terenig

No problem :) Here's the mission statement that I wrote out a year ago, hopefully clarifying my motivations: http://haveago.city/our-vision/

But to be 100% honest, if I was offered payment, I would consider it. Reason being: I truly believe in lightweight electric mobility and have dedicated full-time hours to help expand their use. In exploring ways of making this financially sustainable, if it's consult fees, so be it! If that happens, I'll disclose.

As for sounding PR-y, I hope you'll judge the post again on its merits. I've been very influenced by the wealth of urban planning literature indicating how walking/biking make for great, rich, and pleasant cities and how cars make for dangerous streets and negatively affect communities. I also live in LA and find it very frustrating that we have so much poverty/homeless here and that access to affordable mobility like bikes without risking ones life isn't an option since cars are so dominant.

So I'm genuinely excited and hopeful for any prospect of shifting our mobility away from them.

Walking BEST. Biking, second best. If too far, too hot, too steep, e-bikes third best.

Plus good public transportation.

The chip is real! But justified.

Cars have a looot of negative side effects and externalities. Global warming, 30,000 deaths each year in the US alone, expensive infrastructure/mobility, incredibly energy inefficiency, geopolitical instability due to oil and mining, etc, etc.

> even the most urban cities of the United States as hopelessly car-bound.

To be perfectly honest, that's what I thought too,= until this mass adoption of bikes/scooters that came out of nowhere. It's a super interesting development that just might make cities less car dependent.

> _anywhere_

Clarified in the article. The argument was about the user experience of cars: "Automobile parking is all around. From street parking, to business parking lots, to single family homes with driveways and garages, to large parking structures. Thus, the user experience for drivers is essentially go anywhere, park anywhere."

Supported by the observation of what happens when we sometimes can't find parking: frustration. Meaning, we expect to be able to park wherever we go in a city.

You make a great point. We have been advocating 3rd speed or protected bike lanes for that reason.

As for the pain that might cause drivers: bike/scooter lanes are a much higher bandwidth form of urban transportation. So more people on scooters/bikes means less people in cars. This actually means traffic reduction, even with fewer car lanes. Now add to that the increased access/usage of public transit (a much higher bandwidth form of urban mobility) because of easy access to bus/subway stations thanks to dockless bikes/scooters, and now we're talking about significant traffic reduction. Not to mention cleaner air, reduced emissions, etc. So drivers should actually be in favor of more bike infrastructure. Counterintuitive, but that's how this particular complex system functions!

One additional thing to think about. Cars in general use what were for thousands of years historically public spaces: the streets. Now, people are pretty much banned from using streets and are relegated to small or nonexistent sidewalks or sparse public parks.

We forget that cities are quite old and cars are very new and our acceptance of streets being for cars isn't actually historically normal and is really a huge concession by cities and citizens to historically public, spaces for walking, commerce, festivals, meetups, musicians, artists, kids, the elderly, etc. The right to freely use and leave bikes/scooters anywhere is simply one tiny push back to this historic uses of streets.

Rental car companies actually do utilize public parking: when cars are rented out, customers are free to park them in any public parking spot. These are businesses that are freely using public space.

Ya, Have A Go is now totally drowning in all the bike lobby cash. Please don't tell anyone!

In all seriousness, Have A Go is not affiliated with any bike sharing/renting companies. If you visit our site, you'll see that we are actually based on the ownership model. Our mission is to help transition us to green, healthy, fun, affordable, and efficient modes of personal mobility, and that's why we wrote this piece! Not because of the $13,500 dollars we received......d'oh!!!

The argument here is that wherever you go in a city, automobile parking is all around. From street parking, to business parking lots, to single family homes with driveways and garages, to large parking structures. Thus, the user experience for drivers is essentially go anywhere, park anywhere. That convenient user experience is what dockless is allowing for. So cities should strive to quickly figure out how to make scooter/bike parking as ubiquitous as cars. The fact that they haven't already done so shows their implicit bias.

Agreed!

Hi all! My name is Terenig, I'm the author of this post and founder of Have A Go.

My friend messaged me giving me the heads up that this article was on Hacker News. I was really surprised!

I'll do my best to reply to some of the thoughtful comments.

Yep! And even rental car companies do take advantage of public parking: when cars are actually in use, customers are free to park them in any public parking spot.

Yep. That's what the embedded Tweet was meant to illustrate.