That is a dumb law that was made when motorcycles were the only vehicles competing inside walks. There is very little traffic on sidewalks and using it for pedestrians and scooters and bicycles is much better. Especially considering that cyclists can pause or go around pedestrians when necessary. Having an absolute law rather than an adaptive is not useful to the community.
Tell that to the wheelchair bound person who now have to deal with a scooter blocking their path every 20 yards.
I encounter cars blocking sidewalks all the time. Cars haven't been banned yet.
Well maybe those companies shouldn’t have been huge assholes the way that Uber was. The city is once bitten and twice shy with Uber.
What did Bird or Lime do?
They created conditions for a massive degradation of the public sidewalk especially for wheelchair users. They did nothing to fix it. Regulators act slowly and rarely, but when they do they always overreact. Entirely predictable.
This is a teething issue that will be fixed by iterative design processes as they learn which parts get stressed by this type of usage.
If the scooter wars are driven by scooter design the winners are going to be very different than Bird and Lime which are logistics companies.
I agree. It will take a combination of logistics and design. Ofo are winning that race in the bike space but mobike aren't far behind. Here in Singapore obike got it woefully wrong. It was obvious that whoever purchased their bikes is not a cyclist because the bikes were terrible. Obike went out of business.
How do "transportation" companies (dockless scooters in this case) have network effects? The automobile industry, which is about as mature as markets get, has seven companies in the US with at least 5% market share and the leader (GM) has merely 17%, and is largely bereft of command-and-control economic policies.
For a scooter, I have to walk until I find a scooter for a company that I'm enrolled with. Do I even have company X's app on my phone to show their scooter nearby? If I run across company Y's scooter, how much effort is it for me to enroll to use it? And is company Z offering me a bulk discount? All of these are totally different from buying a car.
Dumb question: are you arguing that renting a scooter is harder than buying a car? Or easier?
For a scooter, I have to walk until I find a scooter for a company that I'm enrolled with. Do I even have company X's app on my phone to show their scooter nearby? If I run across company Y's scooter, how much effort is it for me to enroll to use it? And is company Z offering me a bulk discount? All of these are totally different from buying a car.
Dumb question: are you arguing that renting a scooter is harder than buying a car? Or easier?
Neither. I'm saying they're completely different things with respect to network effects, in response to someone who thought they were similar in some fashion.
Yeah, I understand that zoning is often used as a way to discourage building things that people don’t want built. But my idea was that hopefully there’s a way to make zoning “work”. I have no inherent issues with a nightclub; I just think it would be better from a noise perspective to put it downtown where it’s not going to bother other people.
I don't really get what you mean; that's the whole point of zoning and an approval process. What's your objection to that way of doing things?
Nothing, as long as it's not abused to make sure that nothing ever gets built.
Considering San Fran is already famous for hilariously spiteful and terrible zoning/real estate development practices, it isn't exactly surprising. Are the companies who got permits local? That may have factored into it. Also, considering the sheer hatred these companies and their business model inspire in me, I can't say it doesn't fill me with glee.
Uber, Lyft, Lime (rejected), Skip and Scoot (accepted) are all SF companies.
That is a dumb law that was made when motorcycles were the only vehicles competing inside walks. There is very little traffic on sidewalks and using it for pedestrians and scooters and bicycles is much better. Especially considering that cyclists can pause or go around pedestrians when necessary. Having an absolute law rather than an adaptive is not useful to the community.
Tell that to the wheelchair bound person who now have to deal with a scooter blocking their path every 20 yards.
I use a wheelchair. It would certainly suck to have a scooter blocking my path.
But I don’t think scooters parked in the sidewalk apply to me very much. If we’re moving, they or I move around each other.
This is a time-limited pilot program that also caps the number of scooters. It's far from a market monopoly. In addition, there's no network effect with scooters. Car sharing has the chicken-and-egg problem where you need enough drivers to meet demand, and you need enough passengers to give drivers a reason to drive for you. But scooters are cheap and easy to dump a whole bunch on a city, so there's no reason why a n…
I disagree. There is a network effect here, people will use the brand that already is installed on their phone PLUS the one that has the most scooters. This is what can occur here.
Using the app already on your phone isn't a network effect. A network effect is when the more users there are, the more valuable the network is to each new user. For ridesharing, the more drivers there are, the more useful the service is to passengers, and the more passengers there are the more attractive the service is to drivers. But for scooters? Whether a given scooter brand is popular or is unknown has no bearing whatsoever on its utility to a new user, all that really matters is whether the scooters are available when and where the user wants them, and whether the app is easy to use.