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> If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?

First, businesses which attract antisocial asshole clients do get extra scrutiny and burdensome regulation; the classic example is bars.

Second, the difference between Hertz and Bird is the rate and visibility of antisocial behavior. The overwhelming majority of Hertz clients park their rentals no differently than any ordinary car driver; and a Hertz rental parked illegally is hard to distinguish at a distance from any other car. By contrast, a very large fraction of rental electric scooters appear to be parked illegally, and they are very visible (due to the color scheme, and because privately owned electric scooters are not very common in most parts of the US and never get dumped in the middle of a road, lest they get vandalized or stolen).

Sure, but to the OP's point, isn't that because the US has subsidized car parking to an insane level? Most parts of the country have literal legal minimum amounts of parking spots for cars you have to have to be able to run a business or build a house there. There's none of that for bikes or scooters.

I'm not trying to excuse Bird here - I'm annoyed by scooters parked in the sidewalk like anyone, but going "car people are so nice and not antisocial" is kinda pointing at the underlying unfairness. If we spent/regulated billions of scooter parking spots, Bird wouldn't have an issue either.

I live in a historical city center in Germany. There aren’t many parking spaces, and sidewalk parking is illegal anyway. Scooters still end up on the sidewalk and in my way. I really wish there were some stronger regulations.

FWIW, I don’t own a car at all.

Sure. I'm not trying to say people can't be assholes or aren't being assholes. If the area is walking only with no place to park anything, then that should be enforced. But excusing car drivers just because everything has bent in their favor legally seems to miss the point.

Practically speaking, at least in the US, there's rarely any good or approved place to park anything but a car anywhere. I'm upset with the scooters, but I'm also upset with bikers locking their bikes to trees, or people parking motorcycles in unexpected places. Half of the time there's dedicated motorcycle or bike parking, some asshole parks their car there and isn't fined/towed.

Point being, there's a lot of money behind making it incredibly easy to take a car to anything in the US, and while other options are regularly annoying in parking places that aren't allowed, I've seen some moves over the last few years to make dedicated scooter parking or expand bike parking to accommodate, and that's a net good. It's certainly not that Bird is part of some righteous civil disobedience program by leaving scooters in the middle of the sidewalk, but the scooter plague has done more to improve bike/personal scooter parking than years of pressure from bikers, so I'll take it.

Bird users are welcome to pay for parking like most cars.

But the biggest difference is rental cars need to be returned to a designated place like an airport or car dealership. Or they get picked up. They are never just abandoned on city streets, and even more rarely parked illegally.

I don’t know. A lot of people moved to suburbs for a very high quality of life per dollar using cars. Then they gained even more when work from home grew. The organic vegetables I’m e-biking around SF were trucked into Rainbow, not scootered. Trucks moved the berry pickers onto the fields. Cars and trucks shlep a lot of people and stuff and make a lot of very cheap land and a lot of very cheap labor accessible to many, many people. There wasn’t some huge surplus created by scooters the way there was with cars, for all their faults.

I agree that cars and trucks are appropriate for a variety of trips and cargo-hauling use cases that scooters are not appropriate for. But I confess I'm missing the implication - what does this imply about the claim that micromobility is held to a standard we don't typically hold other transportation modes to, in part because we have a default cars-first perspective?

My ebike is governored to 28mph, some scooter's have geofenced top speeds. Yet a full car can drive thru a parking lot or residential street with highway speed potential.

ebikes are limited to 15mph in Europe, which is still faster than most bikes on the road.

28mph is pretty much a motorbike.

Bird was doomed from the very start, as they aimed to only be a scooter company.

Scooter operations shut down for nearly half the year in most markets due to the winter, and in those markets they either have to pay employees or lay them off (bird did the latter) once a year. They still have to store the scooters during that time, and they need to have scaled operations for their entire market.

Bike rentals tend to be shut down far shorter periods of time in the winter, and ridesharing doesn't shut down. This allows other companies providing bikes/scooters to move their operations around to other business units when they shut down their scooter unit.

As a whole the scooters make less sense than bikes. If we're going to subsidize something, it should be bike sharing (which _is_ somewhat government subsidized btw).

I have no problem with the owned scooters. The scooter rental market is designed to tax the walking infrastructure. They need to have plug in stalls like the electric bikes. There also needs to be a way of keeping them off sidewalks.

Whoever they employ to collect and charge the scooters loves to line them up on the ramp to the crosswalk of a major intersection near me. It makes it impossible for the disabled people in the neighborhood to cross the street safely. So passersby will throw them all into the gutter. Then they become a road hazard.

Say what you will, this behavior is from an employee, and is thus the direct responsibility of the company, who does not care at all.

When you escalate from being a nuisance to outright endangering people, there needs to be consequences.

> More generally, it's weird that scooter companies are liable - legally or de facto - for such behavior at all. If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?

Scooters are different because them being littered all over public spaces is absolutely intrinsic to these companies' value proposition and business model in a way that it absolutely is not for Hertz or similar.

There’s a huge difference between the impact of a poorly-parked scooter and a well-parked scooter. If the thing is out of the way there’s no problem.

Totally agree. And even more so for hire bikes.

I think hybrid transportation models of this kind are really essential to having liveable cites in the future, but businesses really shouldn't be able to benefit from just ignoring negative externalities associated with their model, and that (unfortunately) includes their customers behaving in an antisocial and/or selfish way. This is no different from how noise levels for residents are considered when granting a license for a bar or something. You're not able to just plan for a world where everyone behaves in a decent and considerate fashion.

Where I live we had a bike and scooter company who had a "park anywhere" type model and our pavements[1] were really littered all the time with bikes and it was difficult (as someone who basically walks everywhere) to get around. Now that company has disappeared and the bike/scooter companies which remain have to look after their inventory and keep it in defined parking spots the situation is a lot better. I don't exactly know how enforcement has been set up and I do see abandoned bikes and scooters around, but I also see company employees rounding them up and taking them to the right spots so the system appears to be working.

[1] Sidewalks for Americans

There are scooters in my town and I’ve used them a few times. When you park the scooter the app makes you take a picture of your parking job. I don’t know how good the enforcement is, but this is a plausible way of solving the problem of inconsiderate users.

I think this should be combined with:

1) QR code on every scooter so improperly placed scooters can be reported to the owning company with images

2) The use of accelerometer data to verify when a scooter was moved (to ensure things like renters not being unfairly penalized if a scooter is moved by somebody else afterwards)

Actually, if you would park illegally with a rental car, Hertz would get a ticket. They would just hold you accountable for it.

"If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?"

If people could rent cars for very short periods of time and 'return' them on the street, they most definitely would be re-parked illegally. We'd never allow a rental car company to use city streets as a parking lot for their inventory. And, yes, it would be the car company's liability.

As a counterpoint, every Turo I've picked up was from a neighborhood street with free parking and a line of dinged up cars.

“If people could rent cars for very short periods of time and 'return' them on the street, they most definitely would be re-parked illegally”

Isn’t this exactly what evo/gig/zip is? Easy to miss if you live outside of a big US metro I suppose.

> If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down.

If you get a rental car, and let it in the middle of the road, you will be fined and Hertz might sue you.

At least in California my experience has been that Bird was doomed after the handicapables decided it was an issue. Great service, very convenient, good density, etc. Then a bunch of regulations passed limiting them to certain parking zones to solve some issue for the handicapped community and now they're basically worthless in terms of convenience. I mean the streets are littered with needles, tents and homeless but god forbid we leave something useful on them.

Yes, all those nasty wheelchair users who need to use the sidewalk to get around. How dare they interfere with your ability to dump a scooter anywhere you please without thought or consequence. No one has ever had an issue with tents or needles or the homeless, either.

I'm just saying, if the street is going to be worthless anyway the public could at least get some value out of it. But progressives care more about the homeless than the handicapped so instead we get trash on the streets and useful things going bankrupt.

I don’t know that “care more about the homeless” is accurate, but I think “care more about human beings than scooters” probably is.

In either case, solving homelessness is probably more complicated than scooter litter.