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Comment by velosol | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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