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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/
I guess I shouldn't be surprised when the vast majority of the responses blame the scooters, the government, and everything but the PEOPLE RIDING THE SCOOTERS. It's just people refusing to aknowledge where the responsibility truly lies. Lock the things up, require a credit card to use them, then have a set of rules that the police can enforce. Done. You know who was using the scooter and can enforce fines.
Their target audience can't read.
-- Cheers!
Thanks for bringing this up. This has been a rampant problem in San Francisco. Clumps of skooters were blocking sidewalks, disabled ramps, etc.
The city finally took some action and have been cracking down on the companies operating these skooters.
Why would they let it become a problem? Why are they not treated like any other thing that is illegally parked? If I park my car and block a sidewalk, the city will call a tow truck and I might even have criminal charges. When I was in college 20 years ago, the campus police would cut the locks off of and impound illegally parked bikes. Not only did you have to buy a new lock, I believe you had to pay a fine to get your bike back.
Try to show some empathy. There are some impoverished areas in east SJ with median housing prices barely reaching $1M. From 237 to Alum Rock, there is not a single Tesla Supercharging Station east of 680. People should not have to live like that. We should all be concerned.
Our government may not care about hunger, housing, or healthcare, but at least they can make sure we all have equal access to rent-a-scooters.
...because no problems should be addressed in the first world unless they involve clean drinking water and warlords disrupting food shipments?
That attitude is cute.
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.
A scooter or bicycle available for rent is essentially a commercial, app-controlled vending machine. Why should it be legal for these things to be left anywhere for rental? If this is permitted, then there is no longer any non-commercial space. Can I set up a rental booth anywhere I like? In Walnut Creek across the Bay, hideous LimeBikes for rent litter nature trails and parks. A boycott seems appropriate if the local governments won't restrict rental areas to something reasonable.
Legalese: bicycles are not federally regulated, but there is a technical definition that the CPSC uses when defining them, and that most states use as well.
Now then...
1) In pretty much all US jurisdictions the ONLY non-motor-vehicle device that can be used on public roads is bicycles*, and these electric scooters would not technically qualify as bicycles under the Federal CPSC definition. So they would not be legal for adults to use on public roads, at all...
*(-draft animals and drawn carts and wagons are still legal too, on most US roads but not all roads-)
2) Also in most US jurisdictions, the ONLY powered devices that can be used on sidewalks is mobility devices for assisting the handicapped, and they have their own set of requirements under the Federal ADA regulations. Among those requirements is that the person using them is medically handicapped...
3) The last option is if the scooters were declared as motor vehicles--but for that to happen, they would need to meet the Federal DOT regulations for one class of motor vehicles already defined, and the scooters would need to be issued VIN numbers (a standard format serial number issued by the Federal Dept of Transportation). And since the scooters cannot technically qualify as any class of motor vehicle, they can't do this either.
These scooters are only considered to be "motorized toys", and are only legal to use on private property--just like pocket bikes. Absent any special law to exempt them, they cannot legally be used on public sidewalks OR public roads.
This is also the reason that a few communities had to enact special laws for people to use Segways when they first came out.
Nowadays there are some handicapped people using Segways, and in that instance they could qualify for sidewalk use as in point #2 above.
Much simpler solution: the owner of the vehicle gets the fine. It's up to them to recover the money from the driver/rider. This works fine for rental cars, it will work fine for rental scooters too.
Scooters pollute less and use less petroleum than cars. They should be encouraged. Sounds like more traffic and parking enforcement is needed for them, however. Add that into the licensing fees.
Table-ized A.I.