Re:San Diego's Bird Scooter Hoarding Problem
by aezell on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @12:33PM
(#18656981)
Thank you for pointing this out. I'm always bemused at the overly complicated technical solutions proffered when a simple "pay a human a decent wage" solves the original problem and lots of other ones, too.
Re:San Diego's Bird Scooter Hoarding Problem
by dawnerd on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @12:07PM
(#18656743)
I think Lime does that? In any case Bird should be inspecting their scooters frequently for safety reasons so really would just make sense to hire teams of people with vans or trucks to pick them up every night.
Re:San Diego's Bird Scooter Hoarding Problem
by midniteslayr on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @12:59PM
(#18657217)
Razor scooters/eBikes do that in San Diego, and I know Jump bikes also have a team of people in San Francisco (as it was mandated by the city).
In SD, the Razor Scooters are much nicer and doesn't seem to have as many problems with their equipment than the Bird scooters do.
Just like uber before them, bird threatens to upend some reasonably decent jobs in cities with bike share programs- assuming the bike share programs don't learn from taxi drivers and adapt.
So much of the reason these things work- and that the companies themselves become massively valuable is the externalization of costs. That doesn't have to be a given.