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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Finally, some sober response from the market. there is just no way these can make money at the rate they get destroyed.

Im an auto mechanic by trade, and realized these things were a terrible idea when we started having to remove them from cars and trucks. Running over one of these things is somewhere between hitting a land mine and a bicycle rack. Ive personally had to cut at least 30 of them from various drive shafts, wheel wells, and suspension arms. I have a Mercedes van customer looking at nearly six thousand in damage to everything from the radiator all the way back to the driveshaft knuckle after hitting two of these at highway speed as they fell out of the back of a pickup truck.

The real joke is they are looking to file an insurance claim against Bird, as their attorney believes state vehicle law covers the scooters as a motor vehicle similar to a motorcycle.

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I don't see how what you described has anything to do with Bird. It could be any scooter, or any random object that's falling out of a pick up truck. Running over things in general is going to be bad for your vehicle.

He may be seeing these coming in at a higher rate than other objects. Bird has set up a business of transporting heavy scooters that wasn't there before. I've seen people ride 4 at one time to transport them home to charge

We don't know if the pickup was being operated by Bird or a subcontractor. My guess is that it was. I see people picking these things up in pickups and vans, and they don't look at all professional, but they look like they work for Bird (or the other companies in the sector).

It's relevant to Bird because Bird makes these scooters available to use at very low cost.

Nobody would leave their own scooter in the street, but people have no problem leaving someone else's scooter wherever it was convenient. People leave them all over the place where I live, and it's been a huge problem. They're constantly being fished out of the rivers, dumpsters, etc.

It's a fair point, but I personally have been the victim of a piece of scrap metal that flew off a truck and into my windshield.

The issue is not precisely with Bird, but that the big dogs who fund these companies can produce giant pieces of wasted material thanks to how US and Chinese monetary policy works

Curious why China is named

There's a lot of cheap money floating around in China as well. This is funding business models like that of Ninebot, who is the manufacturer for a lot of these cheap scooters. Another Chinese company that had a similar business model is Ofo, which essentially went bankrupt a few months ago after raising over $2B in funding for dockless bikesharing.

Eh, I don't agree with this. The issue in your case was that someone didn't properly secure a piece of scrap metal to their vehicle. The fact that China demands scrap metal doesn't seem relevant to me given that this sounds like simple incompetence.

You wouldn't blame the automaker for a drinking and driving incident that resulted in a death, you'd blame the driver.

Bird isn't responsible for securing the load on a truck. They need to go after the driver of the truck that dropped them - he has liability insurance, or his employer does.

My experience suggests that Bird won't tell the victim the identity of the guilty party even if they know it. Here's a video of a Bird scooter rider running a red light and almost causing a collision with me, a cyclist:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=19Bl1ZhMvxbLliIyNkNe_Aj3QWD...

I contacted Bird and while they did look at the video and seemed sympathetic, I got the impression that nothing was done in response. That's because they refused to tell me even simple things like "The rider was reprimanded". I didn't ask for the rider's identity, just for what was done in response. And I contacted them within an hour of the incident, providing precise time, location, and the video above, so I'm very confident they knew who the rider was.

(Sorry for the strong language in the video. Note that I included some time before the incident because I know from experience that some people always seem to suggest that if a cyclist had a bad time on the road it was because they antagonized who gave them a bad time. I hope it's clear that I had no contact with this guy before the video.)

To be fair, this kind of idiocy is in no way limited to scooters. In NYC we don't have Bird yet but we do have tons of delivery people on bikes (electric and traditional) that do stuff even more dangerous than this. One time while I was coming off of a steep downhill a delivery guy wheeled his bike out from between two parked cars without looking either way, and another delivery guy who was about 30 feet in front of me hit the bike, went over the handlebars, and smashed his face on the ground. He was visibly dazed for minutes after and bleeding from his head; it would have happened to me if I was about a second ahead of where I was. I've also had electric bikes whiz by about 2 feet from me on the sidewalk at 20+mph many times. They are nearly silent, so it's easy to imagine abruptly turning around or shifting over (as pedestrians are wont to do) and very getting severely injured. I've seen plenty of other awful and dangerous behavior in addition.

Fortunately, I don't see this as much with non-delivery cyclists. In NYC at least, this is mostly a problem with delivery people; the extreme pressure they are under to deliver on time, combined with the fact that many of them have clearly received no safety training, seems to be a major cause.

NYC's bad cyclists (and, in the future, bad scooterists) are actually scarier to me than NYC drivers because they can come at you from so many more angles thanks to their small size; it's much easier to predict and avoid cars and even pedestrians. (People are also used to cyclists here, so the cars are paradoxically not nearly as scary to me as they are in less dense environments.)

[edited to clarify that I was also on a bike]

Yes, I agree that delivery folks can be particularly dangerous. I also watch out for ridershare drivers as they are frequently distracted by their phone and in a rush.

The small size was a major problem here. I probably would have seen the scooter rider earlier if they were a driver running the red light. I now always check for red light runners at that intersection.

(As for how visible I was, I was wearing a hi-viz jacket at the time. My air horn seems to have been the only thing that caught the scooter guy's attention. Not sure what more I could do.)

For those that don't want to watch the video:

1. Bird rider runs a red light. 2. Bird rider has head phones on. 3. Bird rider doesn't bother to look at oncoming traffic before crossing.

It's clear to me from this thread, that scooter riders need insurance and a driver's license. That would solve 90% of the issues right there.

Motorized scooter riders in CA are required to have a drivers license and wear a helmet. Most states do not require insurance for motorized scooters that cannot go more than 25MPH.

of course they wouldn’t, voluntarily. and you shouldn’t want them to. under subpoena however, they would have to.

Yes, I thought about that after posting. I don't think they should give the identity of a user to some random person. For what it's worth, I didn't ask for the Bird rider's identity, and I don't see a good reason why they couldn't have told me whether the rider was reprimanded. I suspect that the rider wasn't reprimanded and they didn't want to lie to me.

Bird most likey is the "employer." They have a gig economy model where people are paid a rate per scooter to pick them up, charge them and drop them off at a specific location.

Its doubtful the truck driver was an employee of bird, but its also likely they were only moving the scooters because of this model. That sounds like enough of a reason to add them to the suit that will also likely hit the driver.

Yes—if Bird’s business model requires the transportation of the vehicles by contractors, Bird is responsible for requiring parameters of safe transport.

In such a case, I would agree. I was thinking "some random vehicle (perhaps a scooter thief) had a Bird scooter fall off."

It's relevant to Bird because Bird has money, unlike Random Joe's Trucking Ltd.

Imagine running over a piano that fell off a truck, and then suing Steiner instead of the moving company.

If the driver of the truck was only transporting the bird as part of their agreement with Bird to charge the scooters, were they acting as an agent of bird at the time they were driving on the highway?

Scooters, including by Bird, have dramatically increased the amount of street obstacles one can run over. It’s absolutely relevant because the entire scooter model is “blanket the city with them”

On top of that, because many of the chargers are “contractors”, you get situations like the OP described where random people just throw scooters in their pickup, unsecured, and then they fly away on the highway.

Is it that hard to see? Bird, at a minimum, is going to have to replace the destroyed scooter, at least if they want to maintain the same capacity to serve that area/market.

Just as I suspected, in a game of rock-paper-scissors, scooters beat cars.

I'm not saying Bird isn't responsible for some damage, but if the scooters fell out of a pickup, I can't see how anyone but the pickup driver is liable in this case. Or do you mean that the pickup was a Bird maintenance vehicle?

Typically Bird hunters [1] will go around with a pickup truck to gather a bunch of scooters to charge them. I've seen one pickup truck that appeared to be company owned rather than a bird hunter, but it seemed to have a decent system to secure the scooters and had many more than I'd ever seen a hunter get.

In any case, yes, drivers are responsible for securing loads, but in a lawsuit you go after the deepest pockets if you think you might be able to get payment. It would be an interesting argument that Bird is liable as the hunter is at least an independent contractor for Bird while picking up & transporting the scooters for charging.

[1]: Apparently this is the term for those who pull the scooters in and charge them and then redeploy them after the fact for a kickback from Bird.

Yeah, if this was someone getting paid by Bird in any capacity, then I can see them being liable. I was imagining a user tossing a couple of nearby scooters in their truck so they'd have them at their destination.

If you introduce a new technology that creates all sorts of negative side effects, why are you not to blame?

Bring a whole load of scooters into public spaces without ensuring they are properly stored, and professionally collected, is irresponsible and should be illegal. The pavement and roads belong to people, not to corporations.

The pavement and roads belong to cars.

It's a joke to say anything else. If a scooter can get hit by a car and mess up the car, we've gotta do something about this nuissance! If a scooter takes up 2 sq ft of space on a curb in between rides, they're ruining our streets! Capitalism run amok! But the entire row of cars parked for free a couple feet away? That's great. Not to mention, tens of thousands of lives lost every year? All good, nothing wrong with that.

It's also got absolutely nothing to do with people vs corporations, using that dichotomy here is absurd. Car makers spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year advertising to people to get them to buy more, bigger, more expensive cars. Not to mention, cars are even often leased or rented. I don't see why the business model of rental vs one-time purchase matters, but even if it does matter to you for some reason, cars and scooters are both rented!

Again, I'm not saying Bird is blameless in general. I'm saying that if a Bird user (not a contractor) chooses to put a Bird scooter in the back of their pickup, and doesn't secure it properly, that specific thing is not Bird's fault.

If a company leaves out a bunch of guns on the sidewalk and someone picks one up and shoots someone, is the company liable? The logic is analogous.

The way I see it, it’s about where the liability risk is placed and how that changes behavior. Because chargers use personal vehicles, Bird can turn their eyes to those people being unsafe. If Bird had its own employees charging them and using Bird company vehicles, the Bird corporate insurance rates would be at risk of increasing with reckless behavior. So they would probably take some time to police their drivers behavior.

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