First, businesses which attract antisocial asshole clients do get extra scrutiny and burdensome regulation; the classic example is bars.
Second, the difference between Hertz and Bird is the rate and visibility of antisocial behavior. The overwhelming majority of Hertz clients park their rentals no differently than any ordinary car driver; and a Hertz rental parked illegally is hard to distinguish at a distance from any other car. By contrast, a very large fraction of rental electric scooters appear to be parked illegally, and they are very visible (due to the color scheme, and because privately owned electric scooters are not very common in most parts of the US and never get dumped in the middle of a road, lest they get vandalized or stolen).
I'm not trying to excuse Bird here - I'm annoyed by scooters parked in the sidewalk like anyone, but going "car people are so nice and not antisocial" is kinda pointing at the underlying unfairness. If we spent/regulated billions of scooter parking spots, Bird wouldn't have an issue either.
FWIW, I don’t own a car at all.
Practically speaking, at least in the US, there's rarely any good or approved place to park anything but a car anywhere. I'm upset with the scooters, but I'm also upset with bikers locking their bikes to trees, or people parking motorcycles in unexpected places. Half of the time there's dedicated motorcycle or bike parking, some asshole parks their car there and isn't fined/towed.
Point being, there's a lot of money behind making it incredibly easy to take a car to anything in the US, and while other options are regularly annoying in parking places that aren't allowed, I've seen some moves over the last few years to make dedicated scooter parking or expand bike parking to accommodate, and that's a net good. It's certainly not that Bird is part of some righteous civil disobedience program by leaving scooters in the middle of the sidewalk, but the scooter plague has done more to improve bike/personal scooter parking than years of pressure from bikers, so I'll take it.
But the biggest difference is rental cars need to be returned to a designated place like an airport or car dealership. Or they get picked up. They are never just abandoned on city streets, and even more rarely parked illegally.
28mph is pretty much a motorbike.
If people could rent cars for very short periods of time and 'return' them on the street, they most definitely would be re-parked illegally. We'd never allow a rental car company to use city streets as a parking lot for their inventory. And, yes, it would be the car company's liability.
Isn’t this exactly what evo/gig/zip is? Easy to miss if you live outside of a big US metro I suppose.
Scooters are different because them being littered all over public spaces is absolutely intrinsic to these companies' value proposition and business model in a way that it absolutely is not for Hertz or similar.
I think hybrid transportation models of this kind are really essential to having liveable cites in the future, but businesses really shouldn't be able to benefit from just ignoring negative externalities associated with their model, and that (unfortunately) includes their customers behaving in an antisocial and/or selfish way. This is no different from how noise levels for residents are considered when granting a license for a bar or something. You're not able to just plan for a world where everyone behaves in a decent and considerate fashion.
Where I live we had a bike and scooter company who had a "park anywhere" type model and our pavements[1] were really littered all the time with bikes and it was difficult (as someone who basically walks everywhere) to get around. Now that company has disappeared and the bike/scooter companies which remain have to look after their inventory and keep it in defined parking spots the situation is a lot better. I don't exactly know how enforcement has been set up and I do see abandoned bikes and scooters around, but I also see company employees rounding them up and taking them to the right spots so the system appears to be working.
[1] Sidewalks for Americans
1) QR code on every scooter so improperly placed scooters can be reported to the owning company with images
2) The use of accelerometer data to verify when a scooter was moved (to ensure things like renters not being unfairly penalized if a scooter is moved by somebody else afterwards)
In either case, solving homelessness is probably more complicated than scooter litter.
Say what you will, this behavior is from an employee, and is thus the direct responsibility of the company, who does not care at all.
When you escalate from being a nuisance to outright endangering people, there needs to be consequences.
Scooter operations shut down for nearly half the year in most markets due to the winter, and in those markets they either have to pay employees or lay them off (bird did the latter) once a year. They still have to store the scooters during that time, and they need to have scaled operations for their entire market.
Bike rentals tend to be shut down far shorter periods of time in the winter, and ridesharing doesn't shut down. This allows other companies providing bikes/scooters to move their operations around to other business units when they shut down their scooter unit.
As a whole the scooters make less sense than bikes. If we're going to subsidize something, it should be bike sharing (which _is_ somewhat government subsidized btw).
If you get a rental car, and let it in the middle of the road, you will be fined and Hertz might sue you.
I've long been frustrated that micromobility is held to a standard no other transportation mode is expected to meet, at least in the US. E.g.
- "Micromobility doesn't make any sense, you can tell because all the companies lose money." But every other form of transportation is deeply subsidized! In the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on roads, trains get federal infrastructure money, public transit [where it exists] isn't close to fully paid for by fare revenue, airlines get bailed out in recessions, all carbon-burning transport has an unpriced carbon externality, etc.
- "I hate the scooters, they clutter sidewalks." Often the clutter is real and a problem and I wish people behaved better. Among the people who I wish behaved better, I'd include car drivers who park in bike lanes or on sidewalks, yet the prevalence of such behavior doesn't create widespread calls to ban all cars. (Well, in some corners of the internet...)
More generally, it's weird that scooter companies are liable - legally or de facto - for such behavior at all. If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?
At the end of the day, in the US we've built our legal regime and land use patterns around the assumption that most travel should be by car and this travel should be subsidized. The fact that scooters create some frictions by taking up some of the space left over by cars is more an indictment of the system than of scooters.