tandempower

You don't think people in local government are responsive to all the business people who make their money off ubiquitous car ownership, including mechanics, tire/wheel shops, car dealerships, insurance agents, and gas stations? You don't think those businesses and their subsidiaries are interested in restricting and suppressing bike/scooter sharing from giving people an alternative to buying/maintaining/insuring/fueling a car?

Somehow transportation biking has been put in its place, so they're not worried about more than a select minority of people getting around by bike. This is because people don't want to buy expensive bikes and leave them locked at a transit stop, so bike/scooter shares make it a lot more convenient to combine transit and bikes/scooters, so that is as much of a threat as ride-sharing was, and so there is logically a similar level of resistance to it.

The automotive culture only resists alternatives until they are established as minoritarian. People are willing to tolerate some people biking for transportation or using scooters as long as they can be dismissed as fringe divergents, which allows them to be used as cultural deterrents, e.g. tell your kids that if they don't drive cars they'll end up like the bums who bike around instead of driving. But whenever some form of alternative transportation looks like it could actually grow into something viable for a large segment of the population, the culture police step in a start ridiculing and attacking the new transportation form in every way possible, from vandalism to regulation. It's all for the sake of protecting established business patterns.

They don't care about the environmental future, only the economic status quo.