Bird’s Not Real

December 28, 2023 12:50 AM

Bird was once valued at more than $2 billion and seemed to epitomize a shiny future of clean urban transport. But ridership slumped during the pandemic—and so did Bird’s shares after its 2021 stock market debut. In late 2022, after a series of business setbacks, the company warned investors that it could go bankrupt. It was booted from the New York Stock Exchange in September of this year for failing to consistently maintain a market cap of $15 million. As the company scrambled to survive, it has squeezed its fleet managers harder. On December 20, their situation became more uncertain when Bird announced it was filing for bankruptcy. from Blood, Guns, and Broken Scooters: Inside the Chaotic Rise and Fall of Bird [Wired; ungated]
posted by chavenet (51 comments total)

Good post title.

Depressing story and so familiar.
posted by clew at 1:14 AM on December 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

All scooter companies are Venture capital bullshit, which basically means they’re working at an oblique to what society thinks are good practices. Regular hours, dependable jobs, clearly labeled responsibilities - all these don’t matter to the vc dudes because they want to extract profit. That’s why this article exists, because people want to see these companies fall on their face. I don’t want to see scooter users fall on their face though.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:34 AM on December 28, 2023 [15 favorites]

That leaves room for better companies to move in. One way or another, you need electric bikes and scooters, and you need to adjust your infrastructure to support them.
posted by pracowity at 2:26 AM on December 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

Providing an endless supply of e-bikes for throwing into the river is perhaps not the soundest business model, though.
posted by flabdablet at 4:18 AM on December 28, 2023 [31 favorites]

One way or another, you need electric bikes and scooters, and you need to adjust your infrastructure to support them

I would not have said, expected to hear, or believed this ten years ago, and yet here we are. Both are used regularly by people in my area of varying ages and ability for microtransit, or for longer rides to neighborhoods not well served by local public transit. My metro area funded free public (bus) transit during the pandemic and stuck with it afterward, given its popularity, but the city proper probably does not have the funds, staffing, expertise, etc. to roll out a comprehensive microtransit setup in the near future.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:31 AM on December 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

the city proper probably does not have the funds, staffing, expertise, etc. to roll out a comprehensive microtransit setup in the near future.

The fastest and cheapest way to support bikes and scooters is to convert unnecessary car lanes into bike lanes. But that takes political will, "the slipperiest concept in the policy lexicon." The notion that any existing car lane on Earth might be unnecessary to car traffic would sound crazy to the typical American driver.
posted by pracowity at 5:08 AM on December 28, 2023 [14 favorites]

Until the companies make it so you can't ride the bikes and scooters on sidewalks, and make it so riders can't abandon them at the bottom of accessibility ramps or blocking crosswalks, they are the enemy.
posted by goatdog at 5:12 AM on December 28, 2023 [25 favorites]

I like what Toronto has done, which is forbid scooter rentals completely but turned a blind eye towards their use. We also have an extensive municipal bike share which includes e-bikes, and has designated stations/storage areas. So, and this is the big win, there are no corporations using public space as storage for their rental garbage. People do ride a lot of scooters, a lot of e-bikes; they own them and take them inside, which is good for them, and good for everyone else. It's bad enough that private cars are allowed storage on streets. Let's not let it get any worse.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:26 AM on December 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

Transit lives or dies on reliability and a lack of friction. You need to know that the bus or train will show up when you expect them to and go where you expect them to go. And you shouldn't need a dense printed timetable or complicated app to plan every single trip. Transit should be so easy to use and reliable that you take it for granted.

Dockless bicycles and scooters are dumb because they don't provide these things. Where is the nearest bicycle? Gotta check the app. Will the nearest bicycle be in the same spot every time you need it? No promises! If you take the scooter somewhere and un-rent it while you're shopping (so as not to pay for something you're not using) will it still be there for the return trip? Also no promises!

The whole point of docking stations is they give you fixed points to plan your trip. You pick up your bicycle at the nearest docking station which is always in the same place. You either keep it for the day, or you turn it in at another docking station near your destination where you can be reasonably certain there will be another bike waiting for you when you need it.

It's not perfect, but it's way better than the free-for-all anarchy of having to hunt for a scooter or bike and viciously guard it lest anyone else take it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:45 AM on December 28, 2023 [19 favorites]

You don't need scooters. They're banned on the roads and bike paths in the Netherlands and I've never been anywhere with better non-car infrastructure. In fact, the only successful bike share here is the one based out of all the train stations. You can take a bike out for up to 3 days, and you pay by the day. They're great for say, popping over to another city on the train for an evening event, and using them to get from the train station to the event. Or commuters who live in a different city and don't want to keep a separate bike at the station in the city they work in. The only private company that I know of that they allow to have dockless app-based bikes is Cargoroo, but they only rent Urban Arrow cargo bikes, so they're a bit of a specialized service (and growing .. I saw them in Berlin).

People here are really sensitive to stuff clogging up the sidewalks and bike racks, especially if it's a private company trying to make money while clogging up the public right of way.
posted by antinomia at 5:55 AM on December 28, 2023 [13 favorites]

The fastest and cheapest way to support bikes and scooters is to convert unnecessary car lanes into bike lanes. But that takes political will, "the slipperiest concept in the policy lexicon." The notion that any existing car lane on Earth might be unnecessary to car traffic would sound crazy to the typical American driver.

The street I live on T's into what I'd call a minor arterial that mostly funnels traffic from residential streets to other parts of town, plus has a bit of commercial development. So it is larger than my street, but not "busy" in any meaningful sense. It has small, half-assed painted bikelanes, plus two travel lanes and a center turn lane for cars. Every time I travel along it, I think about how some sensitive design could reapportion the road space, giving more space to bikes/scooters/etc while also preserving locations where the center turn lane is actually critical rather than just wasted space that makes people think they can drive faster because the road is wide.

As far as I know scooter rentals aren't a thing where I'm living right now, and for them to work there would need to be identified/mandatory places for them to be parked, since a lot of the sidewalks are narrow and can't accommodate a bunch of stranded scooters. But, the core part of town isn't very large and doesn't have any large hills; it would actually be perfect for "microtransit" if enough space could be clawed back from cars.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:16 AM on December 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’ve found them very useful and it will be unfortunate when they are gone.
posted by interogative mood at 6:36 AM on December 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

Weird, bird just moved into my town in September (with real normal e-bikes, not scooters), into a marked pretty saturated by their competitor Veo. I was hoping for a docked system owned by the public, maybe their death will free up some market space and political will.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:59 AM on December 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Perhaps ten years ago now, there was a study of the economics of rental scooters—there was a city (Nashville?) that for a while required the scooter operators to publish detailed financials as a condition for littering city streets. What the study showed was that rental scooters were barely able to cover their operating costs (credit-card processing, paying juicers, etc), but that didn't take into account the purchase price of the scooters themselves, which burned out alarmingly quickly—the average lifespan was three months, IIRC. So there was no way they'd ever break even unless they charged drastically more than people would pay.

Scooters are not designed to be used by adult humans as serious transportation. The rental model is unsustainable, and if they're being landfilled every three months, the environmental impact is high. The scooter companies treat every public space as their parking space. I have been waiting to see the back of them for years.
posted by adamrice at 7:01 AM on December 28, 2023 [28 favorites]

Lime is just over twice the size of Bird in terms of revenue and claims to have turned a slight profit last quarter. Like/Bird are not the enemy. Bikes also end up on sidewalks and lots of things end up blocking curb cuts/ramps and sidewalks — among them the power companies who seem to think that these are ideal locations for installing their immovable power poles. Until we have bike/scooter lanes everywhere to separate traffic we will continue to see bikes / scooters on sidewalks. That’s just the unfortunate reality of the urban streetscape and a century of automobile focused road infrastructure.

This brings me to the real enemy: automobiles. The rise in pedestrian deaths in the last 10 years is not people being hit by bird/lime/etc scooters — it is the shift to big pickup trucks.

I live in the DC suburbs and nearest metro is just beyond short walking distance. When I’m running a few minutes late being able to grab a scooter and cut the 30 minute walk down to 10 minutes is very useful.
posted by interogative mood at 7:05 AM on December 28, 2023 [11 favorites]

The company was founded in September 2017 with just 10 scooters in Santa Monica, California. Nine months later it had raised more than $300 million in funding at a valuation of about $2 billion.

ZIRP was a hell of a drug.

And A+++ title, chavnet!
posted by Frayed Knot at 7:20 AM on December 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Toronto's bike share is operated by the Toronto Parking Authority,
Still growing it has 9000 bicycles, 700 docking stations and a bout a thousand e bikes { soon to be 2000 e bikes )
I've never used it. But it is expanding rapidly
posted by yyz at 7:33 AM on December 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've been thinking about scooters and the related issues of bike lanes, cars, VC, injuries for a few years. I live in the Bay Area and have watched many a micro mobility startup (and semi-public service) rise and fall (into the Bay). I feel like the issues here have multiple, interlocking aspects, and we cannot have a good solution unless several of these issues are addressed at once through public funding and policy change:

- Road redesign to make bikes/scooters/ebikes and pedestrians on foot/wheelchair/baby carriage/etc safe from cars
- Reduce speed limit of cars, reduce lanes of traffic, reduce parking, tax driving in the city
- Massively scale up transit (if you're taking away cars, you need to replace it with reliable transit). Funding for this in California at least happens at the regional level - there needs to me much more money from the State to provide reliable funding stream to increase busses and bus frequency and cleanliness and compensation for bus workers.
- Rental bikes are great I'm all for them and they should be regulated to encourage their use and safety of the fleet
- Scooters are dangerous. While cars hitting you on an scooter is a significant risk, simply losing control of the scooters is a significant hazard leading to head injuries, spinal cord injuries, and death. The impact of injuries of these scooters is racially disproportionate and has harmed Black people disproportionately. There are significant issues with the devices themselves (most often breaks not functioning) but even if these companies were better regulated for safety, the geometry of scooters makes it very likely to sustain an injury when hitting an unexpected pothole, curb, etc. I'm not a fan of e-scooters. I imagine the larger weight ones with large, stable wheelbases may be safer than the cheap rentals.
posted by latkes at 7:34 AM on December 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

Like/Bird are not the enemy.
interogative mood

Yes, they are.

adamrice is right: good fucking riddance to this corporate garbage strewn on our sidewalks.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:38 AM on December 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

Lime was only here for a brief time but it was interesting to see what lengths people went to claim a bicycle as their own to rent when needed. It wasn't uncommon to see available bikes in places from where their retrieval would be intrusive like apartment balconies, fenced in common areas, inside building vestibules. Despite the city being blanketed with dockless bicycles, they weren't ubiquitous enough for people not to feel like they had to defend "their" bike from being rented by someone else when they weren't using it.

This wouldn't have happened if Lime had bothered to be an actual business with infrastructure and partnetships with the city instead of an app.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:46 AM on December 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

Scooters are not designed to be used by adult humans as serious transportation. Tell that to the people using my office building bike room; there are days where half of the devices in there are (privately owned, natch) scooters. I can absolutely see the appeal for urban short distance or last-mile type travel for people wearing business clothes and shoes.

Before you scream "BIKES" at me, I'm a bike commuter and have been for 20 years. Bikes have chains and grease and dress shoes slip off the pedals and not all clothes accommodate sweating and bending over and reaching forward. Many scooters can be brought on a train or bus, even during rush hour, and if you don't have a fancy secure bike room like I do, stored in your office.

I'm torn about rental scooters and certainly don't love the VC backed companies doing it with little to no oversight and accountability for their behavior and the behavior of their users. But I think it's inaccurate (and rude) to call them unserious/childish, and mimics the same insults drivers levy at cyclists.
posted by misskaz at 8:00 AM on December 28, 2023 [17 favorites]

i am an adult rider who asked for - and just received - an electric scooter for christmas. i intend to use it for local commuting that i typically have done on my (non-electric) bicycle. i plan to continue using my bike for some activities, when i'm looking for the exercise or just feel like a bike ride, but the scooter is just so damn fun, and i can't wait to start using that as well. unfortunately, i work too far from home to travel by bike or scooter.
the scooter startup situation here (phoenix, AZ) has been as much of a shit-show as many other metro areas, but it seems like the city is getting it somewhat under control, as there are not nearly as many littering the streets as there was five or more years ago.
posted by rude.boy at 8:15 AM on December 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

There are several big problems with ZIRP companies like Bird using Somebody Else's Money to try to hit scale before the bills all come due, not the least of which was their lax approach to regulations (like dropping a bunch of scooters all over a city and putting city administrators at a disadvantage trying to regulate them after the fact). But the thing I'm most curious about is how a shared mobility service could really solve the Asshole Problem, as I think of it. People blocking sidewalks and wheelchair ramps, or (say) abandoning bikes in places you're not actually supposed to end trips (like, say, Rock Creek Park in DC)? Assholes. People throwing bikes and scooters in rivers? Assholes. People riding on sidewalks or otherwise unsafely? Assholes.

We use a car sharing service in DC called Free2Move. I'm not sure what other US markets they're even in at this point, but maybe people in other cities are familiar with the service or at least other services like it. Previously we used Car2Go, which shut down its entire US operation because the operational costs were too high. For a few months the auto leasing company Penske had a service called Penske Dash. They were probably the best one because they understood fleet maintenance, but they also gave up really quickly on the experiment because of the Asshole Problem. With Free2Move it's not uncommon for us to get in a car and find dog hair all over the seats, trash and food detritus, or evidence one or more people before us smoked in the car (a pervasive smell of smoke and/or ashes left in cup holders or door handles). We report it every time, but it's clear that Free2Move struggles with the Asshole Problem because we keep having to report it.

These services would all be improved if they could figure out how to get assholes to stop being assholes. But it's far too easy to be an asshole and get away with it, so people will keep blocking sidewalks and ramps, throwing bikes and scooters off bridges, and making messes in shared cars. I don't think it's a solvable problem, and I'm not looking forward to the day that the services people rely on all go away because they can't solve the Asshole Problem and they can't run a profitable service otherwise.
posted by fedward at 8:21 AM on December 28, 2023 [13 favorites]

I don't personally use scooters (they scare me and walking a few miles doesn't) but I can't deny how useful they are to others in Austin. The city has poor public transportation and yet a vibrant downtown area, and students have to get around somehow.

More students seem to be buying their own and taking them into classrooms, but you can't really take them into a bar or library, so rentals are still useful. I agree they would be better with designated docks like rental bikes though.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:39 AM on December 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I hear a lot about rental bikes/scooters as solving a last mile transit problem, but in my -- admittedly limited -- experience they only exist in places that don't have a last mile transit problem because they are dense enough that transit is as nearby as the bikes/scooters anyway. So they're fine for a quick errand if you don't want to wait for a bus/streetcar/LRT, but they aren't really filling a missing link, just saving a bit of time. Maybe they are supposed to replace some of that bus/streetcar/LRT service in the long term, but then that's taking a very ableist approach to transit.

As soon as you get outside the dense urban core, into areas where there actually is a last mile problem, the docking station model is completely useless and there's no longer enough demand to keep undocked versions charged and in circulation and still handy enough for people to rely on them.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:10 AM on December 28, 2023 [9 favorites]

People blocking sidewalks and wheelchair ramps, or (say) abandoning bikes in places you're not actually supposed to end trips (like, say, Rock Creek Park in DC)? Assholes. People throwing bikes and scooters in rivers? Assholes.

These are actually two distinct groups, and the second one is responding to the antisocial actions of the first. A scooter parked perpendicular to a 30-inch sidewalk, immediately in front of a curb cut? I'd throw that fucker off a bridge myself.
posted by jackbishop at 9:10 AM on December 28, 2023 [10 favorites]

Chicago's bike share is now owned by Lyft. Which means it is in direct competition with their core business of rideshare. So the prices of both are going up and short hop ebike rides are now pretty expensive.

Chicago is a very politically dumb city when it comes to dealing with corporations but Lyft is a hometown company so...clout wins I guess.

The scooters are also geo-fenced and I live on a far edge of their range so they are pretty useless to me. They are both not around (I'm thankful as a sidewalk user) and can only travel in one direction.
posted by srboisvert at 9:16 AM on December 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I can't second goatdog's comment hard enough. I bike commute in Boston, and e-bikes and e-scooters are making things super difficult and scary, even on the greenways designed for some combination of bike/pedestrian mobility.

The electric dudes move so much faster than anyone, and they are heavier, right? and half the students riding e-bikes at 12-15 mph are not wearing any kind of protective gear, about which I worry. But I worry more about them colliding with me or a pedestrian.

They'd be super vulnerable in car lanes, but they are dangerous as fuck in bike lanes.

As an old, I'm reminded of mopeds? Soooooooooo convenient, and every kid wanted one... and then so many kids died. Is that why they disappeared?

In conclusion, out of my bike lane, please.
posted by allthinky at 9:17 AM on December 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

i have heard from people that the batteries on rideshare scooters can be quickly and easily removed with commonly available tools and moreover that once removed they can be put to any number of prosocial uses.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:25 AM on December 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

"E-bikes are heavier" is a strange argument to me. Carrying a bag full of schoolbooks or a pannier full of groceries also makes my bike heavier by a similar amount. Is that a menace to safety as well?

For that matter, a 170-pound adult on a carbon-fiber road bike is heavier than a 120-pound teenager on an electric bike or scooter. So should the former be banned first?

I understand there are legitimate safety concerns around speed, but the added mass is usually trivial when considering the total weight of bike + rider + gear + cargo.
posted by mbrubeck at 9:26 AM on December 28, 2023 [8 favorites]

I rented a Bird scooter last month for the first and last time when I visited my old college.

The first two scooters wouldn't turn on but the third worked. Got charged $4 x 3 for the trouble.

Riding the damn thing was super dangerous. Granted I'm 40 years and 100+ lbs more than my teenage prime but that scooter is not something I'd want to use every day.
posted by torokunai at 9:32 AM on December 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

They'd be super vulnerable in car lanes, but they are dangerous as fuck in bike lanes.

They need to have a reasonable built-in speed limit. Whatever the average pedal speed is for regular bicyclists.
posted by pracowity at 9:35 AM on December 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

The e-bike is heavier, +cargo +rider, x velocity. Is mass x velocity a thing? It seems like a thing. A heavy pedalled bike goes slower, unless the rider is hella strong. A heavy e-bike is less restricted.

I ride about 12 mph to work. E-bikes seem to advertise 20 mph up to 28 mph max, which I'm fairly certain any adept teenager could enhance.

They move fast and differently from pedalled bikes. So, yeah, a governor maxing out speeds at 15 would be great. Will it happen? Will it be unbreakable?

Asshole cyclists often ride too fast on shared trails even without electric assist, but the numbers of folks who take advantage of the motor seem much higher.
posted by allthinky at 9:56 AM on December 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

Is mass x velocity a thing?

The name in physics for that product is momentum, and it is generally conserved under most circumstances, so, yeah, that's why a big heavy thing moving fast hitting you imparts more momentum (and resultant pain) than a slower thing moving fast.

Although the other super-important concept which is conserved is kinetic energy, which is not mass times velocity, but mass times velocity squared (technically half of mv², but that's not important). Which means that being heavy matters, but being fast matters more.

In a collision between two objects of like mass, the momentum and energy are all transferred from one to another (think of how the cue ball stops dead when it hits another in pool, or how a Newton's cradle works), but if the masses are unequal, the transfer of energy and momentum tends to be a bit messier. For instance, an object hitting something half its weight and elastically transferring speed (elastic = conserving both momentum and energy) will slow to 1/3 of its original speed, while the object it hits acquires 4/3 of its speed.
posted by jackbishop at 10:24 AM on December 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

People who get hit by (and in!) fast-moving machines tend to absorb quite a lot of that collision energy in ways that are anything but elastic.

This is the rationale behind crumple zones in cars - unlike the "sturdy" cars of the 1950s, today's cars are deliberately designed to destroy substantial portions of themselves in a collision exactly because it's better for as much collision energy as possible to be absorbed by the crumpling of the car's bodywork than by that of its soft and squishy passengers.
posted by flabdablet at 10:33 AM on December 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

In Warsaw the abandoned scooter problem got significantly better when the city started confiscating all scooters that were hindrances. Once every company had to bail out 100+ scooters each, the next feature in all their apps was only allowing scooter returns when accompanied by a photo of the scooter in question being parked in a city-acceptable manner.

From an urban point of view, scooters also plain take up less room than a bike in a small apartment, so that's extra appeal if there isn't bike storage available in the building.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:56 AM on December 28, 2023 [8 favorites]

Calgary has two scooter companies; Neuron and Bird. Bird is the one with the scooters which always look cheap and dirty.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:10 PM on December 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Asshole cyclists often ride too fast on shared trails even without electric assist, but the numbers of folks who take advantage of the motor seem much higher.

The lycra louts and some bike couriers are super annoying with the speeds they ride at but they typically have at least earned that speed through lots and lots of riding so they have lots of experience. E-bikes give that speed to anybody instantly which is a somewhat different risk equation as well.
posted by srboisvert at 2:04 PM on December 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

The vehicle, though a component of a collision, is rarely the cause of the collision. It’s the people driving the vehicles. On Christmas Day we went to Fisherman’s Wharf here in SF, just to go for a walk. We had to keep jumping out of the way because of people riding on electric scooters on the crowded sidewalk. This has been an issue here ever since the scooters appeared. The solution? They put a sticker somewhere on the scooter that says No Sidewalks. That doesn’t work. Granted it was probably tourists but that is not an excuse. Scooters are available without any human interaction. No one to tell you to stay off the sidewalks. Maybe the app says that but to what effect? None. I see it daily all over town. In Golden Gate Park, they closed a main thoroughfare to cars to make it accessible and safe for pedestrians. And bicycles, which being silent and deadly, travel at high speed all over the road with an attitude of pedestrians be damned. These personal modes of transit breed an attitude of self righteousness. I’m saving the environment! Get out of my fucking way!! I get that all the time too. All these discussions seem to focus on vehicles, especially evil cars. But there are voices here pointing out assholes. What the hell can be done to get these dangerous people off the streets?
posted by njohnson23 at 3:41 PM on December 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

It would not be hard to apply geofencing to scooter parking—the scooter companies could arrange things so that "until you have put the scooter in a city-approved corral location, you're still paying for the rental." That would modify behavior. As far as I'm aware, no city requires that of the rental scooter companies, and my own doesn't even require the scooter companies to geofence them away from trails that are explicitly signed "no motorized vehicles."

Of course, geofence-enforced parking brings us back to the problem jacquilynne mentioned upthread: "As soon as you get outside the dense urban core, into areas where there actually is a last mile problem, the docking station model is completely useless and there's no longer enough demand to keep undocked versions charged and in circulation and still handy enough for people to rely on them." And for companies like this, complying with regulations is anathema to their business model and philosophy.
posted by adamrice at 3:46 PM on December 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

The best model for daily commuting has to be owning your own scooter. You can buy the model you prefer and take care of it, and it's got to be cheaper than renting. Ride it from your front door to your destination or to public transit, where you can lock it up and ride transit, or carry it on with you if you need to ride it again on the other end of your public transit ride. For safety from thieves, probably taking your scooter all the way to (and into) work is best.

I suppose the rental model with no docking station is better for spontaneous riding. You ride it to your destination and forget about it. Rental also has to be better for young people who can afford one ride at a time, but not a scooter purchase.

But whether you rent or own, you need a place where you can ride it. Pedestrians on the sidewalk resent you (and cyclists). Cyclists on the bicycle path resent you (and pedestrians). Drivers on the street resent you (and cyclists and pedestrians and other drivers).
posted by pracowity at 4:36 PM on December 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

In my experience ebikes and scooters are not having any impact compared to the traditional bikes ridden by guys wearing racing jerseys who think that a mixed use trail is a high speed cycle track. Assholes are perfectly capable of being jerks without an e-bike. At least the technology solution from Lime/Bird etc can be regulated and forced to obey a speed restriction.
posted by interogative mood at 5:55 PM on December 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think either Lime or Bird tried to get into Japan and got hamstrung by the government deciding that the scooters (or kickboards as they are called here) fit a certain definition of vehicle so you needed a drivers license to use one. Then this year they changed the classification so that you didn't need a license but had to be over 16 years old, a scooter that could go over 20 kph had to be ridden on the road like a motor scooter and under 6 kph could be ridden on the sidewalk. Bird Japan exists but I don't know exactly where but Luup, which started as a bicycle rental, seems to be the biggest scooter rental service (big cities only mainly), teaming up with the convenience store chain Family Mart as a place for docks as well as with some hotel chains and Japan Railways. All of the bicycle rentals (and scooter rentals) are decided municipality by municipality so the cities have some stake in the services.

And that's the pattern with the big "disruptors" when they come into Japan. Uber? Well, you can't just carry passengers for money unless you have a Class 2 license which is what taxi drivers need. They have to enter the market as a kind of personal driver for the upper class, usually a taxi driver on their days off until Uber Eats took off and those are mostly bicycle and motor scooter carriers (motor scooter is the preferred delivery method for pizza). Air BnB? Minpaku laws state that you can only rent out your residence for so many days a year and you have to maintain a level of cleanliness. So users pivoted more to providing experiences for tourists. I don't even know if WeWork got off the ground before it imploded in the US.
posted by LostInUbe at 6:29 PM on December 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

These personal modes of transit breed an attitude of self righteousness. I’m saving the environment! Get out of my fucking way!!

I drive a Prius!
posted by flabdablet at 1:45 AM on December 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

The docked e-bikes in Boulder CO work pretty well IMO. Lots of docks around, cycle lanes most places, and they're geared for around 15mph. There are undocked scooters around too, but I never bothered.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 8:22 AM on December 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

And that's the pattern with the big "disruptors" when they come into Japan

Yeah, but Japan actually puts thought into its public transit, and the US doesn't. Have you seen the 'worst US bus stops' competition? It's absurd. And those are all in major cities, including NYC and Chicago. Just think what other places are like.

And the US has generally made public/private partnerships like partnering with a convenience store also against regulations or nearly impossible to bid out, or even rail companies owning land and developing it to help ridership. So that's where the US focuses it's regulating.

And people ride them on sidewalks because US roads are incredibly dangerous to any other form of transport. Full stop. That's why nobody rides them in the road.

I think some form of last mile transit is a great idea, but the US just doesn't care enough to make any of them worthwhile.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:31 AM on December 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

flabdablet, that didn't load for me, but I think I can guess what snippet it was supposed to be. Let me ask you, do you often run into self-righteous prius drivers?

Because I tell you what the biggest downside of driving a prius is: every time I take it out, I have other drivers tailgating and aggressively passing me same as if I were riding a bike, even though I'm obviously going the same speed as everyone else (do I even need to say this part?). They also cut me off at a much higher rate, and turn in front of me from side streets all. the. time. It's either "I can't BELIEVE I'm stuck behind an effing PRIUS" or "prius driver = soft target for bullying". And no, the prius is not the only car we have, so I can sample back and forth all day long.

But yeah, prius drivers are practically as bad as vegans, amirite?
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:48 AM on January 2 [2 favorites]

I offhand wonder if you remove or obscure the prius badging from the car if it would annoy coal rollers as much. I doubt they're even remotely perceptive enough to recognize one from shape.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:03 AM on January 2 [1 favorite]

Are there places where people still dunk on Priuses? We have long since moved on to hating Tesla drivers here in Vancouver.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:39 AM on January 2 [2 favorites]

Are there places where people still dunk on Priuses? We have long since moved on to hating Tesla drivers here in Vancouver.

Based on videos people post, "rolling coal" on Priuses is still a thing. Outside of that, it's been years since I've seen much in the way of hostile commentary.

I offhand wonder if you remove or obscure the prius badging from the car if it would annoy coal rollers as much. I doubt they're even remotely perceptive enough to recognize one from shape.

The Prius has one of the more distinctive/recognizable car shapes out there. I don't think removing the badge would do anything in terms of recognizability.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:46 AM on January 2 [1 favorite]

A man in his 30s has been hospitalized in serious condition after his e-bike ignited on a Toronto subway train Sunday afternoon, as reported by the police.

The e-bike owner suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries and was promptly transported to the hospital,
posted by yyz at 1:50 PM on January 2 [1 favorite]