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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

You don't really have to feel sorry for them, you just have to recognise that they are entitled to what their contract says they are.

If you're against an exclusivity agreement (which actually makes a lot of sense when establishing a transportation network) then your complaint should be with the government, not Lyft.

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It is pretty rich one of two billion dollar ride sharing tech companies who disrupted the corrupt taxi monopolies by illegally skirting regulations is now suing a city for damages over a contract they claim gives them a legal exclusivity to operate bike sharing. Same people who cried foul over the taxi token system and called it a monopoly...just goes to show what SV disruption is all about.

How did they "illegally skirt regulations"? Having read the california taxi and car-for-hire codes a few months before uber came into existance, I can tell you that in california, at least, lyft was breaking no laws. Uber, was, since it was called "ubercab" and you can't have "taxi" or "cab" in your corporate name without actually being a taxi or cab.

You can look up the number of civil and criminal violation for both uber and Lyft drivers by county throughout the country.

In Miami-Dade county Uber (drivers) for example racked up over $4M in fines between 2014-2016 for operating a ride for hire without being licensed, the way our statute works is the 1st charge is civil and 2nd is criminal. Lucy’s fines were less but still in the millions.

This is repeated in counties all over the country.

Nevertheless here is an article from six years ago showing California regulators fined a lift and shut them down for violating state law and lift had to retroactively work with regulators to remove the fines and continue operations. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/lyft-...

You don't have to feel sorry for Lyft, you just have to recognize that they got what they were entitled to what their contract says they were.

The exclusive right to use public property and the public right of way to operate a bikeshare.

Sidewalks are not public property--they are private property subject to public easements. Ergo, any other bikeshare may legitimately use sidewalks to operate their bikeshares.

BAM. Disruption. Who would have thought that other companies could play the same game Lyft did?

jMyles specifically is objecting to whether the city has the moral authority to sell that exclusivity. If I sell my neighbor's lawn chair to a passerby without my neighbor's permission, the passerby doesn't have a claim on the chair even though it's my ill behavior that was the cause. (This is true regardless of whether the passerby knew who the true owner was.)

> If I sell my neighbor's lawn chair to a passerby without my neighbor's permission

That isn't even remotely similar to the position a local government fills, however.

That point of the example wasn't demonstrate definitively whether the government has moral authority to sell exclusivity. (That's obviously disputable whereas the lawn-chair example is not.) The point was to show that Lyft isn't necessarily entitled to anything just because they have a signed a contract, as you suggested. Rather, you would actually have to dispute jMyles's claim on moral authority.

A widespread belief that transportation should not be competitive might explain why it functions so poorly.

How is this different from banning all but one automaker?

Europe

It's hard to interpret your one-word answer, but if you are saying that Europe can be held up as an example of success for this concept, then I ask you: which European city has successfully granted a legal monopoly to a single bike fleet?

I have done bike / scooter fleet apps in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Malaga, Prague... I dunno, many other European cities - and I don't think I've ever come across one with such a policy.

Is this a normal European thing?

I'm talking about public transport.

Oh sure, public transit is way better in Europe.

But they didn't need to foment a monopoly for a bike fleet company to achieve better public transit, so what is the underlying point you are trying to get people to understand?

It's just one data point, but in Stockholm there were this bike sharing stands the city arranged in the centre via a procured agreement with a company. You would have to put the bike back in one of these stands after the rental. It worked quite well. No bikes laying around.

Nowadays, those are gone because of a juridical dispute over the procurement process between some bike sharing companies.

Instead there are these e-scooters littered everywhere. They are used mostly by tourists. I have no idea how the companies collect those and charge them with a profit. Most likely they don't. There were also some non city cooperation leave the bike anywhere bike sharing companies, that failed.

Maybe the main problem with communal bike sharing is that there has to be forced returns to designated end points, and only the city can "afford" (i.e. designate) public space for those places?

If you can put the bike where ever after the rental, it's just gonna be a mess.

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