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Comment by sharken | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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