Michigan State confiscated around 100-150 of these scooters, I think primarily Bird's. If they don't reach an agreement with the company I think it's likely they will be auctioned.
This is why hubs are super important. People should be able to host their property as hubs where people can safely leave their scooters, as opposed to just dumping them anywhere they please.
But to answer: Because people pay taxes for their vehicles, so the government uses a portion of that to pave roads, and provide some parking spaces. Also some parking spaces are paid for by the hour.
So if you are willing to pay scooter taxes, then Im sure that they would also provide scooter spots.
Taxes on vehicles and gasoline do not remotely cover the costs of road construction, let alone the costs of urban parking. Private vehicles are intensely subsidized.
I was going to reply to this, but found there was a long and healthy debate already here hours before you posted your comment, that is worth reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18604680
TL;DR it’s not the same thing, but a lot of people do feel cars are a problem.
I googled "unsecured bicycles" and among the first few hits I noticed that a lot of universities have rules on bike parking, saying that unsecured bikes will be confiscated. So the bird scooters might not be such an exception here. I live near a university, and every year they tag a huge number of abandoned bikes in racks as well.
The influx of traffic has been a great surprise. I've contacted the host and updated the plan to handle the activity. They informed me the issue will be fixed soon. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Thank you for checking out Scooter Talk. Hope you enjoy!
You shouldn't need an updated plan to handle this. It seems as though every page load is hitting a database. I can't see the page since it won't load, but I'd imagine the content here can be easily cached.
This is the best answer. Cloudflare free tier CDN is amazing, and is ridiculously easy to set up. They even provide and set up an SSL certificate for you.
Reduce the max users in your http servers. Your max database users should always be a bit less than your max http servers/instances/connections.
Http will queue connections if over the limit and everything will just work without errors. You won't even have an overloaded server (although some users may have a long wait).
Would be cool if it didn't leak half the authentication setup. Seems like the error handler could scan the text for configured values and mask before echoing it out.
Better yet, the error handler could not print anything back. A generic 500 is the way to go. Log your errors.
If you think you'd get worthwhile bug reports / don't want to implement log analysis or whatever, take whatever errors, stack traces, etc. you'd like, encrypt and base64 encode them, and print that.
Printing any hints about the nature of errors should be regarded as a security risk.
Absolutely true, and how I implement error handling personally (meaning give a friendly non technical message and track the error internally) I blame a brain collapse after a long day :)
Bird scooters showed up in my city unexpectedly, literally overnight. We woke up and they were everywhere, like... a swarm of... Birds I guess. Suddenly everyone is zipping everywhere on these things and everyone says how awesome everything is. But then mad people go to Facebook and say that someone once saw a Bird scooter in a crosswalk and the city loses it's mind. They get lawyers to write letters to Bird (to demand... what? We don't know). They hear nothing back. Soon city council is complaining on Facebook too. The police impound them by the dozens, creating a phalanx of Birds in their lot. For a couple of weeks after that you are lucky to see one on the sidewalk. People are sad, but then, unexpectedly, Lime scooters appear, literally overnight, everywhere. Somehow the Birds are now free of their cage and everyone is zipping about town on scooters again. I think they are cool.
I must admit I had a little chuckle. I suppose there is a term for it when the correct answer is right there on the tip of your tounge but you just can't quite put pen to paper.
If they are used in commision of a crime, the police would probably keep it. But in this case they confiscated 400+ of them, so they're probably treating them as abandoned, which isn't unreasonable. Public space isn't storage ground for private property.
It's worth noting that it's extremely common to confiscate cars for relatively minor infractions like parking where you're not supposed to. You can pay to get your car back, but if you don't, they'll eventually consider it to be abandoned and sell it. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing had happened here, with Bird not paying the fee to retrieve their property either through negligence or it just not being worth it.
Cities regulate the use of public parking spaces, including what can park (e.g. RVs often can't), how long a car can stay, and charge fees for use (via meters and such). In Seattle car share companies like Car2Go are paying about $1700 per year per car [1] for the right to "store them" in public spaces. Cities historically haven't regulated sidewalks as elaborately because it wasn't common for anybody to leave large numbers of valuable things lying around on them. Cities are now trying to catch up, but I'll guess what regulations do exist mostly forbid leaving your business property on them without proper permitting. (For bikes Seattle's implementing a flat annual fee of $250,000 per company, scooters haven't really shown up here yet.)
Scooters aren't yet permitted here in Seattle FYI, though recent rule changes make it possible tto request authorisation to deploy scooters under a bikeshare permit iirc. Same for cargo bikes and other bike variants, which opens up interesting possibilities in Seattle.
Scooter riders should be licensed. They need to take an exam, including a road and written test.
Need to pay city parking fees. Respect parking zones. Only park in designated areas. Areas change in a complicated pattern depending on weather, time of day, day of the week or scooter type and color.
If they violate that they get confiscated and need to pay a fee to get it back.
They also need to be insured in case they hit a pedestrian.
Riders who speed get mailed speeding tickets from speed cameras
Getting caught inebriated on a scooter on a sidewalk should be a serious offense, with points taken off and a corresponding insurance fee hike. Possibly court appearance as well.
Cars are treated like this because of theirs needs. At the beginning, they weren't and all theses requirements came later on.
If we did the same as we do with the scooters right now, we simply wouldn't have cars. Instead we made the right decision and added all theses requirements one by one when it was needed.
Sure scooters have needs to and we need to define theses needs and regulate them, but can we actually discover theses needs first? China has shown that we need designated space, so let's start with that. They also shown that we should have ways for carriers to quickly move some, so let's add that too.
Massive bans are stupid and just stop innovations.
I suspect if you scattered 400 cars around the city, randomly parked in the middle of streets and sidewalks, the city would have some unkind words for you, too.
Except this is exactly what happens. Cars double park or park in bike lanes all the time. Cars drive on sidewalks or park in driveways blocking sidewalks (heck I was just honked at by an angry motorist driving his car down a sidewalk near downtown because I wouldn't move out the way). Cars park in private lots without paying. There's a reason why there are private tow operators, meter maids and cops out to enforce traffic violations.
The thing is so many people store their cars incorrectly nothing is usually done, so poorly parked cars and scooters are about the same problem -- except that a poorly parked car is potentially life threatening whereas a poorly parked scooters is annoying.
> The thing is so many people store their cars incorrectly nothing is usually done
This is patently false, as not only public entities (i.e., law enforcement and local governments) but also private companies (private tow operators) create and invest in specific services to address the problem.
So,once a whole industry emerges to tackle a problem then obviously something is being done.
> The thing is so many people store their cars incorrectly nothing is usually done, so poorly parked cars and scooters are about the same problem
In both cases, it's part of your civic duty to report cases like these. There must be a phone number in your city that you can call when you see someone parked a car (or a scooter) in a place where it's a) illegal, and b) is causing troubles.
Yes, except cities have 100,000 of cars randomly parked. So not sure what you are talking about. I mean, yes, there are generally accepted places to put a car, but only because they have been around so long. Yes, new things don't currently have that luxury, They are also a 100 times smaller, and easy to move, unlike a car.
Those rules are incredibly generous with how they allocate incredibly valuable real estate to cars, often for the price of free.
If every other block has enough room on the curb, for 30 cars to be parked for free, then surely, there should be room for one or two scooters to do the same.
Tragedy of the commons is a significant issue. So, if land owners allocate space for them that’s fine. But it’s not legal to leave random junk in public spaces because there is simply not enough space for everyone to be doing this with anything.
Further, public parking is rarely free, it’s being payed for somone and often that’s not the city.
> public Parking is free almost anywhere but in in city centers, and it occupies one third of a typical, residential street.
And is still regulated, though enforcement tends often to be complaint based, rather than active patrol. Leave a vehicle a few days with moving it and someone complains and it gets tagged and, if left a little while longer, towed as abandoned.
> If every other block has enough room on the curb, for 30 cars to be parked for free, then surely, there should be room for one or two scooters to do the same.
That's pretty much irrelevant as the business model of these scooter services is based on the concept of riders dropping them off wherever they feel like it.
Hmm? Its not uncommon for there to be freely usable bike racks on most city streets. I see them all over Seattle, predating bikeshares by years in most cases.
Right, so when Bird funds some scooter racks and starts ensuring their scooter are stored there, cities will stop impounding them. In the meantime it's like if I left my bike in the middle of the sidewalk somewhere - if it doesn't get stolen, I can expect it to get cleaned up by some other means.
Edit: While writing another comment it occurred to me that these scooters are exactly like the shopping carts you see abandoned around stores. Either the stores collect them or the city does - but either way they're basically large bits of litter for anyone not in need of a shopping cart at the moment.
I'm sure Bird wouldn't appreciate this analogy, because it's deeply unsexy.
I think cities have wised up since AinBnB and Uber that saying “we’ll wait and see” while the corporation gets strong is not a winning strategy for regulators.
If getting hundreds of scooters impounded and auctioned off is a good strategy for Bird, their business strategy is too subtle for me to follow.
> If every other block has enough room on the curb, for 30 cars to be parked for free, then surely, there should be room for one or two scooters to do the same.
Then...lobby your city for scooter parking. Car parking is supported because people very much want it, and politicians no there is a cost to not having it.
> substantial taxes are paid for the privilege of using the public roads, including city streets.
We all pay theses taxes, cars or not, are you talking about license plate? Here it's a few hundreds buck a year, if that's all what's needed, I'm sure they would gladly pay it.
We already pay for the privilege of using the side walks, we are already able to lock our bike outside.
Tokyo and other cities in Japan require an off-street parking space as a condition of car ownership. In the course of a day, cars are very seldom abandoned on the street and drivers would be punished if caught doing so.
Tokyo has no street parking. You will occasionally have someone idling their car at the side of the road for long amounts of time, but they have to be inside the vehicle.
Chino Hills is the largest city around here that I know of that does not have street parking on public streets. Technically, Tustin and Tustin Ranch are mostly private developed by Irvine CA so both of those as well.
The one thing they all have in common is that they are all wealthy suburbs.
The reason, in the UK at least, is the tax (and additional parking fees for some spaces) that motorists pay that covers this. Also when and where cars can be parked is highly regulated and enforced.
Lets see
VED: £0. Fuel:15p per 100 miles. Consumables (tyres etc), maybe £20 a year in VAT?
Land cost in say Ealing is £30m a hectre, or £3k per sqm. A parking space that's about 3m by 2m of the road is worth about £20k, and thus costs about £1k a year to provide.
Loosely speaking - in UK - off-street parking has standard rate VAT, on-street is VAT exempt. But it's very much a rule of thumb, not a strict regulation.
Maybe they were talking about VED which is sort of about using the public highway in that you can declare the vehicle as off the road and stop paying it. But the complicated emissions/price/age based charge means it doesn't really make sense to think of it that way anymore. E.g. A zero-rated vehicle still has the same impact when parked on the road.
Because the space is specifically designated as available for cars to park. If you park your car on the sidewalk, or at the entrance to a park, your car will not be there when you get back(or, you'll have a ticket).
...and bicycles! Cities even build bike racks on sidewalks so that people can park their privately owned bicycles. At least the scooters are a public good.
It's chaos vs. order. A bike rack is a place that a bike get put if the owner doesn't want it to be stolen or cleaned up. Bird scooters get left all over the fucking place. The closest analog is areas around big box stores where people often abandon shopping carts. Sure they're theoretically useful and private property. They're also basically random garbage for anyone who doesn't need a shopping cart at that moment. And, like Bird scooters, cities usually respond by either forcing the owner (store) to clean the things up[1] or by cleaning them up themselves[2].
Not public goods in the literal economic definition, true, but there's some flexibility in common usage of this term.
Irrespective of who owns it, I can walk up to a scooter and use it. I cannot do this to your bicycle tied up to a post. From the general public's perspective, the scooter has vastly more utility than your bicycle.
A bicycle is also a public good, because it’s not a car taking up 8x the space, poisoning you, potentially running you over, changing the climate, making your president a docile sub to murderers, and annoying you wit noise.
The Chinese case in those photos is subtly different: a bunch of competitors all spammed the same place, so there was massive oversupply. When a competitor failed, the stuff was worthless except as scrap because of the insane glut.
From what I can tell, police departments are seizing them:
(1) When used illegally, and
(2) As nuisances based on where and when they are left, and
(3) As part of an illegal operation, where there is a permitting requirement the firm isn't complying with.
> If someone leaves a couch on the curb and you take it is that stealing?
In England: Probably, yes. You have appropriated something that belongs to someone else; you intend to permanently deprive the ower of it. The only other thing needed for theft is for the appropriation to be dishonest.
You know the couch doesn't belong to you, and there isn't a sign saying "Free couch", so there's a strong argument that this is dishonest unless there's a sign on it saying "free couch".
> you intend to permanently deprive the ower of it.
Very much case by case.
I used to live in a street that had tons of stuff left outside of buildings (think chairs, shelves, mattresses etc) as tenants moved in and out a lot.
I got loads of useful stuff from that practice.
You just wait or ask around a bit before taking. Realistically a sofa left outside on a London street for a few hours is _at best_ temporarily awaiting disposal.
As for the first, It’s the same as someone uploading a stolen photo with a CC0 license, i. e. none. If the true owner finds you, they are highly likely to be entitled to get their property back.
As for criminal charges, a reasonable assumption of permission should usually work as an excuse. This will depend on the specifics, such as the item’s value, local customs, etc.
I actually found a rather valuable chair (the rietvelt) on the street, and did leave my phone number because I could not quite believe my luck. The previous owner called and told me to enjoy it.
How do you verify that goods on craigslist wasn't stolen before being sold? Reasonable assumptions that will be tried if you are caught carrying home the sofa.
I wish the downvoters would explain why you're wrong instead. Under what legal theory can Bird file charges against someone who takes what they've left unsecured sitting on a sidewalk?
You're arguing against about 2000 years of legal history. Theft is defined as the taking of another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.
Note how nothing in that definition requires the property to be secured.
You also don't get to hit people over the head with a hammer only because they have turned away from you.
In general, law abhors your principle of "might is right". In fact, law and morality are entirely unnecessary in the cases where an otherwise unlawful action is successfully prevented by protections.
I guess all the moral gymnastics to justify copyright infringement are now having spillover effects. It's one way to get back to a coherent moral code, I give you that. But I hope you can afford bodyguards to accompany at all times of day, and no enemy of yours ever becomes rich enough to pay more muscle than you can.
It's not really a 'principle'; I was genuinely curious, not trying to make a point.
I like electric scooters, actually. But it does seem strange that suddenly there's an expectation that things can just be left on the sidewalk while enjoying the full protection of the law. I don't think that if I left my bike sitting unlocked in front of someone else's apartment building indefinitely, I'd have much of a case against the kid that walked away with it. But companies can do it and because they are companies, it's a different story.
I’m sort of surprised none of these pissed off city councils have gone after them for illegally dumping hazardous materials.
I guess most people here infer that I hate these scooters, but I actually think they are mostly a public good. Just like uber is. Doesn’t mean it is legal though.
If you leave a car by the side of the road and someone takes it is that stealing?
Vehicles - of whatever size - have a distinct treatment from other forms of property; you can station them beside the highway without being deemed to have abandoned them.
That's not necessary here. Taking of property requires explicit or clearly implied consent. The latter includes depositing something in a trash can. But just leaving it on the streets clearly does not.
The listing claims to be selling a brand new part still in its original packaging, so that wouldn't fit, although it certainly wouldn't be the first time that an eBay seller lied.
Isn't a big part of the advantage of ride-share is that the vehicle is just there for your journey, you don't need to take care of it outside of that?
These companies companies seems to have exploded in valuation, driven I guess by VC money. I wonder how much of the rider-growth fueling that is just people trying out an electric scooter for the first time.
> I wonder how much of the rider-growth fueling that is just people trying out an electric scooter for the first time
I saw they have Lime in Madrid and a few other Spanish cities, and that was my impression for their usage here. For a 10 minute ride the cost is comparable to what you would pay for car-sharing scheme like Car2Go - but that's for a car where you can fit a passenger and shopping. It's also priced in USD here, which suggests it's not aimed at the local market.
If they had pricing similar to bicycle sharing schemes (X minutes free, then pay per minute + daily/yearly subscription fee) I could see them being a lot more popular with commuters, but as it is now, my impression is it's too expensive for the European market.
But that’s also for a car that you need to park, and that stops at traffic lights. Depending on the travel, scooters are a great value proposition.
I’d say shared electric motorbikes (also present in Madrid) pose a more direct threat to scooters: they accompdatr 2 people, speedier, safer (comes with helmet), easily parkeable, not affected by traffic jams (but dependent on traffic lights - in strictness)
That's the advantage of ride share, yes, but ride share isn't the only application of electric scooters. If you live 2 or 3 miles from work, it might be good for commutes.
Even now, when it's <40f and 29f in the morning, I am doing my 3 mile commute both ways on my ebike. Its a fun quick ride that gets the blood pumping in the morning.
> Isn't a big part of the advantage of ride-share is that the vehicle is just there for your journey, you don't need to take care of it outside of that?
That's what I use it for. They're great for situations where I want to get somewhere that's 1-3 mi away and don't want to be responsible for the object I used for transportation once I get there (be it car, bike or scooter).
I suspect the margins are high enough. These things are cheap, and it doesn't take a whole lot of rides to pay for themselves. If they last a few months on average before being trashed, that's probably good enough.
It's also possible that these companies are taking the loss to gain market penetration, hoping to find a solution to the vandalism problem before the VC money dries up.
They cost <$500 at retail prices. Assuming they have 15 miles of range at max speed (15mph), worst case one charge only gets them $10 ($1 to start + 0.15/min * 60min), $5 of which goes to the person who picks it up and recharges it. That's 100 cycles to breakeven on worse case (one person rides one scooter until it dies).
They've disclosed that an average scooter does 5.5 trips/day ($5.50), assuming everyone rides at max speed nonstop, that still ~$14.50/day. Pays for itself in under 2 months.
Full retail price in china is 1,999 RMB ($289-300). Wholesale on Alibaba for more than 300 is $153USD per scooter.
Bird probably manages to get a further $25-30 off that, so perhaps as low as $120 per scooter, plus perhaps $10 for the bird brain modification and shipping by container, another $10-15.
So theoretically, a scooter could pay for itself in 10-20 days if used that heavily. I'd say that they are very capable of absorbing the cost of the occasional one going missing
But that's just the cost of the scooter. On the one hand, they're paying wholesale prices for the scooters, but on the other they need to pay for marketing/sales/engineering/legal/local gov liaisoning/customer + catcher support etc.
Not as cheap as bikes though, and they aren't profitable in many cases.
I think a lot of people are being quite optimistic about the economics of these. That said I really hope they are successful. Anything to reduce car traffic.
It happens. Mostly in cases where people are repeatedly annoyed by them, or don't like the stereotypical rider, etc.
But, in general, people tend not to destroy stuff just because they can, just like they don't kill old people just because they can't defend themselves, and don't consider "soft paywalls" meaningless just because they can easily fool them.
Cars can also easily be scratched, and it's not one of the major problems of humanity. Dockless bike-sharing has been a thing for over a decade. And while there is some vandalism, it's not prohibitive. In fact, people have left their bikes in public spaces for decades.
Society would brake down if everything required physical defences against any possible threat. Luckily, people tend to be more Russeauean than Hobbian.
I had got to know about the scooter boom in USA via youtube video. It says anyone can put scooter anywhere in the city and can pick up any other scooter anytime they want from anywhere?
Does anyone have a source for confiscated Bird scooters in europe? I would definitely buy a Xiaomi M365 from a government/police auction and do this mod if possible; for now, it seems like they are being welcomed with open arms though.
Someone at u of Michigan stole my personal use m365 (bird) handlebars and brain so that they could steal a bird for personal use—and to think I felt so clever using a u-lock to lock the frame up....
Sounds depressingly fqmiliar. I thought I was clever with a lock thru each wheel at u of m, but came back to just 2 wheels, sans frame. Curse you quick release, and things worse than curses to whomever stole our bikes.
There are. Sdr code for opening many cars, replay attacks (featured today on HN), and can-bus interfaces are all available inexpensively. Dealer style keyfob copiers and obd2 port hacking products are about 200 and up online. The scooters haven't been around as long.
> There are cities that are selling Bird scooters at police auctions. Planning on picking one up once the eBay parts show up.