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Driverless Car Hype Gives Way To E-Scooter Mania Among Technorati (nbcnews.com)
Millions of dollars in funding and billions of dollars in valuations have made scooters the next big thing since the last big thing. From a report: When Michael Ramsey, an analyst for technology research firm Gartner, started in February to put together his 2018 "hype cycle" report for the future of transportation, he had plenty of topics to choose from: electric vehicles, flying cars, 5G, blockchain, and, of course, autonomous vehicles. But one type of transportation is conspicuously absent from the results of the report: electric scooters. "At the time, outside of California, these scooters were really not that common," Ramsey said. "That's how much has happened." As for autonomous vehicles, which have enjoyed years of hype as the next big thing, Ramsey labeled them sliding into "the trough of disillusionment," which Ramsey described as "when expectations don't meet the truth."
In a matter of months, electric scooter startups have gone from tech oddity to global phenomenon. In some cities, hundreds of scooters suddenly showed up on streets from companies including Bird and Lime, leaving municipalities to figure out how to handle the sudden influx of two-wheeled travelers. The concept behind the scooters is simple: A user can grab any available scooter, unlock it with an app, ride to their destination, and leave the scooter there for someone else to use. Even by the hyper-growth expectations of Silicon Valley, the rise of scooter companies has been dizzying. Scooters can be found in more than 125 cities in the U.S. and more than 10 across the globe. In the year after their launch, both Lime and Bird said their scooters had been used for more than 10 million rides.
In a matter of months, electric scooter startups have gone from tech oddity to global phenomenon. In some cities, hundreds of scooters suddenly showed up on streets from companies including Bird and Lime, leaving municipalities to figure out how to handle the sudden influx of two-wheeled travelers. The concept behind the scooters is simple: A user can grab any available scooter, unlock it with an app, ride to their destination, and leave the scooter there for someone else to use. Even by the hyper-growth expectations of Silicon Valley, the rise of scooter companies has been dizzying. Scooters can be found in more than 125 cities in the U.S. and more than 10 across the globe. In the year after their launch, both Lime and Bird said their scooters had been used for more than 10 million rides.
suicide
nothing to see here - move along
Every one I see on a sidewalk gets tossed by me.
1. You can't just leave your shit in the middle of the sidewalk. That's called littering.
2. You can't operate a business in the middle of the sidewalk. That's illegal in every municipality that I know of.
3. The really hurt disabled people, such as people in wheelchairs and the blind.
If I can, I just one foot underneath the middle of the things, and launch them somewhere else, out of the way. I'd put them in the trash, if it were worth my time.
I don't respond to AC's.
"Blitzkreig" is the term that you were looking for.
Bird, Lime, etc. knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that there would be resistance from a substantial part of the populace, that city governments would have issues with hundreds of unlicensed scooters littering the street, that some cities would want to regulate, etc.
So they swooped in under the radar, got them established and in use by the part of the populace who thinks this is a good idea, and now they can say "Nyah, nyah, it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."
Mainly homosexuals in Silicon Valley who consider themselves the technological elites. Characterized primarily by the "soylent grin", dopey beards, and a slavish devotion to the latest techology trend, these "technorati" consider themselves to be the natural aristocratic class by virtue of their education and cushy tech sector jobs making important decisions about things like what color the buttons in "Generic Social Media App #11223" should be. Because of the nonsensically large salaries from their largely pointless jobs, they tend to have a certain sense of guilt for their entirely unearned privilege and as a consequence tend to espouse "socialist" political views through which they imagine they will a) assuage their upper middle class white guilt, and b) be the controlling elite in the future Socialist Utopia. Both of these are patently untrue as they, too, will be murdered unceremoniously by the third-world proletarians they advocate importing en masse and whom they believe ought to inherit the country.
To summarize, a technorati is a self-absorbed Silicon Valley elitist. See also: futurist, technologist, narcissism, hubris.
It is not "bizarre." They are simply following Uber's tactics of avoiding regulation by entrenching themselves before regulators have time to react. Once money is in play things get politically "tricky" for the regulators