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Comment by yazaddaruvala | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of when the first scooters and bikes were deployed across Seattle.

"Oh this is the worst! people leave them in the middle of the sidewalk"

"They are just gonna get stolen and stripped for parts"

"Everyone please, actively break them, throw them into ditches, or into the water."

X years later, people in Seattle love them - they are constantly in use. Less traffic on the streets, fewer drunk people driving. The homeless have a few stolen ones but actually use them practically (so good for them). And people have learned to park them half-decently.

This will be the same story for AVs. The tech is gonna improve faster than the complaints get filled, and very soon everyone is gonna love paying 80% less for their Ubers.

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It turns out that it takes a lot of energy to hate/antagonize random stuff going on - you don't get paid and there's no benefit to you. Eventually you just get too busy living your actual life to continue the feud.

Real protests are fueled by real pain, and those don't just peter out because there's refueling every day, not just flavor-of-the-month outrage.

Meanwhile, the entities pushing these advances won't run out of gas because they are making money from real customers who find their service valuable (citation needed admittedly).

Time will tell which of these scenarios it is, but my bet is that people will find these very useful 5 years from now and the rough edges will be sanded down by technological improvement.

I do wonder why they aren’t all stripped for motors and battery cells though. There should be a bit of incentive for that. Maybe they’re sufficiently difficult to get to without expensive tools?

Yeah I don't get this either. I can't believe a $10 angle grinder from harbor freight wouldn't do the job.

A thief would prefer to strip cars without cameras.

Who are they gonna sell the motors and battery cells to? The only people interested in them would be a few hobbyists doing some DIY stuff. Not like you can just bolt it into your Honda Civic or run them in your laptop. Maybe once the true Civic of EVs comes out, you'll start to see them getting stripped for parts.

A local scooter app rental company said that the turnaround time for their bikes are three months, an insider said 40 days.

So, maybe they are stripped for batteries and parts?

Why would you strip driverless cars instead of other cars? If anything the driverless ones probably have more counter measures and monitoring.

I believe all of these entities are currently _losing_ money hand over fist, but remain in the game because of the expectation of future profits.

You're right that there's less traffic on the streets in Seattle. But I hate to say it, the scooters are not the primary cause by a long shot.

Also, do you really think Uber is gonna pass the savings on to the customers? People been paying high prices for rides for years now, why would they lower the prices when they can just keep the profits? Have the savings ever been passed onto the customer by any company?

It's wild how much they're charging for the scooters. $1 unlock + $.35/min ride time. Back in 2013, you could rent an entire Smart Fortwo from car2go for essentially the same price!

It makes sense when you compare it to other transportation options: if the bus costs $2.75, and a lyft ride costs $20, getting there by scooter for $7 seems reasonable.

If a bus costs me $2.75, I'm almost certainly not paying $7 for a 20 minute scooter ride. The bus will get me there in ~the same amount of time, 98% of Seattle buses are not crowded, and they don't subject me to the risk of a scooter-car collision, which would quickly be followed by an unprotected head-pavement collision.

Whatever works for you! I'm sure it depends a lot on the part of town you live in. For me, the scooter trip to work is only 10 minutes, while the bus trip - including the walk to the departure stop, the wait for the bus, and the walk from the destination stop - takes more like 25.

If I'm in a hurry, then, the scooter has a clear advantage; it's not competing with the bus, it's competing with Lyft, and it's both cheaper and lots more fun.

Most of the time I use scooters not to commute to work, but to run errands around the neighborhood. Then again the scooter is not competing with the bus - it's competing with my own feet! I do a lot of walking, but it can be really nice to have a motor help you carry the groceries home, or just get you where you're going quickly when time is short.

To each their own! I have a protected bike path all the way from my home to work:

https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...

Except all those things were and are true. They were left all over the place, Many were stolen or destroyed. They're normalized now and less novel.

Dogs bark but the caravan moves on, as the (probably) Turkish saying goes.

Yeah it is Turkish. "İt ürür, kervan yürür."

Does that rhyme in Turkish? I’m curious now if it has a certain “beat” when it’s spoken that sort of helps it persist as an idea in the language (at least that seems to). Sort of a short form poetry.

Yes it rhymes. Turkish words are always read as they are written so if it's the same letters it'll sound the same.

The way we were thought about these in school regarding proverbs and idioms is that they were distilled through time to be their most economical and impactful form. So yes, the good ones rhyme and are either funny or poignant.

does seattle even still offer bike rentals for this? for some reason feel like i only see scooters around... in the middle of the sidewalk or in some bush

Yeah, there are bikes.

> in the middle of the sidewalk or in some bush

Yeah, sometimes. The super majority are parked well tho.

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