In addition, there's no network effect with scooters. Car sharing has the chicken-and-egg problem where you need enough drivers to meet demand, and you need enough passengers to give drivers a reason to drive for you. But scooters are cheap and easy to dump a whole bunch on a city, so there's no reason why a new company can't move in on an existing scooter market. For the most part the only important pieces are the brand recognition of the company and how easy their app is to use. If Uber is serious about scooters, I fully expect them to just move back in when the pilot program is over and immediately pick up a sizeable chunk of the market.
Ride sharing companies then also have to reach a critical mass where drivers and riders can match in a reasonable time. I think overcoming that is the network effect.
I suspect a lot of that regulation has been wrong, monopolies would not have emerged, and we would be better off regulating only the monopolies that actually exist.
I’d rather see the scooter companies fight it out than have the city government pick winners and losers when the industry is only a few months old and multiple viable competitors already exist.
- aren't hard to reach for anyone with funding, and
- can be maintained over relatively small geographic areas (neighbourhoods/cities, not states/countries/globally).
If some new company invents a scooter with better tires or a better battery or a disco ball and a stereo it's not hard for them to enter the market. And, in fact, this regulation is happening because the city thinks it's too easy for upstarts to get a toe-hold and cause negative externalities like sidewalk crowding.
(Besides these points: Has anyone made the argument that "overwhelming, unapproachable network-effect leads" are kinda great outcomes for consumers? Like, assume there were 10 facebooks instead of one -- kinda terrible. Or if there were a hundred Ubers and Lyfts, and you didn't know which one had cars close to you... awful.)
The notion that the only way to ensure competition is to forbid it is convoluted.
Boston hasn't been overrun yet, and I am hopeful that we stay that way.
But not all. One street in either direction of Bellevue is essentially bus/pedestrian/bicycle friendly - 6th Street and 108th Ave. At their intersection is Bellevue's bus hub. 6th Ave provides bus access to the freeway, and pedestrian-only access to the Bellevue Collection.
108th has a bicycle lane wedged between car parking and the driving lane on either side, and this is where almost all of the Lime Bikes congregate. There are special painted squares, almost like Zipcar parking slots, where the bikes can usually be found. The bikes are occasionally seen outside apartments and businesses, but never for long - none have been there long enough to become a real eyesore.
I care.
Wait, no, I really, really, really really don't.
Ends matter and the ends of the shitty scooter companies are awful at the human scale.
2) As the sibling comments note, cars tend to park in observance of the law and don't go whizzing down the sidewalk while I am walking to work.
Why pay $1 for something that should cost $0.05, and would be difficult to integrate into my life? If I wanted to ride a bicycle, I'd spend the equivalent of 150 Lime rides at Target or Wally World and own my own bicycle. Why rent what you can own?
How much do Lime and their competition pay for their parking spots? They're usually left in a sidewalk or other public walkway, using government-provided locations that were intended for a different purpose.
You feel it's reasonable to prevent everyone else from using a very cheap and convenient transportation service just because the vehicles aren't esthetically pleasing to you?
In your world, it's incumbent upon me to let them shit up my town, but not incument upon them--either the users or the companies that supply them--to not shit up our town.
That's a pretty nasty world.
Even if many of these scooters are improperly parked, the parking was done by the users and not the companies themselves, so holding the companies solely responsible for that dose not appear fair.
I don't think many people are in favor of zero regulation, but politicians literally picking winners and losers instead of the market is even worse.
As opposed to a city ineffectively delivering transportation to such an extent that people have to drive their personally-owned cars everywhere?
Anyone in SF who was here before Uber will tell you that Uber and Lyft were and remain a godsend. Cabs were few and far between (there's an Eddie Izzard bit about this actually) and Muni is slow and unreliable.
In any case, the only thing worse than government running services is a company with a monopoly running services. The first tends to be inefficient. The second tends to be inefficient with a profit motive (see Comcast).
Choices in my market are: dialup, dsl, and Comcast.
There is actually a small independent WISP here I would love to use, but they don't serve my particular location currently.
All of these are totally different from buying a car.
If Uber and/or Lyft get a monopoly and then jack up prices, they won't have a monopoly for long.
Markets that are important (like transportation) and have network effects need to be regulated. A monopoly with Uber and/or Lyft dominating local transportation is not good for consumers or cities in the long-term.
Cities should take control of their transportation and ensure competition by managing allocation of capacity. I think the best parallel is managing of spectrum in telecom to ensure competition.