it since it has enough funding/focuses on market adoption.
It's the same with Microsoft and piracy tools of Windows. I'm sure they can crack it down completely, but it just don't bother them enough on the bottom line.
As I recall, Bird uses Xiaomi Mi scooters, which cost ~$500 retail. Even if the credit is high enough that Bird only makes $1 / weekday off the person "renting" the scooter like that, it would still only take 2 years to pay the cost of the scooter, so that "rental" model would probably work fine.
Every morning on my drive to work, I pass a few pickup trucks with 10/20/30+ scooters in the back. Seems like folks have created a full time business out of charging these things, so I'm not surprised it's challenging for a "casual" charger to make a couple bucks with them.
That being said, I was very bearish on the idea of Birds until it clicked to me how brilliant the charging program is. They're essentially paying people to protect these things in their homes overnight, and nicely place them in optimized locations every morning. Other competitors down here (especially bikes) who just left their units out all day and night quickly lost them all to homeless people and vandals chucking them into the ocean. But Birds are cleanly lined up on every corner every morning.
Very clever.
I also saw a few drunken (or angry) [or both] people smash up a few of them as they walked down the street. I'd like to know how many they lose in this way.
If there’s still hoarding, offer riders (not chargers!) some bounty for reporting hoarding.
As other posters have said it’s a game-design problem to align incentives so that you get the outcomes you want.
/joules will be the currency of the future!
I don’t think enough people steal for it to prevent all bicycling. Perhaps there is still benefit.
If you do anything except daytime ride, you're liable to get messed with in some cities. People largely just accept thieves in their society.
From where I'm sitting the whole thing seems like a bad joke. The people hoarding scooters are probably just waiting until the company inevitably folds, with the (likely correct) assumption that an already overstretched municipal police force isn't going to be bothered to help a (fiscally and ethically) bankrupt company track down hundreds or thousands of lost scooters across town.
The correct response by cities to the issue of the startups dumping scooters on public sidewalks is to send them to the municipal recycling plant for scrapping.
They may perhaps try and get friends to rent it but if you do it as profit sharing rather than a fixed price then they can't cheat.
So many of these dumb problems would be solved if they worked with cities and created a docked system, but no I guess that's too boring and not ~disruptive~ enough.
Or you can solve it by adding docks all over the place. But docks cost money to build. And you need them in as many locations as possible; otherwise, your service no longer offers the convenience that is its main selling point. And, like with parking spaces, you can never have 100% utilization of docks. For every scooter, you need multiple spaces in docks.
So, I would not take it for granted that docks would actually be the most efficient way to solve this problem.
I hope they solve this.
So much for the environment eh!
I guess the fact that these show up on a map contradicts that.
If the scooters are indoors, that is good for the scooters, by the way.
Keeping scooters in homes and garages can be allowed, provided the scooters are "on the clock": in the middle of a booking that is being paid for.
Quite like farming, really.
Bird really need to structure it better, and make it clear that such actions are fraudulent. The people involved need to lose their licence to charge and their user accounts and then they won't have any way to make money or use the scooters.
Then people will use their grandma's backyard to "abandon" them and charge at their house.
I suspect in the early days it doesn't really matter, since they will want fully charged scooters and a rumour you can make lots of money to incentivize people to join.
On paper, it seems like the idea is that if you were in this program and you found a scooter, you could take it home with you, charge it, then drop it off on a curb somewhere the next day and you'd be paid for charging it.
In reality, they didn't account for how people actually behave. So people are picking up scooters and "keeping" them in their apartments/houses to let the batteries drain more(?), until it gets to a point where charging it would be most profitable.
Seems completely justified but oddly weird to me. I haven't witnessed it yet, but I wonder if there have been fights over territory/scooters.
If we give the 'hoarders' the benefit of the doubt, could it be the bounty is increasing while they have a bunch of scooters queued up to charge? They grabbed 20 in their truck, and it takes 5 hours to charge 1, but they only have 2 outlets, but the bounty goes up every 12 hours, so they have a backlog?
What they're doing instead is grabbing them without scanning them, chirping be dammed, and holding onto them for a while so the bounty increases. Then they scan them as found and charge them.
You could ban people who charge bikes to use them (it is as weird as if an uber driver couldn't use uber as a passenger).
Is it? Honest chargers who go out to the boonies to recover truly hard-to-recover scooters will pick up scooters which turn red from all over the place. Dishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the charger's home).
Developing an algorithm to find the dishonest players should be relatively straightforward, and after dishonest players are found, they should be banned.
Will it be perfect? No. Will it be effective? Yes. Will it make a great HN blog post? Absolutely
Dishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters
who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the
charger's home).
You can never solve gaming the system entirely, the goal is just to make it harder than it's worth, and hopefully the abusers move to some other scheme.
If someone has a habit of turning in a whole
bunch of scooters that didn't have GPS
available for X days before, ban them.
Now he's complaining on your employees' subreddit everyone said he was doing a great job and his numbers were really good, that no-one else should invest in equipment to do the same work, and that you've ruined Christmas for his family by cutting off their only source of income. The Guardian is going to interview him for their article on job insecurity in the gig economy.
There's something really funny about the libertarian mindset here:
- Screw regulations! Disrupt! Use public property for private gain, but then
- Let the hammer of the law crash down and the state deal with those scundrels if there are unintended consequences
This isn't an extreme case but the same reasons still exist, hoarding the scooters is providing value. Take efforts to reduce value. Like start letting the scooters talk to each other and you'll be able to find the cycle in the graph where the hoarded scooters only talk to each other until one pays outs handsomely and it joins the rest of the public scooters. Or make a scooter pay out less if it has been idle for an extended period of time even with low battery value. Or the opposite, make a scooter pay out more if it's getting higher than average use.
> Citizens remove hazard from streets, profiting at company's expense
Isn't this the definition of poetic justice?
This argument only holds water if public transportation sucks in a city. If you can get to wherever you want to go within a 200 metre radius of a city by public transport (which is the case in a lot of European cities to begin with) then this argument does not make any sense.
fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure.
That's at least debatable. If it's really part of public transport infrastructure then this should be coordinated with the cities. But the mindset seems more a : "We shit 500 of those things throughout a relatively small city and disrupt the holly bejeezus out of this town". As long as this attitude prevails I neither see this as a valid argument.
I don't really see how coordination with the city is better than just making the things available and seeing what happens. The city often has poor visibility into where people actually want to go and by which criteria they choose the mode of transport. And adding bureaucracy without clear benefits doesn't seem smart.
It would, for example, avoid that you have 1'000 defunct OBikes in a relatively small city (~90km2) basically cluttering up everything, but being of so bad quality that they're borderline useless. Even if you're stupid enough to cough up the required deposit and download their dodgy app.
Same bikes which need to be removed not even a year later on the taxpayers dime.
It would help to not make entire town districts unafordable and unhabitable in some cities by the likes of AirBnB waltzing in for fun and profit.
I could come up with more examples, Uber being the most obvious.
I see a city as a rather complex organism, with a lot of competing factors and variables, which require careful balancing and calibration. There's a reason that cities prepare master plans about development for the next two decades.
If the burghers believe that change is required it's up to them to initiate such change. It should not be up to some venture capital fueled SV companies, which use public property for private gain, to make such decisions.
I've been in cities where the bikeshare was borderline useless. I've also spent lots of time in NY, where its bikeshare is both at least as useful as the subway within Manhattan and legitimately the fastest way to get e.g. north or south within Brooklyn.
I'm currently based in Berlin, where I agree with the parent to your comment. Berlin's metro is generally great, but there are a large number of places I go to regularly that are ~10 minutes away by bike but ~30 minutes by public transit, purely because of the way the system is laid out.
If you're going to complain about bikes or scooters cluttering up sidewalks, perhaps the answer is they should have dedicated space on the streets (as with docked bikeshare programs like NY). I'd love to see studies about the effect on number of transportation trips that e.g. a dedicated scooter stand the size of a car parking space has on the flow of traffic as compared to letting that single parking space be usable by cars.
I totally get your point that this is something that should be handled at the civic planning level rather than at SV-funded startups. Copenhagen is probably the clearest example where the city government was able to make massive improvements to the way people move around their city, encouraging non-car transit. That doesn't change that bikes and scooters are arguably a more effective way to move individuals than cars (either private ownership or rideshare), and a shared system has transportation benefits that are unique from the benefits offered by traditional public transit.
It would be awesome to massively reduce private car use in cities and use the space gained for other modes of transportation and uses (bike, scooter, walking, leisurly get togethers of the neighborhood) and reclaim the space for actually useful things and efficient transportation.
One of my current issues with the scooters (apart from the philosophical objections, which you correctly point out) is that they zip around pavements with speeds, which are definitly uncomfortable (and depending on the riding style menacing) to the actual users of pavements, which are pedestrians. Being able to provide dedicated space for scooters would be a huge leap forward for their use.
I'm privileged enough to have Zurich's public transport system at my disposal, which literally gets you everywhere in 10 minute intervals and that this slightly skews my perspective (Tokyo is also pretty awesome, but I digress). But I do believe that such shifts in policy should be debated and planned and not just brute forced by some outsiders, whose main interest is profit and certainly not the best interest and well being of the citizenship they claim to serve.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
They could've been required to put a plan in place (and maybe even some ring-fenced funds etc.) to clear up their potential mess, before being allowed to dump things in public spaces.
Very few, if any, cities in the world live up to that standard. I've certainly never seen one, and I've been to most major cities in Europe, unless you define 'city' is only a small part of the main city center. And even in cases where there are stops close to where both you are and want to be there is no guarantee that those stops are connected in any reasonable way.
Any city > 100'000 pop in Switzerland
Paris, within the 20 arondissements
Prague, basically everywhere
Yeah, you may even need to take a bus. But then you're moving to those outskirts of town, where scooters anyway can't be found
As it does in most American cities.
You could also call it "a last-mile role in public transit that's completely inaccessible to the disabled".
Hell, my disability is relatively minor—I have developmental dyspraxia (a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder)—and I attempted to ride one of these scooters once, and I was so completely out-of-control riding it that I had to stop after a block, drag it back onto the sidewalk, and tuck it in a corner so nobody trips over it. It took me several minutes to stop shaking.
And they can also cause externalities for people with other disabilities. For example, people throwing them down on the sidewalks can create tripping hazards for the blind (though from what I've seen, this was a much bigger problem with the bikes that predated the scooters than the scooters themselves).
I can't see this as poetic justice. Two wrongs don't make a right, as the saying goes.