This is such a boondoggle. I rarely see any birds, lime bikes, orange bikes, ofos, etc. parked in places other than off to the side of the sidewalk, or in a bike rack. When I do, I move them.

Most people, generally speaking, are good people. They put bikes where they're supposed to be, they put scooters where they're supposed to be etc. It isn't just enlightened tech commenters who know that a bike should go in a bike rack.

This hasn't been my experience at all when walking around Santa Monica. It seems like about half the time Birds are parked in a reasonable place - in an alcove designed for bike parking, on the edge of the sidewalk on the Promenade, off to the side next to a door - and the rest are just... random. It's not at all uncommon to see three or four Birds parked in the middle of the sidewalk in front of a popular store or restaurant.

The last time I was over there, it seemed like someone was going around and purposefully knocking them over: https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/vp/1cd4296b10424b53...

I know this might be a radical proposal but have you considered, when encountering a bicycle blocking part of a sidewalk, moving slightly to the left. I admit its a crazy proposal but it might help you while you’re waiting for the state to implement the death penalty for scooter infractions.

wont work for many disabled people

This might be the case for where you live, but I've see dozens of Lime bikes recently around the Boston area (not in Boston proper, but in Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, Everett, etc.) that are just on sidewalks. The main problem is that there aren't really a ton of bike racks around. Usually when I bike somewhere, even in Boston proper, I have to search for a bit to find a bike rack. I imagine it's similar for other cities that don't really have the existing bike rack infrastructure.

Do you mean in the middle of the sidewalk, or to the side, against a wall? The former seems overtly malicious, the latter is a completely normal place to park a bike in cities where people ride bikes.

You must not live in San Francisco, where I saw multiple scooters every day parked in the middle of sidewalks or otherwise in the way of pedestrians. Until the city temporarily banned them.

These scooters need docking stations and the users parking them illegally need to be handed hefty fines, just as a motorist would be fined for parking their car illegally.

In Melbourne, our dockless bike provider, oBike, had to pull out because the council threatened them with fines for littering.

People just couldn't help throwing the bikes on train tracks, or in the river, or in trees, or basically anywhere that wasn't a bike rack. I don't think I ever saw an oBike in a bike rack.

This is not true. They came to an arrangements with the Melbourne city council, and hired people to go around and tidy it up.

They pulled out because too many people were dumping bikes in rivers and train tracks, and they weren't making enough money. They were reasonably popular.

Melbourne is a car addicted city though, and it is difficult to get anyone here to see an alternative.

You're right, I was oversimplifying the situation. The council threatened oBike with fines, so they came to arrangements to have cleanup crews, which then cost too much money, causing them to pull out.

I wouldn't say oBikes were reasonably popular. The only people I ever saw riding them were tourists in St Kilda, and homeless people who had broken the locks off them.

I'm surprised they don't have a technical solution -- like, say, have it take a photo from the scooter when you log out to validate you put it in a good spot. (Or gps if they have drop-off points, etc.)

Lime starting doing _exactly_ this in Denver before pulling out at the behest of the police department.

Bird requires this.

One man's "placed in designated spots" is another man's "dumped on the side of the road"

I honestly think we are just used to seeing idle cars all over the place that we don't "notice" them. There's no reason scooters won't be able to "blend in" in the same way over time.

In my fantasy world, we go the opposite direction and start realizing that all that idle car space could be used for parkland, housing, storefronts, bike lanes, miles-long slip'n'slides, pretty much _anything_ but wasted space in high-land-value areas.

How do you get there without having scooters or similar available everywhere instead?

Gotta solve the point-to-point problems of mass transit if you want to kill demand for cars.

How awesome would miles-long slip'n'slides be in hilly San Francisco? Bay to Breakers would never be the same.

It wouldn't be too difficult for cities to create designated 'parking spots' for scooters. Or require that they must be next to a bike rack. The apps all require you to take a picture of the scooter after parking, so it would be pretty easy to verify if someone moved it after the fact.

That wouldn't be too difficult, and I think some cities have done that. The problem is that it's difficult to enforce and there isn't much incentive to try; are they going to give out tickets for poor scooter parking? Who would they ticket? Bird/Lime, the user, or the unknown person who moved it afterwards?

I think docking stations are the better solution. Portland has docked shared bikes and they work well. It prevents the littering problem almost entirely, and it could provide a way to keep these scooters charged.

You're right that it would be hard to figure out the exact mechanics of the enforcement, but I think it can be done.

> I think docking stations are the better solution. Portland has docked shared bikes and they work well. It prevents the littering problem almost entirely, and it could provide a way to keep these scooters charged.

I strongly disagree. Docked bikes have been around for a while in most cities, and scooters have been a lot more popular because they are everywhere. If I use a docked bike to go 2 miles I'll spend half my time on either end walking to and from a dock.

The only way to make the docked model work is to have many small docks - several on every block, which isn't going to happen. My suggestion is essentially this (multiple docks on every block) without the need for infrastructure. Cars (which are way less space efficient) have more parking options that docked bikes, which makes 0 sense.

> The only way to make the docked model work is to have many small docks - several on every block, which isn't going to happen.

That's probably the root of the disagreement: ubiquitous docks seem perfectly possible to me. I wouldn't advocate for several on every block but I think there's a feasible level where they remain pretty common. Here in Portland the bike stations are close enough that you don't often have to walk more than 2-3 blocks [1]. It would be even easier to create scooter stations, since they're less than half the size of a bike -- small enough to put a 10-12 scooter station on a sidewalk corner without much fuss. That compares pretty favorably with bike stations, which usually need to take up street space (which I'm fine with, but it can create political/logistical barriers).

You make a fair point about the scooters' pervasiveness being important for their popularity. Looking again at the system I know best, Portland has a hybrid system: in the highest traffic areas you can leave a bike pretty much anywhere at no cost, and you can leave one anywhere at all for a $2 fee. To prevent bikes from being strewn about and/or poorly distributed they offer a program where you earn account credit if you return a bike to a station [2].

I think that kind of thing would work pretty well with scooters, since they need to be charged every so often. Bird already has their Charger program [3] that pays you to pick up and charge their scooters. Users could instead earn account credit for returning scooters to stations, especially if they need charging and/or that station is low on scooters. That would allow people to leave them around but would keep them charged and "crowdsource" the effort to cut down on scooter clutter.

[1] https://www.biketownpdx.com/map

[2] https://biketownpdx.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600011157...

[3] https://www.chargers.bird.co/join

Why would it be so hard to enforce? Treat the problem, not the symptom. If the problem is that people leave scooters in the middle of the sidewalk, pass a code that says scooters blocking a thoroughfare will be impounded. Don’t mandate to the companies where their property must be stored, let them know where it can’t be stored and hold them accountable thusly.

If Bird had to pay a fee to get scooters out of impound, I’m sure it would find a customer-friendly way to encourage its users to keep the scooters out of impound to begin with.

It seems like this problem is already solved with cars. If you leave a car in the middle of the street, it will get towed. Then the registered owner has to pay a fee to recover it. No worrying about whether to give a ticket to the last driver, or the owner, etc.

Or rather, the owner worries about recovering the fee from the last driver. This works fine for dockless car rentals; the only reason I can see that it wouldn't work for bikes is that the margins are too small to actually cover administering such a system.

This seems like over-solving the problem, to me. All that's needed is a general guideline: 'Scooters should be parked on the side of the sidewalk nearest the road, no more than 12" from the curb'.

Given that photos of the scooter are required by the apps anyhow, enforcement via a small fine should be trivial.

When they're actually parked in those spots. But the issue is idling cars (Ubers) taking up spots in the lane because they're waiting on people/don't want to leave a good pickup zone. I see it all the time in Seattle and it's made traffic significantly worse, particularly around Cap Hill. I see the bus drivers honk at them to get out of the bus stops at least once a week.

That happens in Portland as well, especially in front of streetcar and MAX stations. I think pretty much everyone dislikes that, but that would be more like standing still on your phone in front of an escalator than tossing a scooter on a sidewalk. Plus, there are laws in place that are supposed to prevent people from idling in active lanes, it's just a question of enforcement.

Sorry. I don’t want to abandon my mode of transportation to appease you OCD. Get over it.

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