People complaining about dockless scooters strewn over sidewalks makes me wonder how we ever got people to stop littering. If the primary reason why people leave scooters in the middle of the sidewalk is out of empathy-lacking convenience, then why don't people throw food wrappers and plastic bottles all over the sidewalk in the same quantities and for the same reasons?

The answer (supposedly) is due to widespread anti-littering campaigns and the new ubiquity of trash cans. Why can't there be similar measures for scooters? Painting lines on sidewalks saying "it's OK to park a scooter here!" (painting lines being an option that costs almost nothing and is completed extremely quickly) combined with signage saying "you must park dockless scooters only in the lines or else $250 fine" (akin to only throwing trash in trash bins or else fine).

Scooters aren't inherently problematic, it's the sclerotic municipalities which refuse to adapt to changing circumstances who are the real culprits.

You’ll find no disagreement from me that we needn’t completely ban scooters, only figure out the right way to regulate them. Not coincidentally, the MTA isn’t completely banning them, just beginning to regulate them.

As for the specific solution you suggested, I think that sounds great, although it isn’t obvious to me that it would “cost nothing”. At the very least, deciding on parking spots for them seems like it would take a lot of a bunch of government employees’ time. It certainly seems reasonable to me to start with a permitting system on the handful of companies, which seems like it would take much less time to implement.

Maybe, just maybe, the level of scooters strewn about is wildly overstated.

I agree. As a pedestrian I see scooters whizzing past me about 10x more than I see scooters left on the sidewalk. When I have the opportunity, I tell the drivers, very nicely, that they aren't supposed to be on the sidewalk. Very often I get some 4 letter words thrown my way.

This is why I hate the things.

>Why can't there be similar measures for scooters

Because when your only hammer is regulation everything else is a nail.

Edit: this isn't meant negatively. If you ask a painter what will make your house nicer they'll tell you to paint it. If you ask an organization that creates and enforces legislation to solve a problem they'll try to legislate it out of existence. Problems are solved with the tools at hand.

You can't store your stuff in public areas. This has little to do with scooters, leave your motorcycle on the sidewalk and it's likely to be gone when you get back.

PS: A much better solution IMO is to simply pick them up and sell em for scrap. Problem solved.

uh, where do you park your bike?

In Santa Monica, they're planning to add a pictograph of a scooter to bike lanes so the tourists know to ride there instead of the side walks. (And they're charging the scooter companies additional fees to pay for the costs.)

They've also started a marketing campaign. Recently saw a banner on a city bus with 3 "scooter laws" written on the side (helmet, not on sidewalks, etc). Both Lime and Bird have adopted giving out free helmets to frequent riders. Seems they're much more accepted down here as well when compared to SF.

So you suggest that cities pay for infrastructure in order to enable financial gain of private companies.

Let's just say that I disagree.

That's par for the course, for example you don't see Ford chipping in for the 275,000 street parking spots in the Bay Area. SF could easily remove one parking spot per block and make it parking for bikes and scooters. But then all the people used to the city subsidizing their parking will be in an uproar. It's only a subsidy when the other guy gets it.

Cities have done that for thousands of years. It's a symbiotic relationship. The businesses pay taxes which pay for services to make the businesses more viable.

No, I'm suggesting that cities pay for infrastructure to reduce the negative externalities imposed by dockless scooter companies. If such infrastructure incidentally makes it easier for those companies to make a profit, because the lack of the negative externalities is no longer producing a negative effect on the company's reputation, is that really so horrible? Are you willing to, through inaction, harm society just so a private company won't profit?

Sure, ideally, the scooter company should pay some kind of tax or fee to help pay for the infrastructure, but I'm not convinced that it needs to be a special tax or fee, applied only to the scooter companies, beyond typical general corporate income taxes etc. that the scooter company is already paying. Particularly because the infrastructure costs involved are cheap. In my opinion, society is better served by government moving quickly to provide needed services out of a general fund, than it is by delaying action for months or years just so that expenditures are 100% just instead of 99.9999% just. There is a balance...

I mean, cities already pay for roads, and food trucks are a thing.

> Have you considered the possibility that the scooters are genuinely unpopular?

Pretty sure they're not more unpopular than the human feces and used needles people are also stepping over, yet those haven't been addressed in SF yet. By comparison, Vancouver, New York, Chicago, Miami, and many other big cities don't have such problems, and SF is getting worse every year.

The homeless and drug addicts operate outside the law--hence the difference.

Personally, I'd be fine with scooters if they were never used or stored on sidewalks. Which will happen right after bicyclists start obeying traffic laws...

That may all be true (although I certainly was not under the impression that New York or Chicago were particularly clean) and good evidence that with the right policies and programs, those are tractable problems, but I think we can at least agree that nonetheless they are harder to solve than the MTA taking a vote and mailing out some letters about new permitting requirements. So the fact that that has happened for scooters, yet homelessness and substance abuse haven’t been solved, doesn’t strike me as “malevolent”.

This could be an oversimplification, but my perspective having lived in both NYC and Chicago:

New York is dirty. It's very dense for the US and the trash collection is on the sidewalk in front of businesses, meaning you are walking around trash on a daily basis.

Chicago is one of the cleanest cities in the US, largely because of the alley system built after the Great Chicago Fire.

You are fully correct. The reason SF don't address it, IMO, is that it's a no win situation for them. If they clean up the homeless they'll be forced to make tough choices and enforce public order against people their stated ethos which tells them are oppressed and deserving of unlimited compassion. If they do the right thing and clean the place up there will be a backlash from activists. If they do nothing at all then they don't have to make tough choices, don't have to face backlash, and the frog continues to slowly boil which will be the next administrations problem.

I’m not doubting that it has happened, but this seems to be way overplayed. I’ve never actually seen it happen, whereas it’s pretty common to see homeless with tents and suitcases obstructing a sidewalk.

I think it’s definitly more of a case of NIMBYism and tech hate than anything else.

well, and some vested interests/money not desiring any competition from scooters.

You're definitely right. For someone relying on a wheelchair, scooters everywhere are a significant impediment.

With that said, I have heard very few people voice such completely reasonable concerns. Most of the complaints about scooters I've encountered from actual people seem to hinge on them looking funny, especially when in use. And even those are rare. Most people don't seem to care, suggesting that scooters are not genuinely unpopular.

Your concerns are real, and very important. Yet, they don't seem to bear much on scooters in the public consciousness. Have you considered that there may be other factors at work in the minds of most?

You may be right about all that, but that’s no reason to think the MTA is going off silly reasons or being “malevolent” for regulating (not even banning!) the scooters, rather than acting out of genuine concern.

I don't think they're malevolent. I do think they're acting at the behest of Supes looking for a quick win over something trivial instead of working on SF's very real, very visible problems of people suffering immensely.

Are the feces, shattered glass, and tent cities only a minor inconvenience to this person in a wheelchair?

Just like SF has microclimates for weather it also has them for compartmentalizing the city's various problems. Fidi and east cut (or whatever realtors are calling it now) don't have feces, needle, and tent problems. It does have scooter litter problems. The city population swells 2x every work day and the majority of those workers interact with scooters parked haphazardly.

If it's one thing entitled early adopters and east bay commuters have in common, it's that they DGAF about the sense of community in SF. So they park these things in the most selfish ways possible. I swear some of them have to be doing it on purpose. I've seen them blocking turn styles at embarcadero station before.

I had a friend visiting from out of state and usually the first criticism of SF I hear is something about homelessness as we pass through the 'loin. But this time we were by embarcadero and it was "did a scooter gang of children all get raptured at once?"

I’m confused by your dismissive tone, the answers to this seem like common sense.

No, feces and shattered glass are not a major impediment; wheelchair tires can usually go over them, and additionally, area taken up by individual instances of feces on the street is measured in square inches, so wheelchairs can typically be navigated such that the wheels avoid touching them.

Yes, tent cities are also an impediment, which is why the city actively works to get rid of them, even implementing short-term solutions that do no good and possibly harm in the long run like having the police and community workers forcibly clear them. Not to mention the literal hundreds of millions of dollars a year the city spends on homeless programs, which is many, many orders of magnitude more than they’ve spent on any kind of regulation of scooters.

Are you comparing tent cities where homeless people live with faeces and broken glass? I certainly think the city could do a better job providing public toilets and cleaning the streets but what are you suggesting they do with the poor people's temporary accommodation? Sweep them up and throw them away? People live there as a last resort.

Have you considered people don't like scooters in the city because it's another thing that's happening in SF where rich private companies decided to introduce changes without asking the people who lived there.

It's likely not entirely about the scooters themselves but what they represent and how the process has been implented. The city streets are funded by public money and the companies didn't treat residents with adequate respect or forethought before dumping scooters all over the city.

To me it is a physical manisfestation of startup culture and that's why many people hate them. Why consider the problems in advance, let's just do it and see what happens.

you may be right. would be curious to see polling numbers.

my reaction is perhaps a little overheated, but it's frustrating to see a city that is completely inept at solving its many real problems so quickly and effecively squash something that is at worst a minor inconvenience and at best actually a signifcant boon.