Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

“Their app specifically says you can ride it ‘anywhere’ and leave it ‘anywhere,’” Borelli says as he pushes a Bird scooter through the Pacific Beach neighborhood. If he sounds slightly bitter, it’s only because he owns a bike shop nearby and believes that dockless scooter companies are trying to steal his customers.

But to Borelli, it seemed that the scooter industry was really trying to replace bicycles. He threw the offending scooters in the dumpster, but they were quickly replaced by more scooters

So a bike shop owner didn't like the competition, and decided to start stealing scooters and throwing them in dumpsters? I have sympathy for people who don't like the scooters on the sidewalk (I'm one of those people), but don't act like you are taking some kind of honest businessman just trying to help the public. This whole thing is just a way to justify eliminating competition for this guys bike shop. Started out throwing them in dumpsters, and moved to "impounding" them and issuing them tickets (not sure why he thinks he has the authority to do that) to try and justify it.

I live in San Diego, and have followed this with great interest. From my understanding, they are only doing this for scooters that are parked illegally: e.g. on the shop owners property, blocking vehicle access, etc.

It's very interesting, because the riders don't have an incentive to park appropriately (and that is sometimes a guessing game -- street signs don't exist for where you can park scooters legally). However, I'd warrant that it's the sheer carelessness of riders who cause this issue.

Without people like these repo folks, there would be no disincentive for either the riders or the scooter companies. The riders don't care (and making them care would hurt the companies' growth/user retention -- part of the appeal is that "drop anywhere" thing).

In short, I see no problem with this. We allow tow truck companies to do the same, with private citizens as the victims. This only forces the scooter companies to solve the problem they created.

> because the riders don't have an incentive to park appropriately (and that is sometimes a guessing game -- street signs don't exist for where you can park scooters legally). However, I'd warrant that it's the sheer carelessness of riders who cause this issue.

i think this is not exactly correct. The scooter-riding apps i've tried do make users take a photograph of the correctly-parked scooter after the ride, and even if there wasn't that enforcement in place, if the riders are to use the service more than once, they have an incentive to leave the scooters in positions that will be amenable for further riding.

i'm not denying that the riders can be arseholes, but there's also a significant proportion of people who don't use the scooters but are angry at the presence of those scooters and vandalize them, push them over, and even drop them into bodies of water.

  make users take a photograph of the correctly-parked scooter

You can upload any picture of any of their scooters. It's just a picture, and it may or may not have any metadata, or unaltered metadata.

I think the incentive should be to call the police and have them impound it in a legal way, or just move it off of their property, not have a private party come and steal the scooters. Just because something is on your property, does not mean you can legally take it - if you park in my driveway, I can't just steal your car.

Replace "steal" with "call a registered tow company" and you can do exactly that - have someone remove an improperly-placed item from your property. Cities solved the problem of improperly-parked cars by creating the entire "towing" concept.

Police aren't a service for junk removal, they are for holding guns. You hire a moving company to remove junk and you get the police to come hold guns if the junk-leaver threatens to do you harm because of same.

Impounding isn't the same thing as throwing them into a dumpster.

Likewise, unless it is registered as a vehicle (and I doubt these scooters are), impounding probably wouldn't happen, and there is no law against tossing abandoned "garbage" that appears on your property.

Interesting. Precedence will eventually be set and then we'll know.

That's not how it works for cars why would it be different for scooters? You generally can't call police to impound a car parked on your private property. That's why you call a towing company.

What if you have a dozen people show up every morning and leave their pickup anywhere leave anywhere car rentals in your driveway?

Call the police, or (in the case of the scooters), move it off of your property. I mean I sympathize with the property owners encountering problems, but I'm pretty sure it is very illegal to just impound other peoples property like this. If it was an individual property owner taking scooters off their property and throwing them in some dumpster after they got fed up with them, I wouldn't really blame them, but making a business centered around stealing property just to shake down scooter companies and reduce competition for your bike shop doesn't seem very legal or ethical.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/sites/default/files/FileC...

Every state/city is a little different with regard to the specifics

Police contract out this sort of work to companies like the one in the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com