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What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

haveago.city

81–90 of 198 posts

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't, and legally we can't. Once they accept the ticket to SF and choose to make their home on the sidewalk, they become our problem, legally. And SF (even now) is so much nicer than Texas that few of the homeless are willing to go back.

Disputes between states are always political and only occasionally legal. But yeah I can see it being difficult to prove, and harder to action. If one state wanted to sue the other, what is the process? Congress? Supreme court?

States do get into law suites with each other from time to time. The issue has to be about federal law.

Nebraska and Oklahoma vs Colorado was recently declined to be heard by the Supreme Court.

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#82
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m all for it if they stay off the sidewalk.

Someone who is not comfortable/fit enough to bike on an American road should probably bike on a non-crowded sidewalk. There are over 800 cyclist deaths, from being hit by cars, every year in the United States. How many pedestrians have been killed by a cyclist hitting them? Forcing someone biking at 7 mph off the sidewalk and onto the street creates more danger then it protects us from.

  How many pedestrians have been killed by a cyclist hitting them?
Finding fatality data is oddly difficult; DuckDuckGo finds lots of UK data and news items (e.g. [0]) but little USA data. There are many individual cases, including several well-known in the Bay Area. The official DOT reports count pedestrian and cyclist deaths in collisions with motor vehicles only.

"Overall, 7,904 pedestrians in New York State (including New York City) were treated in a hospital for injuries caused by a person on a bicycle between 2004 and 2011. In California, the number was 6,177 between 2005 and 2011."[1]

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/14/cyclist-killed-p...

[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/10/the-rate-of-p...

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#83
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who is not comfortable/fit enough to bike on an American road should probably bike on a non-crowded sidewalk. There are over 800 cyclist deaths, from being hit by cars, every year in the United States. How many pedestrians have been killed by a cyclist hitting them? Forcing someone biking at 7 mph off the sidewalk and onto the street creates more danger then it protects us from.

Pedestrians killed by cars is an order of magnitude higher than that. They are presumably already using the sidewalks. It doesn’t matter where you are relative to them, cars are dangerous.

  They are presumably already using the sidewalks.
The vast majority of pedestrians killed in auto collisions are in intersections or completely on roadways.

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cracking down on the scooters is relatively easy: there are a handful of major actors, and dealing with them solves the problem. Human waste, needles, garbage on the sidewalk is the result of hundreds of bad actors, which correspondingly takes significantly more resources to deal with. (And on that note, the state of Texas is the worst offender. Their official policy for dealing with their homeless during the Perry e…

And does California charge them for this? That's an incredible story, especially from a Europe where immigration controls is on everyone's lips.

The various states have many powers that are reserved for independent nations elsewhere in the world, but interstate immigration control is not one of them. Freedom of movement is a Constitutional right, and there would be a huge bipartisan outcry if anyone tried to limit the movement of US citizens.

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#86
post #2

If Hertz or Avis attempted to use public space to park their inventory, local residents and city officials would pitch a fit. Public parking exists for the benefit of the public at large, not as a cost-saving measure for rental firms. The same is true of bicycles. You can store your private bicycle almost anywhere you like in public. But city fathers will naturally take a dim view of a business using that public spac…

You mean... like Getaround and Zipcar already do? The streets are filled with companies using public spaces: Fedex deliveries blocking the road, sidewalk signs for bars, Getaround rentals, food carts, mailboxes, ATMs, parking meters, Scoot scooters, taxi lines, Lyft/Ubers, Redbox DVD rentals, annoying Greenpeace petition people, construction, billboards, etc. I don't think it's a cost-saving measure for scooter/bike…

Well where I live (Melbourne, Aus) what a assume are the equivalent to Zipcar actually buy/rent car spaces to leave for their cars.

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not allowed to park your car in any random place you like You can probably get away with parking illegally more often than you imagine. (Note that I'm not saying that you should, or excusing bad behavior from dockless bike users.) Take an example from the article: cars illegally parked in the bike lane. In my experience* most drivers who park in the bike lane do so out of convenience, not a lack of options.…

It is not illegal to park a car in the bike lane in California. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/traffic_l...

"You may park in a bicycle lane if your vehicle does not block a bicyclist and/or there is not a “No Parking” sign posted"

You cannot completely block a bicycle lane, but part of your vehicle can partly cover the lane.

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#88
post #2

If Hertz or Avis attempted to use public space to park their inventory, local residents and city officials would pitch a fit. Public parking exists for the benefit of the public at large, not as a cost-saving measure for rental firms. The same is true of bicycles. You can store your private bicycle almost anywhere you like in public. But city fathers will naturally take a dim view of a business using that public spac…

You mean... like Getaround and Zipcar already do? The streets are filled with companies using public spaces: Fedex deliveries blocking the road, sidewalk signs for bars, Getaround rentals, food carts, mailboxes, ATMs, parking meters, Scoot scooters, taxi lines, Lyft/Ubers, Redbox DVD rentals, annoying Greenpeace petition people, construction, billboards, etc. I don't think it's a cost-saving measure for scooter/bike…

>Yes, these scooters/bikes are making money.

Are they? Are any of the companies public? It seems like a burn through cash to get a user base sort of thing but maybe these companies are older and more established than it seems to me.

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#89
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most places in the US at least are not very livable without a car. Let me rephrase that for you: In most place in the US public transport is woefully under-funded, under-utilized, and overly stigmatized (as a thing only poor 'others' would use). That is changing, slowly, as places that basically gave up on public transport are discovering that less and less people in their cities want to own a car.

> In most place in the US public transport is woefully under-funded, under-utilized, and overly stigmatized You misspelled "in most places in the US public transport cannot meet people's needs". Yes, it can in inner cities, but most of the US is not inner cities.

> According to new numbers just released from the U.S. Census Bureau, 80.7 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas as of the 2010 Census

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...

I assume that number has only gone up since 2010.

Re: What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

#90
post #2

If Hertz or Avis attempted to use public space to park their inventory, local residents and city officials would pitch a fit. Public parking exists for the benefit of the public at large, not as a cost-saving measure for rental firms. The same is true of bicycles. You can store your private bicycle almost anywhere you like in public. But city fathers will naturally take a dim view of a business using that public spac…

Uber? You may say "Uber is just a platform" but they use public facilities as well as private cars. That User car takes up as much space as 20+ dockless ebikes.
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