Archive: https://archive.md/wip/GnOjR

E-scooter rental companies, not e-scooters. Big difference!

Flagged for misleading title

Seems like mods should just change the title to match the published headline?

E-Scooter rental companies and their effect on urban spaces is absolutely a topic germane to HN discussion, and a simple change to match the actual WSJ article as published does away with the headline misrepresentation.

Low turnout elections are antidemocratic by nature. I'd venture there are many more e-scooter users in Paris than voters in this referendum.

There's a pretty big difference between a person who owns and uses an e-scooter (not banned) versus rentals (banned).

I don't know about Paris, but in the earlier days of e-thing rentals (especially when Lime first came to our area), they were treated like trash. Users would dump them where ever they were done with them, often in the middle of the sidewalk or on people's lawns. Their batteries didn't last a full day so they'd often end up cluttering areas until the company came around and picked them up.

I think I'd have preferred to see something along the lines of unpleasant fines for leaving them anywhere other than a designated drop-off location, plus perhaps electronic governors limiting speed if that was an issue.

That said, if Paris doesn't have the ability to make and enforce such mandates, then a ban on nuisance business makes sense to me.

> I think I'd have preferred to see something along the lines of unpleasant fines for leaving them anywhere other than a designated drop-off location, plus perhaps electronic governors limiting speed if that was an issue.

Maybe you missed this sentence in the article? "Paris’s regulatory scheme, which automatically limited the top speed of the scooters and required users to use dedicated parking areas or pay fines"

> low turnout elections are antidemocratic

This is a feature. Democracy is government by the people. Not by their whimsy. If it isn’t worth the inconvenience of voting, that might be a sign.

Sometimes what is being voted on is unclear. Names/monickers are often misleading. The description text of bills can seem contradictory to the advertising about them.

This is all before we get into gerrymandering and other patterns to shape voting outcomes.

It’s not always about apathy.

> what is being voted on is unclear. Names/monickers are often misleading. The description text of bills can seem contradictory to the advertising about them.

Which is why direct democracy rarely works. And again, if someone is dissuaded from voting on the basis of how a bill sounds versus taking the time to learn what it is, I’m still chalking that up as a feature. Gerrymandering is a problem, but not an excuse for apathy—not every issue, local to national, is gerrymandered.

Not voting is a "whatever is fine with me" vote. Turnout doesn't matter as long as there isn't mass disenfranchisement.

There is a difference between "not eligible to vote" which is arguably anti-democratic, and "chose not to vote" which is arguably democratic. Would making voting at elections compulsory make them more democratic?

It's a ban on the rental companies, not e-scooters themselves.

Australia, by accident got compulsory voting because no one was showing up. Turns out to be the best things since sliced bread.

I feel like maybe they should ban e-scooter companies parking them on the sidewalk or something like that (or did they)? Why would it be illegal to rent e-scooters, but not own or ride e-scooters?

They already had regulations that meant that they had to be parked in specific areas or fine the person who left it somewhere they shouldn't.

But that didn't stop someone uninvolved in renting one walking by, picking one up and moving it.

Nothing stopped people just riding along the paths at top speed hitting people or randomly darting into traffic. Soon as you entered any pedestrian square you had to be on the constant lookout for being smashed into by a scooter. Anything near the Louvre was particularly bad.

E-scooter rental companies are in a contract with the city to allow the scooters to be parked on city property. Paris just ends the contracts. This isn't making anything illegal.

It happened in Copenhagen, too:

E-scooters were restricted to a few areas. When you park them, a GPS has to agree that the e-scooter is within bounds. This can take forever.

I came late to appointments and eventually gave up using them. The apps often have problems processing credit cards. It feels like society is rejecting them, and so they become less valuable. Renting a car is the same price, but with fewer problems.

You are more likely to lock up your scooter at a bike rack or carry it with you than you would with a rental scooter.

They did have parking zones.

Good.

These are just a menacee. At least people (mostly) ride bicycles on the road and bike lanes not sidewalks. Scooters are often left to litter sidewalks and most of them are too narrow to share with pedestrians safely.

I hate these types of rented vehicles. I hope more cities follow Paris' example.

1. There is questionable quality and reliability. They always feel worse than a mid-range private ownership model.

2. Ownership is cheaper for regular users.

3. Parked vehicles litter sidewalks, making the city less pleasant for pedestrians, bicyclist, and even people actively riding an e-scooter.

4. You need a cell phone to interact with them. Maybe I'm a luddite, but I think this is bad for society.

I went to Paris a couple years ago and it was a mess. There were like 4 or 5 different companies offering e-scooters, they were left everywhere, tourists were driving them in the middle of the road in high traffic areas, I saw 3 people on a single scooter, one guy riding 2 at once, areas along the Seine were restricted and scooters would start to slow down when you entered, instead of leaving people would just get off and drop the scooters, the ground was littered with them. It is not surprising they were banned with how they were rolled out. That said, I love e-scooters, they really add a degree of freedom and make getting around the last mile in cities much easier. And they are just fun. I hope there is space for them in city transport but letting people leave them wherever was always obviously a bad idea.

The discussion around shared e-scooters (and similar micromobility) tends to have a ton of hidden status quo bias. For example, one of the most common complaints about e-scooters is that people leave them all over the place and they clutter sidewalks. This can be a true and valid complaint!

But people do that, in part, because cities don't provide good alternatives. A city the size of Paris probably has literally millions of on-street parking spots, or at least hundreds of thousands. (E.g. NYC has ~3 million [1]). Each car-sized parking spot can fit 12 scooters. So replacing 5% of parking spots with micromobility parking would provide space for something like 500,000 shared micromobility vehicles. For context, that's order of magnitude larger than the number of e-scooters in Paris.

(FWIW, Paris is maybe not a perfect example here; it's a relative leader in reclaiming space from cars for shared mobility and biking and such. Also when I was there last summer the scooters weren't a nuisance at all because they were overwhelmingly parked in marked areas, not littering sidewalks. YMMV.)

But especially in the US, we're so entrenched in thinking that only cars can be real mobility that we can't imagine shifting even 1% of the space and money we spend on cars towards more shared and less polluting forms of transportation. It sucks.

[1] https://gothamist.com/news/how-else-could-nyc-use-its-12-cen...

> Each car-sized parking spot can fit 12 scooters.

So if you take someone's parking spot, they just have to destroy a dozen scooters to get it back?

Can do!

Please use the right name.

These are rental e-scooters. It's not like a scooter shared between friends with no profit motive involved.

> because cities don't provide good alternatives

Strong counter-point. In my city there is a decent amount of bike parking. Yet I've often seen scooters not parked at a nearby bike parking area, even though there's space.

I got very angry with a guy last summer who left his rental e-scooter in the middle of the park pathway next to me, when available bike parking was about 30 feet away. Anyone with a stroller or walker would have had to go on the grass to get around it.

And e-scooter parking seems to take up more width than bicycles. I've seen people park their (non-shared/non-rental) bikes at the edge of the sidewalk, either against a building wall, or against a sign.

They often leave a lot of space between the rental e-scooter and the wall, because people get off a scooter with feet on both sides of the scooter, and because it's too bulky to scooch over to the side, thus blocking more of the sidewalk.

Certainly cars take of an undue amount of space. But that doesn't mean you can assert that cities like Paris only have car parking as the alternative, when they also have bike parking, and have been active in switching away from cars.

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35415305.

Thanks! DanG