Comment by throwawaymath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaymath | Hacker News Reader

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> Obviously sarcasm, but as a non-car-owner I get a kick out of people freaking out about these scooters taking up public space. Meanwhile every street in the city is full of cars...

I don't follow...these things aren't comparable. Cities have developed a common infrastructure over decades to facilitate car ownership and usage in everyday life. While they may do the same with rental bikes and scooters in the future, they have not yet done so.

We also have a rich body of legal literature pertaining to car ownership, storage, usage and property laws. Likewise, we don't yet have those precedents for rental scooters stored on sidewalks. What we do have is a rough patchwork of sidewalk and property laws we can try to extrapolate from. How's that for efficiency?

That you get a kick out of peoples' dissatisfaction about this, for the reason you stated, suggests to me that you don't actually understand why they're upset. I don't think most people are strictly concerned about how literally space-efficient the scooters are; rather that they have a tendency to be parked on a sidewalk. People would get pretty upset if cars were suddenly parked on sidewalks without oversight too.

If you don't like the car analogy, how about bikes? After all, kick scooters are parked in the exact same section of the sidewalk that bikes are (the "furniture zone"), and are frequently even locked to bike racks.

Bikes are parked on bike racks, which is to say, in a place designed to store bikes. Scooters are parked — rather, strewn — across the side walk chaotically with no regard for those of us actually trying to walk there.

Sometimes scooters are parked on the side of the road. Sometimes scooters are parked in a ditch beside the road. Bikes rarely are.

Bike racks? Really? I've never lived in a town that had them until my current city - and even then, there are really only in areas with enough traffic for them.

Scooters can be parked at bike racks. Are there enough bike racks to park the scooters at the bike racks? would the situation be similar if all of those scooters were bicycles or if bicycles were as cheap as scooters?

Isnt it the job of the government to make sure there is infrastructure in place for bicycles and motorcycles? That is what they did for cars after all.

> Bikes are parked on bike racks, which is to say, in a place designed to store bikes.

Speaking from my experience in Shanghai, where bicycles are common, there's no such thing as a bike rack. (Well, I have seen racks for rental bikes. But none for individually-owned bicycles.)

Rather, supermarkets, university buildings, apartment complexes, and other places which are likely to receive a lot of incoming traffic have bicycle parking lots, and if you're somewhere else, you park on the sidewalk.

The bike analogy seems more applicable, yeah.

Visit the Netherlands, a society where bikes dominate, and you'll see how that is handled.

For example, in many cities once every week every bike parked in a public area is labelled with a little color ribbon. The colors rotate according to a fixed schedule, so that it can be verified if a bike has been parked for more than two, three, four weeks. If a bike has been left unattended for more than N weeks (where N can vary) it gets towed away. They all get stored someplace out of town, and once a month the bikes that haven't been reclaimed for M months get sold for cheap.

In other words, there are systems for how long you can leave your property unattended in public before it ceases to be your property.

I'm curious about the dominance of bikes in the Netherlands from a different direction.

The primary reason there's no system for handling abandoned bikes in the US is not that nobody uses bikes. Bikes aren't especially common, but the issue of an abandoned bike isn't going to come up -- ever -- because of the extreme frequency of bike theft. An abandoned bike will quickly be stolen, just like a non-abandoned bike. Bird's scooters don't have this problem because they're tracked. But the background reality of bicycles may contribute to jzl's (false) impression that you should be legally able to just take scooters that aren't locked down.

How much of an issue is bicycle theft in the Netherlands? How long would you expect to be able to own one before having it stolen?

Years ago I saw somewhere that an estimated two million bikes are stolen each year on a population of (then) fifteen million people. So that averages out to once every seven years if everyone rode bikes, but if we remove the really young and old that's probably closer to once every six years.

This does not represent my experience at all, I've had bikes stolen once every three years on average. It won't surprise you that students learn to buy very cheap second-hand bikes with very big bulky locks really quickly here.

On the plus side, I've never been worried about junkies mugging me. They steal/sell bikes for drug money instead, and I honestly wonder if that is a uniquely Dutch thing.

On the west coast, bike theft is common. Junkies and/or homeless people steal them and sell them for parts. Or change parts around and paint them so they can't be identified.

Also, there's supposed to be organized rings where bikes stolen in Portland are trucked to Seattle (so they're much harder to identify as stolen) and vice-versa.

Don't the scooters generally get rounded up to recharge every couple days? That sounds like a good system but I don't understand how it's relevant.

I wouldn't know, I'm not in a place where Bird operates. But it was just an example - if it is like you say, it sounds like a different type of system should be put in place instead (probably some form of licensing).

Stealing is stealing, regardless of whether the property is unattended. There are legal procedures for abandoned property however.

I'm not talking about stealing. I'm talking about the commenter's perspective I quoted.

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