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 era, and still their unofficial policy, was to give their homeless showers and then a bus ticket to SF.)

And does California charge them for this?

That's an incredible story, especially from a Europe where immigration controls is on everyone's lips.

That's the root of the problem: the borders of movement are at the federal level* (well the 48 states), but the 'solutions' for non-integrated citizens are left to the states, counties, and local municipalities.

Informally, I recall learning that the 'solution' for inhuman insane asylums was to just release everyone and close them down. That's quite probably where a good portion of the 'homeless' problem comes from; there are of course also untreated veterans and just pure scam-artist pan-handlers.

The actual solution is also a difficult and politically impalpable issue:

    * national healthcare including drug addition treatment and mental health
    * an unending 'new deal'
    * + everyone trained to aptitude
    * + non-broken-window fallacy job assurance
    * adequate housing of actual quality near jobs

Also taxes / incentives (carrot+stick) at a federal level to pay for / encourage the correct behavior from all actors.

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.

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.

And SF, like most cities, has this program which will send the homeless somewhere else.

http://hsh.sfgov.org/services/outreach-and-homelessness-prev...

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.

> That's an incredible story, especially from a Europe where immigration controls is on everyone's lips.

There's no immigration controls between the states because we're all part of the same country. Don't think it'd even be legal to try it, ever.

The only real "immigration controls" we have are for produce at the California border to control the immigration of insects, people are free to go wherever they want. Oh, and those annoying Border Control checkpoints not at the actual border to impede the movement of foreign nationals.

That's a highly misleading statement. Homeless busing programs are common across the country and while not without their problems, they don't just send all homeless to a single location such as Texas to SF. Also, SF buses considerably more homeless out of its city every year than it receives via bus.

Maybe cities should organize to bus all their homeless residents to DC Union Station and Dupont Circle so those in the squaky clean Capitol can understand that this is a national issue. MLK tried to do something similar before he was assassinated.

Have you actually been to DC? Union Station always had homeless outside when I worked nearby. DC may be unique in a few ways but in most ways it's similar to any other large city for the people that live there.

I agree that there's a problem to be solved but DC is far from squeaky clean...

Real numbers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-has-the-highest-home...

Sounds like there's enough demand to create a "homeless busing as a service" app.

It is not an absurd priority if you are disabled. These scooters in the middle of side walks can literally mean injury to the blind, and a big pain for those in wheel chairs. Think of that the next time you simply 'step over' a poorly-parked scooter.

If the thing you care about is clear sidewalks, scooters are such a tiny problem that they're barely worth mentioning. I've had to step over parked scooters a handful of times. Every time, they were in an alley that no wheelchair or blind person could have navigated. The sidewalk was also populated with garbage cans, bicycle parts, and some random trash.

If a scooter is poorly parked in a high traffic area, people tend to move it out of the way. If it's in a low traffic area, then there's almost always other stuff in the way as well.

Yep. That's what the embedded Tweet was meant to illustrate.

> If the thing you care about is clear sidewalks, scooters are such a tiny problem that they're barely worth mentioning.

So let's nip it in the bud before it becomes a bigger problem and then use scooters as an example to rationalize the bigger problems with sidewalks.

* rationalize dealing with

His argument is they're ignoring things like tents and feces. Maybe you can roll over trash and used needles in a wheelchair, but I wouldn't want to ride over or around any of those.

As an aside, I always found it odd when they mount street signs in the middle of sidewalks.

I want to “crack down” on both.