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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

> injury-inducing street litter

If you abandon a car in the middle of the road across two lanes, you'll fairly likely see relatively hefty fines, possibly lose your car. This hurts you, the abandoning party directly.

If you abandon a rental e-scooter in the same way, you'll most likely have no repercussions, and at worst the cheap e-scooter is forfeit which doesn't impact you, the abandoning party at all, and not really the e-scooter company either since they're most likely on a VC funded mission to try to flood the market with cheap e-scooter rentals until the competition drowns.

There's some seriously skewed incentives at the root of the rental e-scooter plague.

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This seems trivial to address. If you misuse HN, you get your account banned and can no longer post on HN. If you mistreat an Uber driver, you get your account banned and can no longer hail a ride. What stops this system from working with e-scooters?

Suppose you rent a scooter, park it "properly enough", I come by and move it a few feet into an improper parking place. Do you want your account banned for that?

If not, this might not be as "trivial to address" as you first think.

The scooter has gps as well as your phone and they require a photo anyway. The company can check that you ended your ride correctly, what happens after that isn't your liability.

GPS won't help you here, though the photo will. GPS simply isn't anywhere near accurate enough to verify you placed the scooter in spot X, and not 1-2 meters away from spot X where it's now a hazard.

A gyroscope on the scooter and location awareness of the renter’s device seems to take care of that. If the scooter’s gyroscope indicates movement after the renter has returned the scooter and left the premises, then assuming the renter didn’t move it seems pretty safe.

> This seems trivial to address.

Yet it is not.

This. It's a wild west with these e-scoots, and unlike cars they're everywhere. My city has only 100k people and even here they're a huge nuisance.

They are super convenient. Cars are the nuance. We will figure out how to deal with scooters the same way Asian cultures figured out theirs. And the same we we figured out how to socially deal with cell phones.

Straight banning them because a bunch of fuddy duddies who never took one don’t like them is pretty short sighted.

>We will figure out how to deal with scooters the same way Asian cultures figured out theirs.

They did? When? Here in Tokyo, they've only very recently allowed e-scooters to be used.

China?

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