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San Jose May Start Cracking Down On Rampant Use of Scooters (mercurynews.com)
If you've ever visited San Jose, you may have noticed something rather unusual: there are electric scooters littering the streets. The scooters are placed randomly throughout the city and can be rented by users via an app. They're reportedly bothering pedestrians enough for the city to take notice and consider a number of possible restrictions, "including issuing revocable permits to a limited number of scooter companies such as Lime and Bird, requiring the companies to pay a deposit to cover potential scooter-involved damage to city property, and charging annual fees to operate in the city," reports The Mercury News. From the report: In recent weeks, the city has fielded complaints about people zooming down crowded sidewalks instead of riding in the street and parking scooters in front of driveways or leaving them tipped over outside stores. But the city currently doesn't have any rules governing the relatively new scooter-sharing industry, enabling both the companies and users to operate freely. In addition to paying operating fees, [...] the city wants the companies to provide multilingual customer service at all times, and to commit to addressing problems quickly. And like Ford GoBike -- which currently has an exclusive contract with San Jose to operate a docked bike sharing program in the city -- the city says scooter companies should be required to offer discounts to low-income residents and operate in what it calls "communities of concern."
To understand how and where people are riding scooters, the city says it also wants the companies to share their data, something they so far have been reluctant to part with, at least publicly. Most residents at the meeting seemed supportive of having scooters in San Jose, calling them an easy and environmentally friendly way to commute or run errands quickly.
To understand how and where people are riding scooters, the city says it also wants the companies to share their data, something they so far have been reluctant to part with, at least publicly. Most residents at the meeting seemed supportive of having scooters in San Jose, calling them an easy and environmentally friendly way to commute or run errands quickly.
Why not simply allow people to haul away abandoned and/or illegally parked scooters and sell them for scrap? Of course the scooter companies should be allowed to come by and pick up their property- as long as they pay the same reasonable towing and storage fees that tow companies charge for cars.
When you share it, you should, but most won't, take care of it.
It is inevitable that once the element of ownership is taken out of the equation, that people become careless.
Irresponcible to the point of creating a hazzard for the general populace. A mess to clean up.
This applies to so many things on so many levels.
It is absurd that many people forget about this or would simply like to believe otherwise.
After the inevitable scooter share startup bankruptcies, the problem will essentially solve itself. The scooters will then be auctioned off in bankruptcy to satisfy creditors.
See also: the mountains of abandoned sharing bicycles in China.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Their target audience can't read.
-- Cheers!
Primary link is to a website that only has an auto-playing video.
Can reporters in the USA still write?
Primary link is to a website that only has an auto-playing video.
Can reporters in the USA still write?
No. They were too busy with their social justice classwork to study English and writing skills. Is writing even an elective in journalism schools these days? Even big money national "news" websites routinely misspell words in articles, use the wrong words - often homophones - or even omit words in a sentence, mangling the meaning. Sometimes, it looks like a middle school book report. I read an article today on one of those national "news" sites where the first paragraph referenced a "she" with nothing to identify who "she" was. Nowhere, in the entire article, did it identify exactly who "she" was or why I should care what "she" says or thinks.