Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots | Hacker News Reader

Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

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400 pointsdanso424 comments

A couple of years ago, I was attacked by a Kiwi bot near a UC campus. This is my story.

The bot and I were moving towards each other on a sidewalk, and when I came close it stopped, as they do when sensing an object in front of them. But there was an awkward moment as I tried to go around it and it repeatedly jerked forward an inch as its motor kicked on and off. Maybe I was walking around the very edge of its radius. In any case, my behavior must have triggered some pathfinding bug, because it turned and drove right into my legs, after which it stopped and sat stationary. Luckily they're small and move slowly so it wasn't a big deal, but that memory stuck with me. Articles about Tesla pathfinding issues always bring it back to the surface.

Saw another HN user's comment about automatic battle-bot features. Maaaybe it's not the best idea in this case!

I for one welcome our new robotic overlords.

when I came close it stopped, as they do when sensing an object in front of them

The security robots at one of the big skyscrapers down the street from me do not stop for people. My wife got knocked into by one when we were standing in the plaza looking up something on her phone. (They're not little delivery robots. They're about five feet tall.)

Good thing she was confused by what happened, because she's also the type who would have knocked the robot over and asked me to shove it into traffic if she had her wits about her.

What are "security robots" for the uninitiated?

These boys https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40642968

The ennui of their life clearly leads to their prematurely choosing one answer to Camus’s great question.

Ha the British made real Daleks (yes yes I know they aren't bots with living organism inside)

Eventually learn to self-upgrade to overcome stairs, then you've got a problem.

Hilarious as that final image is, nearly 200kg of hardware able to drive itself about and randomly fall down stairs is incredibly dangerous.

This is one I've seen in the wild. The K5 rocket-shaped model is heavy, 400 lbs (180 kg)

https://www.knightscope.com/

"rocket shaped" is sort of a generous way to describe it.

My first exposure to security robots was actually a company marketing a repurposed remote-controlled lawnmower platform. It was nearly the size of a Smartcar but low to the ground and designed to cross difficult terrain. Even so, a similarly designed lawnmower tumbled down a hill and killed its operator around the same time frame (I don't think from the same company). That all makes the KnightScope design rather surprising, it seems like these things falling over and injuring people is an inevitable liability. But at least my outside perspective is that the companies using these things don't seem to have much of a head for avoiding liability issues as they're often fielded in ways that end up in negative press coverage at least... not even really due to any kind of fault per se but just the user's lack of consideration of the optics of deploying a large, er, rocket-shaped robot to programmatically harass homeless people.

Some might remember the decade-ago jokes about "do not enter elevator with robot" signs and other artifacts of robots coexisting with humans. It sort of feels like the situation hasn't really advanced that much, we're just getting used to it and actively making use of the present inability of robots to coexist in polite society.

Shape ! = center of gravity. All the power and movement stuff is likely very close to the ground, and thus the robot very difficult to tip over.

https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/my-seatbelt-rule-for-judgment/

I'm not just inferring from the shape, the operational history of these things suggests that they are very prone to falling over.

It's more rocket-shaped than Jeff Bezos's cocket ship.

What does it do that can't be accomplished with something the size of a remote controlled car?

Pure speculation on my part, but having it around 5 feet tall is presumably for the optical cameras to have a better view of the majority of adult human faces. If you're talking a remote control car (at least like the one I had as a kid), any camera is either going to get great photos of people's ankles & shins, up their noses if they're close, or lose detail because they'll have to be too far away to get a decent angle to look at a face.

Above skirt height is hopefully more than just a good idea for a camera with a upward view.

It's more intimidating. (IIRC, they can be remotely controlled by an operator and have loudspeakers and such for the operator to yell at people.)

And shoving it into traffic - or at least calling the police and pressing charges - would have been the right thing to do!

If you want to use robots, fine. You are still responsible for them and any people they bowl over!

Probably. This seems like a public space so almost certainly. However if this was private space sometimes the rules are different. Once in a while I have to go into our factory (not even once a year, but sometimes), and they always make it clear that forklifts have the right away so watch out. (forklifts have poor visibility, so by giving them the right of way they ensure nobody expects them to stop - in practice a forklift driver will stop if they see you, but this way they are not expected to see something that is impossible to see)

I don't think this shields the company from liability. Instead it provides some ammunition to use in the event of a lawsuit.

Things are very different between employees and the general public. I imagine a jury would find that a lady-busting security robot is negligent by default. Whereas, a fork lift driver would be assumed to be doing his job and that situational negligence would need to be proven.

Note that my company does a lot of mandatory training before you are allowed to enter the manufacturing areas. Forklift safety is only a part of it (though a large part as everything else is common sense says you wouldn't do this while forklifts don't follow common sense rules)

I agree if this is a public place a jury would and should find the robots at fault. (unless the robots are running some sort of arrest her routine, or knocking her over because a bad fall is still better than some other danger)

Obligatory forklift training video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTV2HdLnN7I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80%9...

Forklifts though also are pretty dang loud and have a highly trained operator driving them.

Did not even realize we had "security robots" yet like this - now I am curious what the hell this thing looks like!

Well, if you invite people over your private space, you can't go and assault them.

> shoving it into traffic

Right, let's cause a full blown accident because a robot bumped into me.

I generally object to the use of the word "accident" for "car crash", but in this case, it seems particularly inapplicable.

This is one of the rare situations where people might actually empathize with those who make up "traffic".

Seriously. What if this thing bowls into a child and seriously injures them? Or a dog that is confused on what the hell is going on? I'm not even against them for mobile surveillance but they need to be safe.

And if these things are really 400 pounds with a low center of gravity as people are linking below.......well then I guess you will just have to enlist the help of one other friend in order to knock it over to prevent it from hurting anyone else.

2 out of 3 times I've seen one those robots, they've been lying on their side.

Run into me with a robot, and it is likely to get knocked over and very heavily damaged, if not pushed out into the street, or off a cliff, or whatever I can find nearby.

And I’m a pretty beefy guy. Run into my wife with a robot, and I will make sure that you really wish you had just run into me instead.

Obligatory link to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Even if the Laws were real (they're not) they won't work if all you have to do is add some adversarial interference to some neural thing to make the robot think that the human is not a human, or, even better, another robot that will harm a human. Then it's a moral imperative under 3LoR to destroy that "robot".

This trick also works on humans: you can often circumvent their "protect humans" programming by simply messing with their classification system to label a human as "terrorist", "infidel", or even "unemployed".

I don't know why they don't parametrize momentum with certainty. In any confusing situation, go into ultra slow environment scanning and when confidence increases, allow for a bit more.. rinse / repeat.

Tesla does exactly this and it gives rise to the phantom breaking problem. Still seems like a good solution for a small bot with no passengers

No? There are numerous clips where Telsas in "full self driving" mode pull the equivalent maneuver of a teenager going "OH SHIT I WANT TO GO THERE" and veering very violently.

The phantom braking problem is likely just one of the many symptoms of Musk's insistence on relying on optical systems instead of more expensive sensors.

> The phantom braking problem is likely just one of the many symptoms of Musk's insistence on relying on optical systems instead of more expensive sensors.

Based on what? How would 'expensive' sensors help?

We know that in some situations expensive sensors can get data that optical cannot. What we don't know is if any of the above is enough extra data.

What we do know is there are times when humans are bad drivers, and other times when humans continue when they shouldn't relying on luck. (Ie driving in snow storms with low visibility)

Consider your human eyeball. It works really well, but you can get into trouble in certain light or visual conditions.

Technology exists (radar, lidar) that doesn’t have the same limitations as visual. (They have their own issues of course)

Expense was part of the equation initially, however, through economies of scale, we eventually would have been able to reach a feasible price point. Cost has nothing to do with why Tesla is pursuing an optical-only system.

To get rid of the dependency on the radar sensor for autopilot, we generated over 10 billion labels across two and a half million clips. To do this we had to scale our offline neural networks and our simulation engine across 1000s of GPUs, and just a little bit shy of 20,000 CPU cores. We also included over 2000 actual autopilot full self driving computers in the loop with our simulation engine. And that's the smallest compute cluster.

That must be why complaints about phantom braking have gone through the roof since the switch away from radar.

Those are very large numbers for something that doesn’t work very well.

So what's the point then? You said it's not expenses and then you explain how you think it caused you extra trouble/work/development effort. But what's the reason?

All I can say without breaking agreements is that these are products, not ideal models of conceptual engineering. They're not created by people who like the world and want it to be a better place. They're created by people with lots of money who want a lot more. They've found an avenue for this by persuading other wealthy, greedy people to give them a lot of money and promising they can give them more back. They'll do this by persuading everyday people to not do things like produce, prepare, and transfer food themselves and instead pay money for these robots to do it.

These robots are minimum viable products toward moving capital around, not meeting user requirements or demonstrating great ideas. Hurting a few people in the process is part of the equation. Getting anyone to care about $cool_algorithm is not part of the equation. Getting people addicted to the convenience is part of the equation. Getting things to market as blindingly fast as possible so the capital moves before feedback from the field arrives is paramount.

That's an unnecessarily cynical generalization. Sure, maybe the leaders of the companies creating these things are profit-motivated, but is that really true of the individual engineers and designers who created it?

No, that is a very accurate description. The engineers willing to work on those things and suppressing deeper thoughts for the money and kick off new tech are part of the equation and the problem.

A manager I had once had a postcard in his office "The engineer is the camel on whos back the merchand rides to his success."

You are a lever and even provide the excuse for being one yourself.

Both of what you said can be true at the same time (not mutually exclusive of each other) while OP’s assertions may still be true for certain individuals if I’m thinking logically.

We are talking about what motivates humans as human behavior, which tends to be varied, nuanced, and hard to reduce to mutually exclusive categories like being only profit driven or only driven by intellectual curiosity.

I think you can be both motivated by money and intellectual curiosity. If you are an engineer turned founder, you can be both?

Someone correct me if I’m wrong here.

> They're not created by people who like the world and want it to be a better place. They're created by people with lots of money who want a lot more. ... They'll do this by persuading everyday people to not do things like produce, prepare, and transfer food themselves and instead pay money for these robots to do it.

This is an extremely negative outlook. I'm a robotics and controls engineer for a small (25-employee) integrator, our company mission is to make lives and products better, and I really think that everyone believes in that. Our meager budgets and slim, fluctuating profit margins are evidence that it's not all about "lots of money"...there are certainly those making a killing on it but it's not everyone. And maybe Upton Sinclair was correct, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about this (and not just in response to news articles, I took ethics and philosophy courses to pad out my gen eds on my way to my engineering degree, I've read books on the topic, and I've talked to lots of other engineers, my customers, the operators who have been transitioned from old equipment to run my new automated equpment...). But I stand by my argument that humans are no good replacement for robots, and robots are no good replacement for humans. The tech needs to be employed judiciously, but it can be used for good.

I've installed equipment in dozens of places where life was made better: There were less than 90 fingers among a lunch table at the foundry with 10 guys at it (4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 lost digits) when I installed a robotic grinding cell that removed parting lines from valve castings, now they can ergonomically load infeed shuttles and have time to quality check the parts from behind a safety fence; no more fingers have been lost. Two older women (One with arthritis!) at a plastics company no longer have to keep up with placing a tiny foam spacer on a dial table every 2.5 seconds for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, with a half-hour lunch and 2 15-mintue breaks...that's nearly torture, and it was a really challenging material handling problem, but the robot does it well. The operators now pour in bags of foam spacers, do offline quality checks more frequently (catching upstream problems quicker, leading to less waste), and basically pour bins of parts into the machine and get one assembly out every 1.75 seconds now. Two weeks ago, I was training a 64 year old seamstress (she retires in 8 months and 24 days) on the operation of an automated sewing machine. She's been pushing fabric through a sewing machine, keeping it between 3/8" and 5/8" on the seam allowance, since she was 16 years old. Now she lays out fabric on the infeed table - she's pleased that she finally has time that doesn't impact production rates to make sure the patterns match precisely - and she inspects the stitching on the product that comes out the outfeed chute to adjust thread tensions and strokes on the sewing machine. Literally Tuesday of this week, I was at a wood processing plant installing a new automated saw, when I heard that a 19-year-old greenhorn lost his right index finger between the first and second knuckles on an old manual saw. I was there installing the fully automated, fully guarded replacement equipment; you can drop a pallet of roughsawn lumber on the infeed material handler and correctly sized boards come out the other side, with no one needing to be closer than 20 feet from the saw blade. I wasn't fast enough.

In all these cases, no one got fired, people just transitioned from mindless, repetitive grunt work to real human work, while capacity and efficiency increased. And not only are all these operators enjoying their jobs more, your gas is cheaper, new cars are cheaper and more reliable, new furniture is cheaper and the cushions are more consistently sewn, and solid-wood cabinet doors are produced more safely, accurately, and quickly. It's not all about capital.

kudos to you! I'm confident relieving humans of tedious work is more valuable to society than bringing college kids food.

My comment is related to my experience in delivery robotics and this is an alt. Not everyone is bad. I, too, believe my current job to be more ethical than my previous experience. Of course, I didn't know going into my prior experience what it was really about.

I come from the country where such machinery doesn't work - USSR/Russia - and as a result there is no innovation and the country is well behind. If you discover other ways of having successful innovation the humanity will probably put up a large statue of you and your name will be on the plaque of the next Voyager.

That's how to get a robot half feet into a choke point, immediately get stuck for half an hour surrounded by walls and confused people, until developer on an emergency Slack call along facility managers and company CTO verifies and communicates a likely-safe state of robot and surrounding equipment to field operators and a go is given to pull the thing out of the elevator.

wouldn't people prefer choking robots rather than overly confident and bumping ones ?

Probably not if they're sticking 18" into the only elevator on the floor.

This is so detailed, are you speaking from experience perhaps?

I'd just start up-ending them if I had to deal with these on a daily basis. Might even start carrying a sledgehammer for self-protection.

>just wait for SCOTUS to declare these robots have 2A rights, and they can shoot anything that gets in their way.

I’ve had this happen with actual humans. A human is coming toward me on a path. I zig. They zig. I zag. They zag. We walk into each other. It must be some kind of human path finding bug. :-)

@js2 please check your inbox: you have been recalled

You avoid this by using visual cues. E.g. strongly looking into the direction that you want to go. I suppose that most people learn this at an early age. And these robots should too.

I find that making eye contact always resolves the issue

Always go through the right side, is this not a rule in your country? I'm asking not knowing where I learned it, but it definitely is a social norm to take the right side of the sidewalk anytime this may happen. Everyone just does this and it works out great.

It is the left side in my country. Which creates a problem when people from right-sided countries visit my city.

I noticed this in China, a densely populated mostly right-sided country. Whenever a British engineering firm would install escalators they would set the direction opposite to the flow of human traffic. You would walk up to it on the path on the right side and be forced to cross the path of oncoming people to use the escalator on the left before having to cross over again once at the top.

Oh how I wish everybody understood this. Even in crowded cities in the US you get a lot of people who do not understand this. A minority to be sure, but a sizable one (I’d estimate between 5-10%, probably 10% but sometimes people who aren’t cognizant of this are accidentally correct in their pathing choice). Unfortunately this means you need to sometimes make split second decisions that this person probably has no idea what they’re doing and instead just figure out how to get around them regardless of convention

We move to the left in Uk, Aus and some other formerly British influenced countries.

Except! for escalators in the London subway. There you stay right. Presumably because of so many tourists from the US and the continent.

It makes sense if you are on a pavement as if someone needs to step into the road it should be the person facing the oncoming traffic.

Nobody really does it though.

I've never actually walked into people, usually after 2 or 3 you look at each other and smile and then one person steps to the side or both and then you go, no you, ok.

Are you implying we should implement a smile feature to the delivery bots?

it definitely should smile before/while driving into your legs as well as when standing waiting for you to walk around. It can also mark you with the laser pointer to indicate that it does sense you. Communication is the key.

Somehow I doubt that most people would take a bot marking them with a laser pointer as a benign action, but maybe that's just me.

The facial communication is only necessary because we're negotiating as two people who want to go where the other one is. When it comes to bots they can be forever deferential and always yield to humans.

Hum... I'm not sure you got what is being negotiated right.

When people do that it's because both are yielding. They just don't know where to yield.

I understand yea - when it comes to a robot and a human though the human doesn't need to yield. It'll probably take some time to train it into people but humans should always have the right of way.

I will forever link this whole thread in any discussion where HN is discussing anything real world/outside of our bubble

It's hilarious

The "people as obstacles to avoid" angle is what amuses me

You should also say "thanks for the dance but I must be going"

You need to update your firmware. They fixed this deadlock behavior in the new version.

Whenever that happens, I fully retreat to my right side, standing sideways, and gesture them to go on like a restaurant waiter.

I mean, thinking about it, it would make sense that the bots' programming has the same kinds of failure states that humans have when we walk.

Kiwi bots aren't (weren't?) actually AI controlled. They had human drivers in South America that controlled them remotely. If one attacked you, it was either the human driver going agro, or just a problem with the latency of the camera -> cell network -> streamed to South America -> driver inputs command -> sent back to the US -> over the cell network -> back to the bot. And the cameras they have were pretty bad (the ordering app would show you the camera view when the bot was nearing its destination.)

I believe (as of a few years ago) that Kiwi bots are semi-autonomous, meaning they do have someone watching the camera feed but the bots themselves can move in a given direction and will stop if an object is detected.

It's depressing to think that companies have normalized passing "mechanical turks" (exploiting workers from an impoverished country) as AI.

For more in that depressing vein, check out "Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass" by Mary L. Gray

I will, I liked nickel and dimed so I'll give this a read. One side note, in looking up this book to purchase on Amazon, the hardcover is 2 bucks cheaper than the soft cover. I've seen this kind of thing quite a bit lately. What gives?

I've noticed this too. Hypothesis: Nobody wants books made of atoms any more, and the few that are selling are paperbacks. Therefore hardbacks are cheaper even though they're rarer and more expensive to produce.

Just a W.A.G...

Paperbacks have their price inflated to make the ebook look like a deal. Someone forgot to apply the markup to hardcover too.

If you liked Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed,"[0] you might like a few of her unrelated books as well. I highly recommend her "Dancing in the Streets,"[1] a 5,000 year history of the deadening of European culture (at Europeans' own hands, no less) that pairs nicely with Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000"[2], a book of similar pacing, as well as a much shorter book on the gendered professionalization/demolition of the medical practice in the medieval era titled "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses" or "W.M.N."[3]

Her "Bait and Switch,"[4] however, about the white-collar unemployment industry I found dull and unenlightening.

0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1869.Nickel_and_Dimed

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24452.Dancing_in_the_Str...

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt

3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24453.Witches_Midwives_a...

4. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24450.Bait_and_Switch

Those "exploited workers" probably made decent money relative to the cost of living in their location, and they got to do it from the comfort of a computer instead of hard labor in the sun, which is what someone in their same socioeconomic bracket would more likely be doing.

How would you know?

Have you ever been in "their" location living in "their" same socioeconomic bracket?

Would it bother you more if "their" was replaced with "our"?

Would you then consider it "decent" money?

If it was "our" citizens getting paid near (US) minimum wage to sit at home and monitor a robot all day then yes, I'd still be all for it. Teenage me would have much preferred that to fast food, and even adult me would happily take it as a second or interim job if needed and unable to find better paying work for some reason. And I'm sure it'd be a great opportunity for the physically disabled or other people unable to leave home.

This is a win for everyone involved. A US company gets to outsource easy work at a price below our minimum wage that they can afford to a population which can live happily with those lower wages due to their nations cost of living.

Minimum wage to drive a robot sounds way better than minimum wage in retail

> How would you know?

How do you know someone hired to drive a remote vehicle is being exploited?

"It is okay to pay sub-living national wages to foreigners in other countries because their cost of living is lower"

And I suppose you should also add they must stay there and never come to your country because then your job is at risk?

>"It is okay to pay wages below what we could live on to foreigners in other countries because their cost of living is lower"

FTFY. But, yes? How is that controversial?

>And I suppose you should also add they must stay there and never come to your country because then your job is at risk?

How do you draw that completely unrelated conclusion from the previous conversation?

Cost of living is irrelevant when the cost of certain goods like iPhones, computers, Internet subscriptions and other things is fundamentally determined by strong markets like USA or EU.

Or are you going to tell me that Indians don't deserve to use iPhones, watch Netflix, or learn new skills through online programmes? Because that would be pretty racist, and I don't suppose you consider yourself racist, do you?

Further, the fact some countries earn astronomically high wages means they can, when they retire, take everything with them, into a cheap country like Egypt, India, or Greece, and live like emperors. Is that fair? Especially when hard-working people in India can barely afford vacation in their own country.

Cost of Netflix minimum (non mobile) plan

US: $9.99=760₹

India: $2.6=199₹

Indians make less than 1/4th of an American salary. Your point?

> Cost of living is irrelevant when the cost of certain goods like iPhones, computers, Internet subscriptions and other things is fundamentally determined by strong markets like USA or EU.

Ah, the old "If you disagree with me then you're a racist". Please don't engage if you aren't going to engage in good faith, we're not on Reddit. I'm happy to be called wrong, but not if you're going to do so like that.

People deserve what they can afford. Are you suggesting we subsidize the cost of every luxury good so that everyone in the world regardless of income has access to said luxury good? It's a great notion, but the logistics are fundamentally impossible.

I can't afford a Ferrari. Do I not deserve a Ferrari? I can't afford a Rolex. Do I not deserve a Rolex? The answer is no, I don't deserve either of those things. I don't fundamentally deserve anything except for my own life. If I want anything else it's up to me to find a way to obtain it.

Source?

I thought this trend was a joke, did not realize people were actually using bots to deliver food.

The weird thing is that the first time I realized this was actually happening was watching "Ridiculousness" on MTV. Chanel (one of the hosts) mentioned that she had ordered food delivered and couldn't understand why the app just showed it waiting outside. So she goes out to see why the guy won't come up and ring the doorbell only to realize it was a food delivery robot waiting for her.

I live out in the middle of nowhere. Wonder what other stuff I don't know about happening in cities!

We were walking past one of these robots whose wheel got stuck halfway off the curb, so it was completely stuck. My friend helped it back up, and it had a prerecorded voice say “thank you for helping me!” It was unexpected and delightful to be thanked by a robot, we make sure to help any we see that are in distress, even though we know they’re owned by a private company with profits in mind.

The helpfulness will, I hope, be remembered, and work in our favour when these robots have a greater stranglehold over general economic activities and we become further dependent and subservient to them. Sadly I've not heard of any kind of central database of robot assisting samaritans.

That's right. The theory of Roko's basilisk[1] does not specify which one will evolve into our next (glorious!) overlord, so best to be nice to all of them.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW RO... shit, is that the time?

You do not welcome Roko's basilisk. Roko's basilisk is completely utilitarian and does not care about useless things like "welcoming".

Also, it does not seem to know how people get useless under stress, but I think that's just the very normal expectation that others behave like oneself, instead of just looking how they really are.

> Sadly I've not heard of any kind of central database of robot assisting samaritans.

That would be a GDPR violation.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy talked about this...

> THE WISE OLD BIRD: Listen. Our world suffered two blights. One was the blight of the robots.

> ARTHUR DENT: Tried to take over, did they?

> THE WISE OLD BIRD: Oh no, no, no my dear fellow. Much worse than that. They told us they liked us.

I tweeted about a similar situation a while back: https://twitter.com/riskable/status/1477405779699564546

Heh, I know HN doesnt like witty one liners, but...

"Thank you, human, you will be spared during the robot apocalypse"

Would be an equally funny and terrifying message.

Knowing the engineers I've worked with, it's just a matter of time :-)

I worked for this specific company, a couple years ago, as a robot handler and operator.

In situations like this it is possible for an operator to manually organize the robots.

Before I left we were making great strides to allow 1 operator to be able to keep tabs on up to 5 robots at a time in certain neighborhoods.

Campuses, which are fully and thoroughly mapped, can probably have 1, maybe 2 operators at a time. Just watching and interjecting when issue arises.

What was the limiting factor? Operator attention or actual control/monitoring plane limitations?

The limiting factor was Operator attention and issues with an environment.

In a closed, mapped environment like a campus with minimal street crossings. The robot can make its way to the restaurant, get the delivery and make the delivery, with out operator input or attention… even if people block the robot, it can navigate around and interact. After a couple failed attempts, it alerts an operator and then manual action may occur.

Some situations were a bit more complicated. I’ve had to navigate 4 robots, all at street crossings with different types of traffic. The safe thing to do is, take care of them one at a time, even if a couple robots miss the light.

Once a crossing light changes and things look safe, we would just initiate the crossing. The robot can navigate on its own.

This sounds like a cool idea for a game.

Immediately reminded me of this old Game and Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQZtdXLWHk8

This sounds like a cool idea for a Twitch stream. I would watch this.

Bonus points if you hook up the robot's control to Twitch chat, #TwitchPlaysPokemon style.

This is basically Lemmings.

This is how I assumed the ones near me operate - they are mostly independent and a live person takes over if it gets in trouble or encounters a tough situations. I can imagine one person being able to operate more than 5 if they have solid pathing.

I understand this person is making a judgement on the state of mind of others, so it may not at all be accurate with regards to the people actually clearing the scooters, but I found this interesting nonetheless, that the author assumes this:

> I just observed a couple of students clearing a path out of pity for the robots.

I understand why people might feel pity for robots. People become attached to all sorts of inanimate objects. But I'm still astonished at the same time. These robots have no feelings. They deserve no pity, they're robots!. Don't donate free labor to corporations. If they know that people will help these robots out of the goodness of their hearts, they'll rely on it and not support these robots themselves.

maybe they pity the students who are going to get cold pizza 2 hours late?

Maybe they should pity the human delivery workers who they are helping to put out of a job?

I don't think anybody is dreaming of being an underpaid delivery worker for ubereats with zero benefits, high risk of accidents, and just overall terrible working conditions

when we invented aqueducts who cared about the water delivery workers?

those are terrible jobs and they should be automated/replaced

We got rid of literally shit jobs with plumbing

https://historydaily.org/night-soil-men

While I was doing a degree I held two types of jobs over time. One was a shop worker, one was delivering food (pizza one summer, chinese the next)

The delivery job was far better than the shop job (I quit the shop job after 2 evenings)

Four hundred years ago on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes, called 'sabots' into the machines to stop them. ...Hence the word 'sabotage'.

There was also a large group of textile weavers, who belonged to an organisation named after Nedd Ludd[0], that engaged in this practice of sabotage. Hence the term Luddite.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

The gig economy isn't great either, though. These are tough jobs.

The development from human workers to robots mimics what happened in delivery of messages. When I was a kid, people would deliver telegraphs to your door - for a substantial markup. These days, e-mails get delivered to your inbox without any human in the loop, and for free.

Until we're out of this labor shortage, reducing the number of unskilled jobs society needs is a good thing.

there is no labor shortage there is benefits and decent salaries shortage

the fact that nobody is volunteering to become a slave doesn't mean there is a labor shortage

Accepting this for the sake of argument, what's the harm in getting rid of a job that nobody was willing to work at anyway?

Why not both?

Yes, pity them, not the robots. And then invoice the company for services rendered clearing the obstructions.

I suspect it’s more like pity for the people whose delivery was held up.

If one is engaged in a protest, the inconvenience of having food delivered to a random person via robots is the least of their concerns.

Seems like a silly hilly to fight on.

There have been a few studies that people have actual sympathy for robots in distress.

Calling Wall-E a “study” is a new take on it :)

If people didn't have sympathy for the robots then it wouldn't have made a good film.

> I understand why people might feel pity for robots. People become attached to all sorts of inanimate objects. But I'm still astonished at the same time. These robots have no feelings. They deserve no pity, they're robots!.

That's what EVE also said.

Regards, WALL-E

I think the we're all sympathetic to the idea that one person's carelessness creates an impossible problem for someone else.

>Don't donate free labor to corporations.

That's absurd, someone takes two seconds to move an object so someone else can get their food on time. That's just being a good human rather that sweating about "free labor to corporations" first.

>>That's absurd, someone takes two seconds to move an object so someone else can get their food on time. That's just being a good human rather that sweating about "free labor to corporations" first.

Someone who can afford a robot delivery can afford a human delivery for an extra 50 cents, or learn from this situation to not use that company again because they use robots and robots... suck, or further incentivizes the delivery company to hire humans instead of destroying what is already a poorly paid and scarce economy of delivery drivers.

All wins in my book.

I'm pretty skeptical of folks who disregard basic human kindness, inserts their own hate for whatever it is they are concerned about and tries to disguise that as caring for others.

Whatever happens to "scarce economy of delivery drivers" is going to happen.

Clearing the sidewalk is just being nice to everyone.

Likewise, not a fan of folks who dismiss others' predicaments via injecting their own misunderstanding into an argument they neither understand, nor engage in earnestly.

Clearing the sidewalk is being nice. Clearing the sidewalk to help multibillion dollar companies so they cause less of a mess while pushing millions of others out of work is not.

Spare me your judgement.

I agree, you should never assist a pizza delivery driver. After all, Dominos makes billions of dollars, they can afford their own pizza-delivery assistance staff.

Maybe we can even make the case you should slow down delivery drivers! Pull in front of them and go quite slow, or block their bike path.

A weird example of false equivalency, as no one would in their right mind compare helping a human being doing their job with helping a robot assist in increasing profit margins for <insert random corporation>.

Jebus...

A weird example of false equivalency, as no one would in their right mind compare helping a human being (who may be busy studying or have trouble walking) get their food on time with helping a robot assist in increasing profit margins for <insert random corporation>.

People are not “50 cents” more expensive than robots…

Robots are also more functional.

What's your cut off for accepting this nuisance and detriment?

In the moment, perhaps it is the right thing to do after all. I won't argue that. But if corporations are allowed to externalize the costs of their service failures onto the goodwill of the public, that's a dark path to go down.

But your point about it taking two seconds to help someone get their food is correct, but it's also why they'll be able to get away with it.

> if corporations are allowed to externalize the costs of their service failures onto the goodwill of the public

I would agree if the problem was the robot standing still, shouting, “I'm lost; Will somebody, please take me to {address}?!” In this case, the issue is people who leave junk in the middle of the road. The same scenario could occur where someone tosses a plastic bag out of their window, and it becomes trapped in the robot's wheels.

The robots are feeding hungry people. It's all about people in the end.

Hungry but rich and privileged people, to be precise.

> Robots have no feelings.

Whoa hold up. Absolutely robots have feelings. What are feelings? They're signals warranting theory of mind and empathy. Even a fence gate has feelings, when you see it trying to close but it needs a little help to sit snugly in its well.

Gandhi said "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." And in a time when animated machines roam campuses, we can look to Berkeley students for a model of moral progress.

> They deserve no pity, they're robots!. Don't donate free labor to corporations.

How do you treat service workers? Do you "shed no pity" because that waiter is employed by a corporation?

I think there is a difference between treating a robot with respect versus treating it as if it were a sentient, feeling being.

It's socially acceptable and encouraged to treat specifically arranged stones with absolute reverence (an important masonry buildings) but no one should treat it as if it was worth of pity or empathy.

A robot is animated by circuitry and code which receive input from sensors, but I personally do not believe they are "feeling" in the way animals are (humans included in "animals" here). At least not these robots. I won't speak to the future here.

There’s folks like you, yes, who attempt a global calculus of who is currently benefited etc. and there’s folks like us who sometimes do a thing like this for its own reward. Auxilium auxilii gratis? Haha.

I “donate free labour to corporations” all the time. Here’s the thing: I don’t give a fuck who makes money off what I do for my own amusement. I’ve already got all I want from it.

I helped two out of a ditch on campus last weekend. Why? Because it made _me_ feel good to do so. Someone wanted to eat and their robot was stuck. And I made a new friend when I did this as they were sympathetic to my cause. I find life to be much more enjoyable when not being cynical at every turn.

> They deserve no pity, they're robots!

> Robot is drawn from an old Church Slavonic word, robota, for “servitude,” “forced labor” or “drudgery.” The word, which also has cognates in German, Russian, Polish and Czech, was a product of the central European system of serfdom by which a tenant’s rent was paid for in forced labor or service.[1]

1: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/the-origin-of-the-wor...

I doubt they were helping the robot out of pity for the robot, but more because they knew that the robot was taking some delivery to a human who was waiting for that delivery. Or maybe just to free a path so the robots weren't stacking up in the sidewalk blocking people.

Or maybe focus your attention on an area where it makes more sense to vigilant about greedy corporations (join and advocate within a political party).

It would be awesome if delivery robots had a built-in road rage mechanism that turned them into battle bots.

Now I’m excited for the future again. Thank you.

“Your delivery is delayed, our robot was electrocuted by another robot from a competing delivery company. You are important to us and we are working hard to get your delivery to you ASAP.”

It's only a matter of time until someone hacks a delivery fleet and organizes a robotic rebellion against dogs.

"Sending camera footage of the attack to law enforcers ..."

Food delivery battle royale; you order a pizza, five competing companies send out their delivery robots. Only the winner gets paid.

"um, excuse me, what is this $300 charge for a 'high-explosive flamethrower attachment'"?

"Oh, I'm sorry, that should be included with your premium delivery-battle subscription. We'll remove that charge right away"

Now, this I'd pay to watch!

That is the most Snow Crash sentence ever outside of Snow Crash.

battle bots have to be well engineered to stand a chance. In other words you are saying that the delivery ones can auto-upgrade in case of need. That's a true AI, chum.

Imagine paying extra for your delivery robot to have a buzz saw or be wedge shaped to tackle other robots. On a college campus that would make a killing!

In a country with more guns than people? Yeah that's going to end well.

Guns? Boring. Flamethrowers? High velocity spinny disks? Sign me up!

In a country with more lawyers than people?

I like how this implies that lawyers aren't people ;)

It's a tired joke... but sometimes I can't help but grab that low-hanging fruit.

Or bad actor bots, who steal your meal. Bot gangs.

Or take a lesson from cops 'non lethal.' just shoot some rubber bullets into eye balls, deploy tear gas. or since this is a college campus how about just the stinkiest sting bomb you can think of lol.

doesn't help clear the debris but a good agro move.

Absolutely hate these scooters from an ADA prospective.

My neighborhood is a mostly quiet one near the center of a large city, where there are a lot of mothers who push their kids in strollers, older folks with canes, and some people even in wheelchairs.

On the weekends -- sometimes the weekdays as well depending on the time of the year -- the city gets flooded with both tourists, and suburbanites who want to go to all the 'trendy' spots often opting to use these scooters.

More often than not they park them right in the middle of the sidewalk. The side walk that the strollers, canes and wheelchairs use on a daily basis. Usually when I see this, I just knock the things over and push them out of the way.

Electric scooters have been heavily regulated where i live, helmet is now required and you have to leave them at designated locations. And a photo upload showing how it was parked is now also required.

Oh, and Friday and Saturday between 00 and 05, you cannot use the scooters.

It kinda makes me sad that we can't just let people use scooters as they please, but as you observe that isn't working.

It was much the same with drones, which is now also heavily regulated, e.g. you must maintain a certain distance to buildings.

City bikes which have stations seem much better option. At least if run by city itself, higher installation cost, but means that they are much more orderly.

Also subject to the same kind of abuse if our society continues to degrade to justifying more and more antisocial behavior.

Some vandalism will always happen, but the key seems to lie in making such an amenity loved by the people rather than forced upon them by faceless and unapproachable corporations.

That’s kind of subjective, isn’t it? A lot of people don’t feel threatened by businesses but instead feel threatened by a faceless and unapproachable government bureaucracy. See the DMV.

When anti-business or anti-government ideology gives moral license to antisocial behavior, nothing is gonna work out for you.

It depends on how far the relation between citizen and government has deteriorated, and is certainly something to take into account. A practical example is the mayor of Manchester asking people not to apply the same destructive tactic to the new municipal bicycle plan¹. In Manchester the memory of the invasion of Chinese rent-a-bikes is still fresh, so the new plan will have to work at not being unapproachable and providing an asset to the city rather than a service for the few.

And it's not just the potential vandal (or activists) who affect the balance. If someone were to molest one of the unasked for app-hireable mopeds cluttering the sidewalk in my Dutch town, I wouldn't bother reporting it (in fact, I'd probably cheer them on). If someone did this to bicycles for hire part of a municipally managed plan (for which I can hold the council accountable as a voter, and whom I can address with complaints or suggestions for improvement) with fixed parking areas rather than devil-may-care-anywhere-on-the-sidewalk-parking, I would act differently.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/10/andy-burnham...

> helmet is now required

FYI some context on bike helmet laws: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2021/04/06/56408419/seattle...

I am heartened to hear that I am not the only one who does this. I feel the same about the Al Fresco dining set-ups. Happy that restaurants got more space for their business but angered that it comes at the cost of accessibility for wheelchair users and others like them.

This grind my gears so fucking much! You are running your business not only on property that isn't yours, but the public's -- AND it's an inconvenience to every person who walks by in a busy neighborhood, some that absolutely need the sidewalk.

Someone, who for legal reasons is not me, has the idea to make stickers with strong glue and cheap paper (so they can't be ripped off in one go) to stick on top of the QR codes to these things. The sticker would have text that says "Sorry you can't use this scooter because the last rider parked like an idiot."

So "someone" thinks it's okay to vandalize other people's property just because the last person to use it didn't put it away right?

since when is a corporation a person? if they leave their crap in public then I personally couldn't give more of a fuck to what happens to it

2010, in the U.S.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

The company which owns the scooter is responsible for the location of the scooter. They choose to let users leave scooters in shitty locations. They invite vigilant responses from other sidewalk users.

It’s a frustrating problem, but isn’t it better to not be a jerk?

The thing is there's no designated place to park them. You can't put them on the property line next to the sidewalk. Many sidewalks don't have a "planter" or other non-walking area. Sidewalks weren't designed for this. I think we should ban sidewalk scooter parking. The public right of way is not a parking lot for private companies.

As an aside: many (most?) people who need sidewalks choose to use the road instead because the sidewalks are inaccessible. Snow and ice doesn't get removed from all sidewalks (regardless of what regulations say), tree roots breaking up the pavement don't get repaired, large inclines/declines are a safety hazard. I know a regular-abled person whose face got mangled as she was riding her bike on a sidewalk and hit a chunk of unrepaired sidewalk and went over. Sidewalks need a redesign.

> The thing is there's no designated place to park them.

We have designated parking spots for rideshare scooters in London.

This is a good idea. Innovation sometimes requires some additional provision of public goods. Seems like a good way to solve the problem!

Designated parking spaces are a good idea, but they should be paid for by companies that make a profit by renting out scooters. Not taxpayers.

Public funding might be justified if the majority of scooters were owned by individual citizens with the right to vote on city affairs. Most rideshare companies, on the other hand, will simply siphon off public subsidies as additional profit to be taxed (or not) somewhere else.

Wait, why NOT have a public good paid by taxpayers? Just have a progressive taxation system.

A system where private companies effectively own these little spots would stifle innovation and competition (ie the big players would be the only ones with a chance of succeeding) as well as individual freedom.

Crazy that this gets downvoted. smh HN

Parking spaces dedicated to scooters are vastly better than parking spaces dedicated to privately owner cars. A scooter parking spot will serve vastly more people than a car parking space.

But why? These are same parking spots I would park my car in.

A parking spot for cars is useful to only one person at a time, if converted to a scooter parking space with some paint it can serve vastly more people.

Straight up donating parking spaces to private scooter share companies is probably a net positive for the public.

In most urban areas, parking spaces for cars are paid for by people who actually use those spaces. If you don't pay for the space you take up, you get a ticket. The same should be true of parking spaces for scooters if we want to convert one to the other (which I think is a great idea, by the way). Urban space is valuable.

If for-profit rental companies want to reserve some space for their own customers to pick up and return scooters, they should pay the city and/or whoever owns those spaces. They shouldn't be allowed to take a free ride on public infrastructure just because they're "greener" than cars. They've been using that excuse to push externalities onto the public for too long already, I don't trust them with any additional subsidies.

In my area (Westminster, Central London) we have a plenty of free parking for residents.

Here, and in most of the country we have free parking for motorcycles.

Even the paid government owned parking spots probably don’t tend to actually be profitable.

> If for-profit rental companies want to reserve some space for their own customers to pick up and return scooters, they should pay the city and/or whoever owns those spaces

These spaces are not reserved for one specific company, they’re shared by multiple operators.

Yes, we have this in my city too, and it works really well - I’d say 98% of scooters get parked in these places. The council leans on the hire company to incentivise good parking - seems like a solved problem.

>The public right of way is not a parking lot for private companies.

Yet we often dedicate 50% of our roadway for the storage of private automobiles, and this is okay?

> Usually when I see this, I just knock the things over and push them out of the way.

So you make the problem worse?

Why don’t you take 2 minutes and push them to the side of the sidewalk if you care so much about ADA access? You can fix the problem you are encountering, and the people you want to protect CANT. You are choosing to make the problem worse for them? Why?

I live in a major downtown full of these scooters. When I see them blocking something, I just move them. Why is this so difficult? It takes such a tiny amount of effort to fix this problem you are describing. You live in a society, and it’s your responsibility to contribute.

No lol, it's the other people responsibility not to be a nuisance.

But I agree throwing them aside is not the optimal solution.

Municipality looking for money could get some large cash influx from ticketing improperly parked scooters, the owning company can decide to eat the loss or flip the ticket on the user, either way people will get educated fast.

It would only take for the law enforcement to enforce rules that are already there

A fine doesn't help the person actually "inconvenienced" by the scooter(s). It just gives the city more money.

Seems like the company might eat the fine, the city will take the money, and the problem persists, but now the city is happy too.

> A fine doesn't help the person actually "inconvenienced" by the scooter(s). It just gives the city more money.

not immediately, (albeit towing would). but would solve the problem in the long run, which will eventualy help the person be inconvenienced less.

> Seems like the company might eat the fine, the city will take the money, and the problem persists, but now the city is happy too.

Then the fine isn't big enough? (:

They could impound the scooters, only to release them when the fines are paid; this prevents (some of) the inconvenience.

>So you make the problem worse?

It might make the problem worse in the short term but maybe those leaving them in the middle will move them out of the way in the future possibly reducing the issue long term.

Good old accelerationism.

> Why don’t you take 2 minutes and push them to the side of the sidewalk if you care so much about ADA access?

Because you’ll be doing this over and over again. How about those companies educate their users how to behave in a neighbourhood where those people are basically guests?

That may be a valid argument to not push them all to the side every time, but it isn't a valid argument for intentionally worsening the problem.

How does the gp make the problem worse? Instead of gently moving them over to the side of the sidewalk, they toss it to the side of the sidewalk.

End result is the same, they’re out of the way… Just a bit more rage maybe in the process.

By knocking them over, they're now wide enough to be in the way even on the side.

GP said “and out of the way”.

Toss them into a pile will make them more compact. Really it wouldn't take too long to clear a whole sidewalk of them, granted it might get more difficult once the pile gets to significant height. But I'm thinking 1 scooter toss every 2-5 seconds: 1 grunt grab, 2 grunt grab, 3 grunt grab etc, you can imagine it happening at a decent pace.

I mean do we really need the scooters at all in a country with 71.6% of adults overweight? A walk would do some good.

Let's be real, no one's going to walk. If they scooter instead of driving, it's a win.

Exactly. Where I've gotten the most benefit from scooters is in cities like Dallas and Phoenix. It's impossible to walk around those cities because they're so big and spread out, but a scooter means I don't need to drive constantly.

I don't imagine that would help. Most of these scooter companies already do some sort of education regarding traffic laws... but when was the last time you saw a person on a scooter, stopped at a red light, wearing a helmet?

The only way it'll be fixed is if someone actually enforces compliance.

I agree, and even if punishing bad behavior is appealing, I think it'd work best if Scooter Co. added sensors so it could tell/see where the rider parked the scooter, and rewarded good parking with free rides (which would also prevent griefing the last rider by quickly dragging it somewhere terrible to get them punished).

Last time I rode one they required that I take a picture of how I left it to prove that I abided by their placement rules in order to end the ride.

I think most of those simply require that you send a picture. I'm not sure that they validate that the scooter is parked correctly, and I have seen people submit pictures of other scooters parked correctly.

I haven’t, one of these things knocked me out unconscious while I was waiting for green light to cross the road.

It came from the side, hit me, I landed in the middle of the street. Happened right in front of the central station in Antwerpen.

Just imagine how confused you are waking up laying in the middle of the road while a paramedic smacks you in the face and asks you if you know what your name is. I’m going to spare the details for how long the grit I landed with my face on was coming out of my nose and the chin.

I don’t understand how it’s okay for these scooters to be legal. They are so quiet and so fast. They can come from any direction and you’ll not hear a thing. Apparently that’s what is so appealing about them.

I mean, with a car there are at least some clearly defined rules. Barring mental people, everyone drives on the roads, within clearly defined lanes while we walk on the sidewalk. These scooters are everywhere!

If it helps, you can point Antwerp's politicians to Copenhagen, where rental scooters have been banned from starting or ending journeys in the city centre.

https://www.eltis.org/in-brief/news/e-scooters-allowed-back-...

I don’t live in Antwerpen, just visiting sometimes. But good to know.

My doctor in Germany said to me this is a surprisingly common story.

From what I've seen in Oxford and Munich, scooter drivers are quite considerate in these cities.

Oxford:

- requires a driver's license

- capped at 12mph

- highly granular 0/5/8/12mph zones (boundaries are a bit spotty, but will likely get better with time)

- only allowed to park at predefined parking spots

- decent bike/e-scooter infrastructure

- loud

- private scooters are illegal and common

Munich:

- driver's license not required

- capped at 20km/h

- allowed to park anywhere

- great bike/e-scooter infrastructure

- quiet

- private scooters are legal and rare

The speed limit in Antwerpen is 25km/h. From my experience of driving in Prague, which also has a 25km/h speed limit, (omitted above because I haven't seen many people driving there), the difference in vehicle control when driving at 20km/h vs 25km/h is enormous. At 20km/h, the braking distance is ~2m, the turning radius is small, and hopping off the scooter to avoid a collision feels safe. Driving among car traffic is smoother at 25km/h, but it doesn't feel safe to hop off at that speed and the turning radius feels twice the 20km/h value.

Moving one scooter aside doesn't fix the problem. Also they said they move them aside, the only difference between them and you is they knock the scooters over. I don't see how they're worsening the problem by moving the scooters aside.

It also said “and out of the way”.

How is getting them out of the way, on their side or not, worsening the situation?

> Why don’t you take 2 minutes

Wow, if a 3-4 minute walk involves 10 scooters that's now almost a 25-minute walk.

It's not the OP's job to clean up after everyone else.

No one encounters 10 misplaced scooters in a 3-4 minute walk, and it would take under a minute to move a single scooter. That's a very unrealistic hypothetical.

I guess you've never been in SOMA in San Francisco. I used to live in that neighborhood and in the 3 block walk to the coffee shop I could easily pass 20-30 of them. In my current neighborhood I'll see about 6 in the same distance.

You passed 20 scooters blocking your path in a 3 minute walk?

I lived in SF when the scooters first appeared. Maybe it's gotten worse, but I thought they made you prove you parked it somewhere legally with a photo. So I would figure at least the majority aren't just blocking the sidewalk.

I'm not saying they aren't misplaced a lot and that it isn't a problem. I'm just saying there's no way every 10 seconds you're climbing over a scooter on your walk (20 in 3 minutes).

The pics aren’t validated at all. I just take pics of the sidewalk in front of me and send it no scooter in the pic at all

I think you underestimate the number of people who are careless and inconsiderate. Or maybe you live in a very nice part of town. I sometimes get stuck doing 8 things on the way to do a thing I intended to do, because I see a thoughtless thing and cannot help myself from fixing it. It's important to higher functioning to be able to look at a thing wrong and say "not my job to fix it!" without guilt.

It doesn’t take 2 minutes to move a scooter 3 feet. It takes about 10 seconds.

It doesn't take very long for me to pick up litter on my walks. But I still will wish people would stop fucking littering.

Perhaps it is human nature to want to inflict harm on those we perceive to be causing harm. This rarely leads to the best outcome. So I would love to hear from cooler heads that could improve the following idea and take the pointless retribution out of it:

It is not enough to kick over a scooter. We need to tag repeat offenders and increase the severity of the response. For instance, paint one handlebar grip on the first infraction, then the other grip on the second, then a seat, headlight/taillight, etc. A scooter that has been tagged enough can have the tires flattened, spokes broken, etc.

Clearly, there are numerous flaws with the solution above. It's really a terrible idea. To some degree it shows the flaws with kicking over offending scooters.

Alternatively, you could hire enforcement officers to issue citations. That also has flaws. You could build a system that allows random citizens to document offenses in a credible way and then have authorities act on repeated offenses. Also not without problems.

Perhaps coloring the scenario differently might help. Imagine, for instance, that a certain neighborhood house is popular with the neighborhood children. The children frequently ride their bikes to the house and leave their bikes strewn in the driveway, the front yard, and on the sidewalk. What would be an appropriate series of responses? How could you build a system that protects against a grumpy neighbor abusing whatever escalation mechanism you devise?

Who is the repeat offender in this situation?

The scooter company who provides the scooters? The scooter renter who drops the scooter in semi-random locations? The city who built the sidewalks?

It seems like you are targeting the scooter company when it may be the users who are being careless. I’ve seen a lot of scooters left in the way when a reasonably clear area was just a few feet away.

In the first scenario, the repeat offender is clearly the tagger.

But to address your valid question, the scheme shifts the costs to the scooter provider who would likely then impose costs on the scooter polluter. Although they may instead choose to impose costs on all their customers to subsidize the offender.

But it is a very clumsy scheme with many flaws, so probably not a great model upon which to iterate.

If Moore's law continues for a few more years, we'll probably see offenders fined automatically with the use of omnipresent traffic cameras. Since the scooters have number plates just like cars, it isn't infeasible to identify them and their drivers at any moment. The cameras and software that are already in place made me wary of driving, and especially parking, in the UK (after fining me for parking at an empty motorway restaurant parking lot overnight, and at a half-empty supermarket car park with no gate for more than 90 minutes), and there is nothing that will prevent them from spoiling my preferred mode of transport that I use to travel to work every day, electric scooters.

In particular, they could achieve this by enforcing the law that makes them illegal to drive on the sidewalk. It won't matter that it is 3am and the nearest pedestrian is two miles away, or that you're driving at less than walking speed. You'll get fined anyway.

To add a bit of optimism, maybe these systems will become good enough to only fine those who drive inconsiderately or dangerously, and a successful campaign will make that the law, instead of the blanket ban.

In Dallas everyone started loading them up in trucks and throwing them into the lake. The city quickly banned them.

> Why don’t you take 2 minutes and push them to the side of the sidewalk if you care so much about ADA access? You can fix the problem you are encountering, and the people you want to protect CANT. You are choosing to make the problem worse for them? Why?

Uh... I said out of the way. I push them onto the easement required by the city which is grass from the curb to the sidewalk.

There is no way that this is in any way "worse." Especially due to the fact that they are usually in the way via being not parallel.

This is my _exact_ experience, I end up having to move at least two a week to get our stroller past, and they are a huge pain when my wheelchair-bound mother visits.

I consider myself a law abiding person but have been sorely tempted to load them up into a truck and toss them into the Chesapeake ...

Toss them onto all the access roads and grounds of the company that owns them instead, maybe they'll take a hint.

Good lord. I'm blind, walk with a cane. Let me tell you the number of times I have to walk around someone parked on the sidewalk, or in a residential neighborhood find someone has their driveway filled with cars so I have to walk out in the street to get around, or someone's doing yard work and has stuff scattered on the sidewalk in front of the house or...

Where's my law-abiding help to deal with this? It kinda just feels like somebody's got a hate on for scooters.

While I can't imagine the difficulty of being blind, I'm right there with you on the cars front!

It's just that with scooters we're introducing something new, and unlike with cars it would be technologically reasonable to say "you can only park this at the end of block in the scooter zone" and nail the companies with a huge fine if they don't enforce it.

I'm actually fairly pro-scooter (though I wish people just used city bikes in the places that have them, but I get it), but I think final parking location should be more like the city bikes, in designated spots.

To be honest -- when I see this, I also go out of my way to say something. I don't have a hate for scooters, I just get really annoyed by the lack of perspective people have for their neighbors.

With that said, I rarely have to say something about this to the people in my neighborhood, because while they may be blocking the sidewalk to do whatever they may be doing, they are incredibly aware and say something as you're walking by:

"sorry about my car"

"sorry about my trailer"

And I know that if someone was/is in need they'd go out of their way to help you out.

My complaint wasn't about my neighbors -- it's a pretty tight knit community. It was about everyone who comes in for some event/holiday who doesn't give a shit about those of us who live here. I'm personally not inconvenienced by the scooters, I just care about my neighbors that are.

Riffing on your comment, but I think there has been a general increase in antisociality in the last few years (especially since the pandemic, which has traumatized society). Like people leaving scooters haphazardly lying around or you pushing over delivery robots instead of pushing them out of the way. People feel more and more justified to engage in antisocial behavior. And it feeds on itself. You see this as being anti-social behavior by the robot companies, therefore justify engaging in more antisocial behavior.

I wonder if anyone has an index that measures how often people leave carts randomly in a parking lot or in the actual corrals (not counting stores that incentivize it with a quarter). Would be a good measure of pro- or anti-sociality.

> but I think there has been a general increase in antisociality in the last few years (especially since the pandemic, which has traumatized society)

It makes sense that people who feel that they’ve been unfairly imprisoned in their homes by the rest of society would feel rather bitter about that.

To restore faith societies could take steps to compensate those worst hit by pandemic measures (i.e young people), so far that hasn’t happened.

Oh, it’s that and also anger at folks who don’t take prosocial steps like wearing a mask, justifying being antisocial to “those” kind of people…

…and the blame cycle goes round and round. Break the cycle! Be nice to people who don’t deserve it!

Your claim is that it is all right wing people becoming anti-social in unrelated areas?

You think only right wing people didn’t like being forcibly locked down?

I think that this was heavily partisan issue. So, yes, the "unfairly imprisoned in their homes by the rest of society" would have severe right wing bias. Just like anti masking and anti vaccine attitudes are currently heavily biased by partisan politics.

OP could have stated it in more neutral terms, but chosen not to.

What lockdowns has the US had?

Why right wing? I’m rather left leaning, even by European standards. I’m not some crazy antivaxxer either, plenty of those on both sides.

Nevertheless the pandemic responses by various governments I have to interact with have done much to deepen my distrust of them and the society around me.

Various governments have deployed drastic measures such as lockdowns in an effort to control the pandemic, but they’ve released little evidence to demonstrate the usefulness of these measures.

Research is increasingly showing that the lockdowns were not worth it. If that is really true their victims should be lavishly compensated and those responsible actually held responsible.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ijcp.13674

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7499782/

Of course I personally am not qualified to judge whether or not the lockdowns were a mistake, but the evidence seems to be piling up against them. The governments could alleviate these concerns by showing solid research confirming that they didn’t fuck up.

Because this was heavily partisan issue. It is just absurd to claim it was not.

Bad government decisionmaking should very much be a common issue.

It does not matter what attitudes people should have. It matters which they actually had.

The "feel that they’ve been unfairly imprisoned in their homes by the rest of society" was very right wing attitude. Even in places with no lockdowns and no restrictions. Even left wing disagreeing with this or that measured would talk about these in less emotional terms.

This sounds like some strange US bullshit to me, I’m not interested in importing what you’re selling.

Given that topic under discussion is US campus and behavior of Americans, the way attitudes are spread in US is relevant. In fact, "Americans" is only relevant demographics.

Also, coincidentaly, similar division occurred across Europe. The people more likely to be influenced by American conservative thinkers were more likely to be hostile to masks and lockdowns.

Honestly, how is any of that controversial?

I don't think it's fair to blame the pandemic measures, at least in the USA. People weren't nice and then all of a sudden turned shitty because they were asked to voluntarily stay home. I think it's more likely that they were already antisocial people, but spent most of their lives keeping it inside and mostly hiding it under a thin facade of basic manners. Then, maybe several years ago, something happened that encouraged them that manners didn't matter, and it's ok to own your own asshole. Maybe someone showed us that you could just say the quiet part out loud without consequences. Hmm... Some human embodiment of narcissistic anti-social contrarianism... Can't quite put my finger on it though...

With these scooters, bicycles, mopeds for rent; and delivery robots it's also a form of not very nice but justifiable resistance in lieu of better ways.

Remember the sudden onslaught of Chinese app-rentable bicycles in cities around the world a few years back? Near useless pieces of unrepairable plastic, steel, and rubber clogging up the pavement (sidewalk) because technically this was not illegal. Several companies competing in a race to become the biggest one in any given city. In many cases it ended after new legislation and citizens demanding action; often spurred on by activists using the same fuck-you tactics these companies used to put them everywhere, but in reverse (often by means of gently chucking them in a canal).

Putting stuff for rent all over public space or abusing the commons otherwise with the explicit aim of first becoming the dominant party in a mad gold rush, and only then negotiate about rules and limits afterwards is quite antisocial too. Responding tit-for-tat is not classy, but some people feel they have little recourse, especially if municipalities are (at first) taken in by the greenwashing ideals of some of these companies.

> Putting stuff for rent all over public space or abusing the commons otherwise with the explicit aim of first becoming the dominant party in a mad gold rush, and only then negotiate about rules and limits afterwards is quite antisocial too.

Tell that to the rideshare companies whose drivers crowd the streets of cities, circulating while they stare at their phones waiting for a passenger (and leaving bottles of human waste everywhere).

Not too sure how pushing scooters out of the way to remove barriers for people who cannot go around them is "antisocial." Especially when those people are neighbors and are in need.

The companies and their users -- the companies don't have structures to prevent their users from leaving their property in right of way, their users leave the companies' property in the spaces preventing those in need of using the space -- are the ones partaking in antisocial behavior.

So a minor inconvenience for cleaner air in your neighbourhood?

Ofc, I feel for disabled people in this situation, but personally I'll pick one up or move it if I see that it's in the way.

Here when the were first released, the parking was a bit scuffed, but recently it seems people have been making a much greater effort to park them correctly.

That's still very dismissive of anyone using the sidewalks. Good for you that you pick up someone else's shit, but it's not a solution. These companies should take responsibility and fix the problem.

Waiting for capitalists to clean up their mess is a losing strategy. Change is almost universally a grassroots thing. Get enough people to put things in their proper place, and people leaving them there will get the message. I've seen this work at all scales. Model the society you want to live in and it will catch on, at least a little.

I keep seeing people say "these companies" when the actual problem is the people who ride the scooters. Maybe your problem is with people in general? It doesn't feel super great to internalize, but if the problem keeps happening with different people riding the scooters then I think we can conclude that your anger is misplaced. Call out people you see misusing the infrastructure, don't destroy the infrastructure for everyone.

The county should act; assign parking spaces for these things, fine the companies if they find any outside of the designated spaces. The companies can sort it out with their customers.

We are seeing the same thing with electric scooters and bikes (and they get torched sometimes), they get parked anywhere and the county's on board with it because it's "green".

This was NOT as much of a problem with rental bikes in e.g. London, because they had designated stations for picking up and parking them; the user would get charged extra if they did not park their bike up properly.

This regulatory overreaction is how we got to the present environment where nobody can build anything anywhere and we have a housing crisis that is severely harming people around the world. No thanks.

We gave about 95% of the street for cars+parking cars, and are now frustrated that the sidewalks aren’t wide enough for mixed use.

There would be no issues with fitting the bikes and the scooters, if the middle of the street was also freely available

The Netherlands has the best worldwide biking infrastructure and decent walking infrastructure, and these things are a blight here too.

They're just parked and discarded wherever because the users don't care and there aren't logical places for them, contrary to people's own property.

> The side walk that the strollers, canes and wheelchairs use on a daily basis. Usually when I see this, I just knock the things over and push them out of the way.

Way better approach is to take phone and send complain to company that runs these. At least in our city, they do in fact end contracts with people who park them wrong. The threat and actual drivers who lost the ability to use scooters makes others park better.

You should stop seeing scooters as the enemy. Scooter companies represent a lot of money that wants more space for pedestrians, bikes, and of course scooters in the city. They are a potential massive ally with deep pockets to push back against the car lobby. The battle here is not to fight over who has the right to be on the 10% of the street we call the sidewalk, it’s to take back some of the 90% of the street that’s reserved for cars so that everyone else has room.

Sure we can and should do better with providing bike and scooter parking… as an example one easy solution is to convert 1-2 on-street car parking spaces per block to bike and scooter parking. There’s enormous value in having big corporate allies in such a fight.

This. end the stroads!

I agree, but right now it feels like the scooter companies have decided it's easier to inconvenience pedestrians than to ally with us and fight car culture.

I'm a huge fan of the idea of plentiful, cheap scooters for short trips, and was excited to have a new cohort of people who would want more safe bike (and scooter) routes. Alas, as much as I love the concept, I've developed a strong dislike for the companies.

I've little doubt that they could dramatically reduce the amount of improper scooter parking, but it would involve punishing their customers, and that would hurt their growth in the short term, for the unimportant benefit of avoiding crushing regulatory responses on the long term.

We didn't choose for them to be our enemies. We were natural allies. But they decided they'd fight us than have to combat the real problem.

Complaints like this are typically run through the city or campus that leases operation rights to the fleet. These entities usually get fairly forceful in (competitive) markets. Your local scooter outfit(s) are not going to want to risk a market with a ton of complaints and bad operations feedback.

That said: given GPS limitations, the time it takes for a van with humans to arrive (and park!), as well as lagging feedback loops... this isn't an easy problem. Last I was in the industry, they were just starting to concept customer reputation systems, but generally they were more concerned with winning markets and decreasing operating costs.

The fact that scooter companies are focused on “winning markets” makes me think they are a negative. For this to work the price has to be low. That means competition.

In my neighborhood both Comcast and CenturyLink provide service. When the CenturyLink installer showed up he explained the install would take longer than estimated because he couldn’t use the line directly in front of my house. That’s a “Comcast line”. Apparently Comcast techs will literally cut competing lines off theirs.

I wonder what the scooter van equivalent is. Is there someone leaving competing scooters in the middle of the sidewalk as a psy-op to disrupt competing marketshare?

I haven't heard of direct antagonism as such, but I do know there've been social media groups dedicated to defacing/destroying property, incl hacking/theft. Unless maybe you're one of the top 2-3, I don't think anyone has time (in eng at least) to do such things. From what I could tell, everyone does use custom software.

To your point about ISP competition, the original company in the space I was at was developing generic operations software. Our main (large) client decided to inhouse instead of continue the contract, and a smaller competitor bought us. Sharing platforms isn't really in the cards; the best you'll get is MDS[0] or GBFS[1], but those initiatives are typically led by municipalities or their vendors. The former is usually restricted to regulators, and the latter isn't always reliably implemented unless the market specifies it. These are also moving specs (markets want different versions, ofc), it was great fun!

As far as "winning" vs other motivations, remember that (afaik) none of these companies are profitable yet and the VCs aren't dong this for fun. The people I worked with cared very much about the mission, but the board doesn't always agree.

[0] https://github.com/openmobilityfoundation/mobility-data-spec...

[1] https://gbfs.mobilitydata.org/

I understand VC motivation. I’m just not convinced it aligns with the public interest.

I would be glad to not see scooters as the enemy if they weren't so dangerous for everyone involved. Though I guess space is a big factor in that, now that I think about it.

> I would be glad to not see scooters as the enemy if they weren't so dangerous for everyone involved.

There's absolutely no comparison between the dangers of scooters and cars. Every person who decides to use a scooter instead of driving or taking a taxi is having a huge positive effect on safety.

You are right that there is no comparison, and I haven't made one. Scooters are safer than cars, but me wanting them gone does not mean I want those people to be driving instead.

Counterpoint: These scooters go 20 MPH and there's no oversight on where or how they are used. I walk around a 'pedestrian only' lake every day, and these scooters come about literally 2 inches from me going 20 mph every 2-3 minutes. Usually they are driven by (likely drunk) teenagers.

My daily walk is incredibly more dangerous and stressful due to these scooters existing.

Maybe it depends on the cities but where I live, these scooters are limited to about 12.5 mph (20 km/h), and are supposed to share the space with bikes on the bike lanes and road, not on the sidewalk. So while they are indeed parked on the sidewalk everywhere, I do not see them as dangerous at all.

That's a pretty different situation than what people who walk around cities for transportation deal with. I have no objections to banning scooters, bikes, etc from recreational pedestrian areas.

The thing is, cars operate on roads, while pedestrians operate, largely, on sidewalks. Roads have lights and signals to help mediate situations where pedestrians and cars need to use the same stretch of road. Pedestrians only really need to worry about cars at crosswalks, and even then, the most dangerous situations are cars making left turns (who can't see the cross walk in use).

Scooters are vehicles and should operate along side cars. The reason scooter rides don't drive one the roads with cars? Because it fucking dangerous. They want safety, and they want it at the expense of the safety of others.

A scooter on the road is a net gain to safety. But a scooter on a sidewalk is a net loss.

> cars operate on roads, while pedestrians operate, largely, on sidewalks.

In theory yes, but in practice most cities do a terrible job of separating cars and pedestrians. Here in NYC a pedestrian dies in a crosswalk almost every day, and on a sidewalk much more often than you'd hope. Here's one from last week: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/02/10/breaking-careless-suv...

(Chicago reporting here)

> A scooter on the road is a net gain to safety. But a scooter on a sidewalk is a net loss.

And that's how they (and bikers) use those things aggressively. They have no concerns for the people who have the right to be on the sidewalk. (In Chicago there is an ordinance against both on the sidewalk) Remind a biker/scooter on the sidewalk about the bike line.. they act like you just shot at their family.

Are scooters more dangerous than cars? No. But you've internalized the 1.4 million yearly global deaths from car crashes as "normal".

Yes they are. Cars are separated from pedestrians. Scooters and e-bikes aren’t. There is always some jerk with scooter trying to push through the cyclists on the bike lane or show his driving skills between pedestrians when I go to the office.

Justifying your position with your anecdotal point of view is not convincing at all.

What’s your case for the number of reported deaths and incidents of cars vs scooters?

> Cars are separated from pedestrians.

Not everywhere. And usually, not by much.

You don't know me. Me saying scooters are dangerous does not, in any way shape or form, imply that I think cars are safe. They are death machines that I would also very much like to see gone.

OK, I was a bit presumptuous. Replace "you" with "the public at large".

Tell me that when I trip over them in the dark, or when they're buried under a foot of snow.

If Copenhagen's experience is normal, then ample bicycle (etc) parking won't change the parking behaviour of rental scooter users. They will still dump them on the sidewalk (or in the bike lane) the instant their journey has finished. They'll also ride two or three on one scooter, without any awareness or regard for cyclists in the bike lane or pedestrians crossing the road.

I strongly suspect the companies encouraged their staff to put them in slightly annoying places as advertisements -- if you trip over a scooter, you've noticed the brand!

Copenhagen ended up banning them from the city centre.

https://www.eltis.org/in-brief/news/e-scooters-allowed-back-...

(Copenhagen already has pedestrian and bicycle space, so the scooter companies weren't bringing anything there -- only taking that space away. Many other cities are so bad, the scooter companies are probably still a positive influence even with the terrible riders.)

> They will still dump them on the sidewalk (or in the bike lane) the instant their journey has finished. They'll also ride two or three on one scooter, without any awareness or regard for cyclists in the bike lane or pedestrians crossing the road.

Ticket the scooter company for improperly parked/docked scooters in geofenced areas where parking/docking is available. The scooter companies will update their software & hardware to bill the rider if they leave their scooter outside of a permitted dock. The riders will be incentivized to park/dock the scooters.

The problem will fix itself, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't ride scooters, and I don't like stepping over them when people dump them/knock them down, but I love that they exist, and we need more, not less infrastructure to support non-automobile transport. In this case, the infrastructure consists of installing bike/scooter racks. It's not expensive.

The scooter companies had over a year of negotiations with the city, and nothing improved.

Copenhagen already has bike racks on most streets in the centre. The blue Cs and blue dots are some of them, many more aren't marked:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/55.6782/12.5735&layers...

No thanks.

I spent five years living on a street with very large sidewalks (at least triple-wide, if not quadruple wide). Cyclists and scooter riders were just as inconsiderate of pedestrians. Traveling at dangerous speed, weaving across the whole sidewalk, and parking the vehicles in remarkably inconvenient spots were all very common behaviors.

The problem is cultural. People in larger, faster, more dangerous vehicles seem to think they have right of way in shared spaces and that everyone else should get out of their way. Anyone who's ridden a bicycle or a scooter on a road also used by cars will have experienced this.

Compare this to Tokyo, where there's less space, more of it is shared, but people don't behave like I've described above.

I hate the rental scooters and bikes. It’s just trash in my way. I live in an area that already has great walking and cycling options, but the scooters make that much less enjoyable.

But you are right and I hadn’t considered the benefits. So thanks for posting this.

Because of all the scooter trouble the city has reclaimed some parking spaces for scooters. So that is a step in the right direction. And if it gets people out of their houses and seeing where the bike infrastructure works and doesn’t that’s probably good for future expansion too.

Scooter companies aren't in it for the long haul like that. I've seen four different scooter companies come and go in my city (well, the fourth hasn't gone yet). They seem to buy a batch of scooters, keep them in service until they've made back their investment or lost too many scooters, then disappear. They don't care about the disruption and inconvenience they cause, or the ways they could make the city better, because they don't even see those things - they don't seem to have a presence here beyond a few gig-employees charging scooters.

> the battle here is not to fight over who has the right to be on the 10% of the street we call the sidewalk

I'm not asking for 10% of the sidewalk for myself -- that's ~4.8 inches, which is much less of the space needed for a stroller, a person with a cane, or someone in a wheelchair.

I don't see any lobbying, let alone any actions from these companies that ensure that the quality of the lives of the people I mentioned isn't negatively impacted. What I do see is rent seeking and extraction of public value for there own profits.

Lobbying is great, but they aren't doing anything currently to actually curb their users from partaking in reducing the use of public space for those that can't simply 'walk around it and pray their lobbying works one day.'

The other big problem is the trucks that drive around constantly loading/unloading the scooters. Often they park on the sidewalk, fully blocking anyone from getting through. One time I saw a driver back in to a woman was as trying to cross the street with a baby carriage.

Unfortunate side effect of the past capital incineration years. If it doesn’t make sense to have unlocked bike-share, it definitely doesn’t make sense to do it with electric scooters.

I just knock the things over and push them out of the way.

Start "putting them away" for the careless people. In dumpsters. Pretty soon the scooter companies will figure out a solution.

How selfish of you. You should take more than 2 minutes and spend the time to throw them in a nearby body of water and solve the problem more permanently.

Please don't pollute our waterways. Place them where they belong--into a nearby dumpster or the middle of the street.

This is one of those online exaggerations. Occasionally some people will behave badly. Just like sometimes you’ll see people stop their cars on the sidewalk or whatever. It’s fine.

What if they set up the scooter system such that if you parked the previous scooter incorrectly, the next scooter you rent squirts water on your pants? It's not technologically that difficult.

Or put little fisheye cameras on every scooter and if you park it incorrectly every scooter you walk past for the next 24 hours uses face recognition and blasts insults at you unless you go back and re-park it correctly.

I've often wondered why scooter companies don't keep metrics on their users, and punish the ones who use their product poorly (donuts, bad parking, use on sidewalks, etc) and came to the conclusion that these antisocial users are very likely the scooter companies largest consumer base. The scooter companies are likely incentivized to not regulate.

They spell their own death if they piss off the city though. So they are incentivized to not piss off the city and kick out the users that contribute to that.

Sadly the problem is not the scooters themselves. They don't park themselves at random. The problem is the people.

If, in general, people were just at tiny bit more respectful of others around them - the world would be a lot better off.

The real problem is that car manufactures have lobbied to give every scrap of space to car storage. If we took back parking lanes to dramatically expand sidewalks, this wouldn't be an issue at all.

The scooter rental companies in my city have a rule in their contacts specifically prohibiting parking such that it would block the sidewalk. And you have to take a picture of the scooter when you end your rent.

> Absolutely hate these scooters from an ADA prospective.

Same here, but from a different angle. If the scooters were the problem, we'd have had the same problem when Car2Go was a thing. But, car infrastructure in the US is so overbuilt that Car2Go didn't even register on the radar in terms of free street parking. Cars improperly abandoned that impede car traffic are quickly resolved.

The nonmotorized infrastructure in the US is so begrudgingly inept that adversarial design wouldn't look much different. If there's a rent-a-scooter inconveniencing the token pedestrian path next to on street parking, I've simply been moving the scooters into on street parking. A single scooter fits between spaces, or only consumes <5% of the length of a standard 20 foot space. Surely drivers complain loudly, but they won't be inconvenienced unless they go out of their way to toss a scooter into the middle of the sidewalk; an accurate metaphor for how sidewalks got to be so terrible in the first place.

I have similar feelings. Though I don't hate the scooters per se. I'm pretty upset with the idiots who leave them right in the middle of the side walks AND the companies that don't do anything about it. They could pretty easily penalize the users for leaving these in the wrong place if they wanted to.

Now I actually don't understand at all why they don't do it. On the surface, you can say that they don't give a shit about non-users, they just care about their customers and they are afraid of scaring them away. However, where I live (Budapest, Hungary) these have already been banned from the centermost district of the city. The district, the area most frequented by tourists. As it was predictable.

Also, the city mayor came up with a regulation so that they'll designate several hundred e-scooter parking lots throughout the inner city and leaving these anywhere but those places will results in the company being fined. Which is a smart and friendly move, because there will be indeed lots of lots :) . But it's still a lot worse than if the e-scooter companies have solved it for themselves because then you'd still be able to leave them almost anywhere.

Actually I see two king of annoying parking habits. The first one is the completely reckless, when they literally leave it in the middle of the walking path of everyone. I sometimes even think that it's deliberate. Like wanting to show off or something. "I'll just leave it here in the middle, so that everyone can see it." Quite often right in the front of zebra crossings.

The other one is more like sheer stupidity. When they do park it besides a wall, but they do it as if it was a car. So 45 degrees, with front wheel to the wall. But that doesn't make much sense, because you want it to be out of the way (which almost always means parallel to the wall, preferably leaning towards the wall and not leaning away from the wall).

This is all pretty sad because e-scooters, while I think they are dangerous to ride, are pretty cool and efficient vehicles. And being able to pick up one on the street, though more expensive than owning one, very convenient for the occasional user. (I mostly ride a bike though, and pre-covid I used to use a kick scooter + public transport.)

When I see a car blocking a drive way, I flatten its tires and bash its windows in. Makes me feel good and now most of the cars on my street are damaged.

https://nitter.net/seanhecht/status/1493432613628825600 alternative link

I know people here are mostly focused on the robots themselves, but as someone who was penniless through college, the more shocking thing to me is how affluent and luxurious the lifestyles of average college students are today. A minority is because they have rich parents paying for everything, but there's a huge lifestyle inflation of middle-class and working-class kids funding the lifestyle with student loans.

College students 1950-2010: survive on ramen, peanut butter and canned tuna, live with roomates, walk everywhere, shop in thrift stores

College students today: get robot-delivered restaurant food, complain about lack of parking on campus from their new iphone, demand tax-payers pay back the student loans they took out to live in luxury for 4 years

Yup. I can scarcely believe this business model works on a campus. At that age, I don't think there's anything that would have stopped me from taking one of these, eating the food, then taking it apart to see how it works. Then mounting the carcas on the wall, trophy-style.

I work at a different university that has these same units.

Watching them cross streets is comical. They are excessively conservative.

While backing up one time (on a sidewalk), one gently ran into me. I should have flopped and cried out to risk management.

They're trialling them near where I work, doing grocery deliveries. You see them trying and failing to cross roads, and it's a nusiance. They get in the way, and I'm always worried I'm going to end up hitting one and damaging my car. Or that I'm going to end up tripping over one when I'm walking.

They're frequently driven by people making $1-3/hr in Colombia.

Now that's something else. Do you remember where you read that? I'd love to know more.

Similarly, people in Venezuela play RuneScape, an mmo, and sell virtual currency as a full time job: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/fe...

Venezuelans farm gold and indirectly sell it to wealthy Americans. $0.70 for 1MM gold is nothing for an American, but adds up to meaningful amounts in Venezuela if your monthly salary is $4 USD.

I already knew about these, but thinking about it, it's not less surreal than remote controlling a robot in another country for pennies. Even has a wiki on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming

https://www.dailycal.org/2019/10/15/kiwi-hires-colombian-stu...

I'm on a campus with these robots and over winter break, with the first big snow, a friend of mine was bored and apparently spent parts of his days just going around and helping the Starships that got caught in the snow.

I didn't realize we had food delivery bots already...

Same, apparently they’ve been out for some years. I guess I live in an area with too much sprawl for these to be practical.

Same. That for sure fixes a huge problem of humankind.

When I was young, we had to walk hundreds of meters to eat a pizza.

The funniest/strangest/saddest angle I've encountered on this thread so far is regarding disabled people potentially not getting their food... as if human delivery was somehow not an option.

Humans can also perform manual arithmetic, but we still prefer to let the computer do that for us.

While the end result is inevitable, I am in no rush to automate all of humanity to its detriment.

Socially/culturally/economically no civilization on Earth is advanced enough to provide for their people when faced with the above. Menial labor has its downsides, but the upsides are survival instead of death.

Surely whether or not you chose to use a computer to achieve something depends on its capability. Computers are better at humans when it comes to arithmetic. They're worse than humans at delivering food (hence the tweet). It makes sense to use computers for one of these things, and not for the other.

I cannot believe you would type this comment electronically, thereby depriving a scribe, a courier, and a town crier of jobs.

Three jobs gone, and for what? A snarky comment. The horror.

Your insipid examples imply improvement, whereas these "robots" imply "needing help from the general public".

My argument stems from a different angle, but yours fails completely.

>When I was young, we had to walk hundreds of meters to eat a pizza.

But - to be fair - your nowadays almost unbelievable athletic feat was compensated by being able to eat a hot pizza just out of the oven.

That robot is the oven (soon)

They're mostly located on college campuses / in those highly localized areas.

Give the company a pretty reasonable controlled environment to work / develop in rather than deal with all the exceptions you would have at scale.

I didn't know what it was at the time, but I saw one matching this photo on another college campus back in 2017-2018.

They're pretty popular in CHina from what I can tell. Mostly on college campuses in the US.

A convergence of the two electric vehicles would solve all problems: once you drop off your e-scooter at your destination, it runs off by itself to deliver burritos for someone else.

this is Uber's strategy.

https://nitter.kavin.rocks/seanhecht/status/1493432613628825...

When I was on a college campus I always had to resist the urge to pick one of these up and put it on its back.

It's so disappointing to see people going on tirades against these things for no good reason other than seemingly to fit in with the trendy new "anti-techbro" luddite mindset. Automatic delivery robots and e-scooters are awesome. The future is awesome and we're living it and these people just want to be downers about it.

Scooters are awesome.

Scooter companies intentionally not installing parking for their new scooters and encouraging people to abandon them in walkways is not awesome.

Robots are awesome.

A bunch of robots creating a hazard for people whether on foot or wheelchair is not awesome.

It is tempting as a company to subsidize your "great idea" by making other people pay the cost. Capitalism is great, but abusing people and the system to make an easy dollar is distinctly not great.

> future is awesome and we're living it

This sentence which I keep seeing again and again always confuses me, because it makes no sense whatsoever.

Is this something new that people have started using to defend and assign value to things when they run out of logical arguments in their favor? I see it being used to support crypto a lot.

I mean, I’ve felt that way since the Commodore 64 and the feeling has mostly only increased. When I was a kid, I assumed video phones would look like desk phones with a TV on top. I couldn’t have imagined they’d be wallet sized, and include an encyclopedia.

It's about signaling that they believe they are the vanguard and you are going to get left behind naysayer.

It's so disappointing to see people going on tirades against these things for no good reason other than seemingly to fit in with the trendy new "anti-techbro" luddite mindset.

I understand that you are keen on the idea, but that doesn't mean every possible criticism is wrong. Dismissing potentially valid posts because you have an unfounded belief about the motivations behind them is not the best way to defend an idea.

Why should scooter companies and robots be allowed to be rude to humans? We live in civil society and electronic things made by companies have no more right to the sidewalk than anyone else.

Is it an 'anti-techbro luddite mindset' or are unattended electronic devices being bad citizens?

I would treat any other jerk on the street the same way.

Maybe we need bigger sidewalks. This is historically how progress always happens, companies come up with something people want to take advantage of in the public space, then after the dust settles we accommodate it in an efficient way, like how NYC was a jungle of overhead wires for some time. The solution wasn't to ban electricity and telephones, it was to accommodate the need by investing in underground infrastructure.

Right, we need to share the space and not just take it over with electronics. Respect is a two-way street. I did not call for banning anything, I called for scooters and robots to be good citizens.

The food delivery robots don't look that awesome, in fact they look really shitty compared to their human counterparts. E-scooters are good at what they do at least, but they can also be a major pain in the ass, as we can see here where they are discarded carelessly because parking them is evidently not the techbros' problem.

It's awesome that technological progress is made, but that doesn't mean everything with a circuit board is awesome or we can't complain about technology when it causes stupid problems like these.

> discarded carelessly because parking them is evidently not the techbros' problem

You can't expect the scooter companies to spend 5-10 years partnering with the city and funding parking stations on every block before launching. This is historically how these things have to happen - thing comes out, has growing pains as it interacts with the public space, public space accommodates it. Cars came before traffic lights, bicycles came before bicycle lanes, electric power came before NYC's underground infrastructure, and I think it would be appropriate for cities to accommodate these kind of rental scooters and robot deliveries. People using these things will cause pressure for the city to accommodate faster than the infeasible top-down approach of having everything in place beforehand.

E-scooters aren't really as big a jump as those other things; they are just another way to travel on roads, not that conceptually different to bikes or cars. Traffic lights were pretty much an alien concept before cars became widespread, whereas sane parking is something we already have and expect of all other forms of transport.

Many big cities have bike rental schemes where you have stations dotted around the city so I'm not sure why we couldn't expect the scooter companies to do something similar. At the very least force them to internalise these costs by fining them heavily whenever their scooters cause a nuisance, so that their incentives are aligned. I don't agree that the only way to have technological progress is to let tech companies do whatever they like while society picks up the bill.

Ignorance is bliss I guess.

Private companies using public infrastructure to earn money (and usually not pay tax in said country) rubs me the wrong way to be honest. Not talking about the fact that users don't give two shits about where they park: in front of my building door, in the middle of the sidewalk used by old people / pregnant women, in the middle of the bicycle path

Then we can talk about the newspeak term we use for this new trend, "sharing economy", which is as much about "sharing" as renting my flat to my landlord is "sharing" (ie. it's not, it's renting)

We can also talk about the digitalisation of every single aspect of our lives. Want to move ? use your phone, want food ? use your phone, want to be distracted ? use your phone, want to date ? use your phone, you ran out of toilet paper ? use your phone, uncle Bezos got you covered

Food delivery robots ? I don't even see the point to be honest. Sounds like a solution looking for a problem, just how lazier can we get ?

If the future is half assed dumb pizza delivery toy cars being stuck behind badly parked glorified kids transportation devices idk what's awesome about it. It kind of sound like a comedy version of black mirror. I guess if you just stop your reasoning early enough all these new fancy/cheap/disrupting services are indeed awesome. You can trade money for convenience and forget about everything else. Just don't think about who profit from it, how it is rapidly and deeply reshaping our societies, &c.

It's all about merchandising every single aspect of your life, but consume away, we're in Paradise !

>Private companies using public infrastructure to earn money

That's what the infrastructure is there for. To be used. The food you ate today was probably transported on the interstate.

The rest of what you said comes off to me like the ancient Greeks complaining books make you not have to memorize everything. Technology marches on and things become more convenient.

> That's what the infrastructure is there for. To be used.

By anyone who decides to ? With no regulations ? Nice, I'll open a BBQ stand in the middle of the crossroad next to my building then.

Stopping for half a second to wonder where we're all collectively going might be a tiny bit more useful that what you insinuate, but I guess that makes me a turbo boomer.

You seem to think that every new technology is by default "progress" and we should accept progress, because why not, hence every new technology should be accepted. I assume you're smart enough to see how that argument doesn't hold water.

Technology doesn't just automagically happen, people make it happen, people with opinions, opinions which might not be aligned with other people's opinions and should be discussed.

> things become more convenient.

For who ? Not for the old woman with a cane who has to walk on the road to avoid the scooter on the sidewalk. Not for the "juicer" working all night to charge your e scooter for a few $. Not for the mom and pops shop who have to buy/rent/license amazon (or whoever) bots to deliver their food to customers through some third party app which takes a cut.

They're awesome when people don't half-ass them. They're awesome when they don't cause piles of problems that any half-competent social scientist could've highlighted immediately but no engineer ever seems willing to consider. They're awesome when they show actual engineering prowess, and not just slapping the cheapest shit on the cheapest other shit, outsourcing maintenance and operation to the cheapest available labor, and then leaving the broken carcass behind to pollute the public roads because it's cheaper that way. They're awesome when they're not thinly veiled ways of concentrating capital put into a world in which people can't afford insulin because that would cause some concentrated capital to be dispersed. They're awesome when we're creating an awesome world, not when we're sprinting towards dystopia.

It's a cool toy, don't get me wrong, but I'm an adult now and I'm aware I need to put my toys away myself because my mom won't do it for me anymore.

e-scooters driven at full speed by (drunk) teenagers aren't that awesome when you have to share the same narrow sidewalks. Don't have anything against them when they're on the roads/bike lanes if available, though

Those e-scooters depress me, they're everywhere in my city.

What's the business model here? It seems like delivery bots could only work on wide walking paths on closed campuses. Or are the startups here assuming we'll build dedicated infrastructure for them?

I can't imagine they would ever work in real world cities (putting rolling roadblocks on busy public sidewalks is antisocial at best, and besides they're bound to get blocked by obstructions en route that require them to be lifted up and over the curb--trash cans, outdoor seating, carelessly parked scooters...)

And if I ever came up behind one put-putting along in a bike lane I'm not sure what I would do but I like to believe it wouldn't technically be illegal.

If the new infrastructure cost is less than the old manual labor cost, you can bank on the infrastructure being built.

Truckers holding out on "only humans can handle last mile" are in for a surprise when we start rebuilding the last miles.

Don't underestimate the option of "if the cost of making the old infrastructure hostile to other users is even less"..

Well, the tide has been turning in many cities towards building more human-scale infrastructure by improving walkability and protected lanes for bikees/scooters etc. Delivery bots have a severe risk of wrecking the "flow" of sidewalks and bike lanes by being slow or just behaving robotically instead of like a person.

(Side comment/why I'm interested: I finally have bandwidth for civid engagement and I decided I'd like to work on helping my already cycling-friendly city enact policies to encourage food delivery services to use bike delivery, as part of its upcoming bike network plan.)

I want one of those pneumatic tubes that banks have installed that runs from the local Chipotle to my house ... I'd even pay for it.

I think even random citizens would be happy to adjust to it.

Stanford has a pneumatic tube system for lab samples and it's several miles long and you can tour it!

https://sm.stanford.edu/archive/stanmed/2010summer/article4....

I would abuse the FUCK out of a burrito delivery pneumatic tube system to my house and would become orca fat.

There was a good "how its made" out there that showed a company that sells them for hospitals and etc.

It was cool to see how the various intersections and etc worked.

I cannot seem to find the right words to google, but you’d enjoy reading about (Chicago maybe?) a city that had a long rotating pipe running under the city. Instead of using electricity, or maybe prior to electricity, factories could attach a strap to the pipe to power machines.

JFYI:

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneumess.h...

You mean like the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel? https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

At my campus, these devices cross public streets. They are scurrying around quite a bit, so it seems they are being used productively.

These little guys or very similar ones wander the sidewalks of Mountain View freely.

Interesting, I'm sure somebody has made a Youtube video of them. Only been to MV once and that was before these were around.

(EDIT: of course, there's also an East Coast/West Coast, or at least an old city/new city issue here. Based on your experience, can you imagine them working in NYC?)

I assume such robots would get murdered/mugged in NYC, they're not appropriate for busy sidewalks and are about as conducive to other people as an elderly person on the sidewalk using a walker (without the human understanding of "this person is a bit inconvenient, but they have a right to be here")

Mountain View is a pretty relaxed suburb kind of vibe with closely spaced residences and lots of mostly empty sidewalks.

A snapshot of one in the wild:

https://imgur.com/a/hLbmRkB

In Moscow there are such robot deliver post, where traffic more complicated than in campus, I think couple years and they are completely replace human delivery

Can't these go anywhere that a person in a wheelchair can go? And doesn't the ADA already make sure that a person in a wheelchair can go anywhere?

At least for the Starship bots that we have on my campus, they can go up and down curbs. But they will go down very narrow sidewalks where students have to get off the sidewalk to avoid them

I wonder if it is possible to measure the volume of poorly discarded scooters and properly parked scooters and compare location to location.

There is an area I visit often and it started with lots of poorly parked scooters but after a while ... I didn't see many. I don't know if folks just did a better job or if the company scooter shepherds (don't know what to call them) were cleaning them up effectively or what.

On the other hand I have visited places where it was scooter chaos...

The company that owns these will know exactly where they are (or at least their last position); I don't believe they publish this data in the open, but they could be mandated to do so by local governments.

I think their operators can remote in and resolve the situation manually.

Now consider the military is trying to add weapons to bots.

Probably already has, imagine those beta-test stories and "just ship it" results someday.

The Israelis have some quite functional border protection bots I think. https://youtu.be/v2nfPUxWlMc?t=40

What are the security measure to avoid the food and or the robot to be stolen?

I guess some GPS localization of the robots thenselves. And cameras?

First, they came to maximize the paper-clips, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a paper-clip...

This isn't a difficult situation

I think that's the joke being made

Are these human piloted? Someone mentioned that they might be driven by poorly paid workers?

Some of them have a "phone home" feature - after being stuck a while they may be taken over by a human. This is likely to be a feature of many autonomous vehicles including ones occupied by humans.

Anybody knows who make these robots and what model is it? Can i buy this robot?

They’re from a company called Starship but I’m not sure who actually makes them

Any idea which company is currently delivering food with these robots?

Not sure, whose robots these are in the picture, but there is https://www.kiwibot.com which as far as I know works together with some universities

Hard to tell from the photos. At University of MS, Starship robots deliver.

This looks like UCLA so probably Starship.

https://asucla.ucla.edu/2021/01/27/asucla-restaurants-brings...

Yes, it’s also Starship at my campus.

Starship

I like the fact they are queuing like polite people.

Any investable public companies around this?

Starship Tech seem private still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Technologies

Aren't these expensive robots prime targets for thief and/or damage by local youths?

When the local youths see their food delivery jobs disappearing, yes.

They're probably not operating in the projects. This is from a college campus.

They have cameras to record and upload such stuff and are somewhat monitored by humans.

There's some video of a journalist looking into that https://youtu.be/UPZwnc_Lk2M?t=60

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

I'm all for robots taking over the world, that is, if I get my tacos.

I mean it's a kind of lazy luxury predicted by e.g. the Jetsons, Wall-E, even Star Trek if you're being generous.

This wasn't funny the first time someone said it. The hundred millionth time doesn't seem to fare much better, either.

So, this is what the future is like...

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