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Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

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Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#241

Post by soared »

npteljes wrote: post #94
shiftpgdn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're frequently driven by people making $1-3/hr in Colombia.

Now that's something else. Do you remember where you read that? I'd love to know more.

Similarly, people in Venezuela play RuneScape, an mmo, and sell virtual currency as a full time job: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/fe...

Venezuelans farm gold and indirectly sell it to wealthy Americans. $0.70 for 1MM gold is nothing for an American, but adds up to meaningful amounts in Venezuela if your monthly salary is $4 USD.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#242

Post by hahajk »

We were walking past one of these robots whose wheel got stuck halfway off the curb, so it was completely stuck. My friend helped it back up, and it had a prerecorded voice say “thank you for helping me!” It was unexpected and delightful to be thanked by a robot, we make sure to help any we see that are in distress, even though we know they’re owned by a private company with profits in mind.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#243

Post by user_7832 »

klyrs wrote: post #194
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guns? Boring. Flamethrowers? High velocity spinny disks? Sign me up!

In a country with more lawyers than people?

I like how this implies that lawyers aren't people ;)

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#244

Post by 1over137 »

Kaze404 wrote: post #196
burlesona wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should stop seeing scooters as the enemy. Scooter companies represent a lot of money that wants more space for pedestrians, bikes, and of course scooters in the city. They are a potential massive ally with deep pockets to push back against the car lobby. The battle here is not to fight over who has the right to be on the 10% of the street we call the sidewalk, it’s to take back some of the 90% of the street that’…

I would be glad to not see scooters as the enemy if they weren't so dangerous for everyone involved. Though I guess space is a big factor in that, now that I think about it.

Are scooters more dangerous than cars? No. But you've internalized the 1.4 million yearly global deaths from car crashes as "normal".

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#245

Post by numpad0 »

nkrisc wrote: post #26

I understand this person is making a judgement on the state of mind of others, so it may not at all be accurate with regards to the people actually clearing the scooters, but I found this interesting nonetheless, that the author assumes this: > I just observed a couple of students clearing a path out of pity for the robots. I understand why people might feel pity for robots. People become attached to all sorts of ina…

> They deserve no pity, they're robots!

> Robot is drawn from an old Church Slavonic word, robota, for “servitude,” “forced labor” or “drudgery.” The word, which also has cognates in German, Russian, Polish and Czech, was a product of the central European system of serfdom by which a tenant’s rent was paid for in forced labor or service.[1]

1: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/the-origin-of-the-wor...

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#246

Post by derivagral »

lkbm wrote: post #173
burlesona wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should stop seeing scooters as the enemy. Scooter companies represent a lot of money that wants more space for pedestrians, bikes, and of course scooters in the city. They are a potential massive ally with deep pockets to push back against the car lobby. The battle here is not to fight over who has the right to be on the 10% of the street we call the sidewalk, it’s to take back some of the 90% of the street that’…

I agree, but right now it feels like the scooter companies have decided it's easier to inconvenience pedestrians than to ally with us and fight car culture. I'm a huge fan of the idea of plentiful, cheap scooters for short trips, and was excited to have a new cohort of people who would want more safe bike (and scooter) routes. Alas, as much as I love the concept, I've developed a strong dislike for the companies. I'v…

Complaints like this are typically run through the city or campus that leases operation rights to the fleet. These entities usually get fairly forceful in (competitive) markets. Your local scooter outfit(s) are not going to want to risk a market with a ton of complaints and bad operations feedback.

That said: given GPS limitations, the time it takes for a van with humans to arrive (and park!), as well as lagging feedback loops... this isn't an easy problem. Last I was in the industry, they were just starting to concept customer reputation systems, but generally they were more concerned with winning markets and decreasing operating costs.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#247

Post by rtlfe »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #228
_fullpint wrote: post #13

Absolutely hate these scooters from an ADA prospective. My neighborhood is a mostly quiet one near the center of a large city, where there are a lot of mothers who push their kids in strollers, older folks with canes, and some people even in wheelchairs. On the weekends -- sometimes the weekdays as well depending on the time of the year -- the city gets flooded with both tourists, and suburbanites who want to go to a…

Sadly the problem is not the scooters themselves. They don't park themselves at random. The problem is the people. If, in general, people were just at tiny bit more respectful of others around them - the world would be a lot better off.

The real problem is that car manufactures have lobbied to give every scrap of space to car storage. If we took back parking lanes to dramatically expand sidewalks, this wouldn't be an issue at all.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#248

Post by rtlfe »

sharken wrote: post #23
_fullpint wrote: post #13

Absolutely hate these scooters from an ADA prospective. My neighborhood is a mostly quiet one near the center of a large city, where there are a lot of mothers who push their kids in strollers, older folks with canes, and some people even in wheelchairs. On the weekends -- sometimes the weekdays as well depending on the time of the year -- the city gets flooded with both tourists, and suburbanites who want to go to a…

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 w…

> helmet is now required

FYI some context on bike helmet laws: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2021/04/06/56408419/seattle...

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#249

Post by watwut »

rosndo wrote: post #227
watwut wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claim is that it is all right wing people becoming anti-social in unrelated areas?

Why right wing? I’m rather left leaning, even by European standards. I’m not some crazy antivaxxer either, plenty of those on both sides. Nevertheless the pandemic responses by various governments I have to interact with have done much to deepen my distrust of them and the society around me. Various governments have deployed drastic measures such as lockdowns in an effort to control the pandemic, but they’ve released…

Because this was heavily partisan issue. It is just absurd to claim it was not.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#250

Post by nabilhat »

_fullpint wrote: post #13

Absolutely hate these scooters from an ADA prospective. My neighborhood is a mostly quiet one near the center of a large city, where there are a lot of mothers who push their kids in strollers, older folks with canes, and some people even in wheelchairs. On the weekends -- sometimes the weekdays as well depending on the time of the year -- the city gets flooded with both tourists, and suburbanites who want to go to a…

> Absolutely hate these scooters from an ADA prospective.

Same here, but from a different angle. If the scooters were the problem, we'd have had the same problem when Car2Go was a thing. But, car infrastructure in the US is so overbuilt that Car2Go didn't even register on the radar in terms of free street parking. Cars improperly abandoned that impede car traffic are quickly resolved.

The nonmotorized infrastructure in the US is so begrudgingly inept that adversarial design wouldn't look much different. If there's a rent-a-scooter inconveniencing the token pedestrian path next to on street parking, I've simply been moving the scooters into on street parking. A single scooter fits between spaces, or only consumes <5% of the length of a standard 20 foot space. Surely drivers complain loudly, but they won't be inconvenienced unless they go out of their way to toss a scooter into the middle of the sidewalk; an accurate metaphor for how sidewalks got to be so terrible in the first place.

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