Build institutions, not apps

Re:Build institutions, not apps by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @07:05AM (#23005779)

The bike hire stations you see in some big cities (e.g. London) are a better solution; you get charged for it until you put it back in the rack. Dumping the bike somewhere just means your credit card will keep charging. It should be the same for the scooters. Mind you, this requires the city to work together with the scooter company, which implies that the city will be pulling one company forwards which may be considered unfair competition in the US.

The city could also pick up any scooters that are in the way / abandoned and fine the owner company for each of them, which would be a big incentive for the company to deal with it themselves.

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Re:Build institutions, not apps by DominikD on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @07:42AM (#23006018)

Scooters need to be charged every night so juicers collect randomly abandoned scooters before the complete battery failure that would prevent company running the service to track its fleet. So charging for time up to infinity may solve the cost problem on the operator side, doesn't solve the societal problem of scooters left in random places. Where I live scooter users are charged extra if they don't deliver the scooter to a predefined location but that's not enough of a deterrent.

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Re:Build institutions, not apps by TeMPOraL on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @11:39AM (#23008055)

> Mind you, this requires the city to work together with the scooter company

And some cities would be happy to. Problem is, scooter companies don't want to work together with cities! They just show up and open shop, Uber style...

> The city could also pick up any scooters that are in the way / abandoned and fine the owner company for each of them

...and then cry foul when that happens, because why, this is destroying innovation and assaulting honest businessmen.

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