Mobile 155

dedhed

https://www.google.com/search?biw=13...67.wrtYpNE_KEQ

I-Like-To-Bike

What local government charges a $500 annual fee per scooter for share companies to have the scooter available on the street? I Googled; could not find any evidence of this $500/scooter fee.

jon c. 

Sounds almost as if docking stations could work.

Mobile 155

I-Like-To-Bike

Also note that any fees (real or conjured) imposed on the so-called "share" companies that scatter dock-less scooters or dock-less bicycles about a town, also has nothing to do with GM or any other car manufacture, except perhaps in the vivid imagination of the conspiracy mongers of LCF.

I-Like-To-Bike

Work at doing what? How many scooter customers are going to spend an iota of time or effort stacking and unstacking scooters in order to ride a mile or two? How exactly do docking stations "work" with the concept of the alleged convenience of dock-less scooters?

jon c. 

They might work in reducing clutter on the sidewalk.

Mobile 155

I-Like-To-Bike

So would a dumpster.

Docking or theoretical stacking stations might "work" in a physical sense for dock-less scooters as suggested, but not in a practical business sense it would seriously reduce their usefulness for the customers.

I-Like-To-Bike

No paywall at https://nordic.businessinsider.com/a...cklash-2018-8/

See https://t.co/8EZvkUfbsO
https://t.co/8EZvkUfbsO

tandempower

Here is a quote from Wikipedia regarding competition law that could apply:
It remains to be seen whether GM's goal is to expand the availability and convenience of car-free options or to hinder them through anti-competitive practices. Once they start making their ebikes or whatever and deploying them in markets, it will become clear whether their market activities are supporting the expansion of car-free transportation options or interfering with competition in order to render car-free options less available and/or convenient.

tandempower

I didn't think they had to pay special fees to rent out cars. Maybe I'm wrong.

Mobile 155

tandempower

Ok, so if rental cars pay a fee of $2/day, that comes out to about $700/year. If escooter shares are being charged $500/year that would be very disproportionate to their size relative to rental cars. A car takes up about 500 square feet of pavement and weighs over 2000lbs. An escooter is about 1% of the size and weight of a car, so its fee should be about 1% of the car, i.e. $7/year.

tandempower

What they really should do is to offer a discount for parking at a docking station and then put poles, yes just poles, at frequent locations, and the scooters should be designed so their decks stack neatly and the handlebar stems clip together. Then, the city should have some fee for when a share scooter or bike is reported as a nuisance. When a complaint is called in, the caller should give their name and if the scooter is not found to be parked badly, the caller should be fined. If someone is sent and the scooter is indeed found to have been parked badly, then the owner would get the fine.

tandempower

Do you ever have the feeling that someone is lying, and then they challenge you to prove they are lying, and that just supports your sense that they're lying?

jon c. 

The discussion did stray into a rental scooters. But entering the rental scooter market is indeed vastly different than selling e-bikes. The latter is, I believe, a potentially viable long term proposition and I think they may also look at it as a means of positioning themselves for the introduction of other types of small electric vehicles. It isn't clear at this point whether they intend to simply sell vehicles or if they want to get into the rental market, which I think is more geared to creating overvalued start-ups than it is to creating a long term profitable enterprises.

dedhed

No, most rental car taxes are a % (2-11%) of the rental. At $40-70 a day rental rate your talking about $1-$8/day. These also often pay parking meter fees when they are rented.
I believe the government scooter charges are more to do with their propensity to be left in places the municipality has to physically remove and handle them, not how much pavement they take up.

Once again, please shows us a citation that they are being charged $500/year by a government entity anywhere for a scooter.

Rollfast

Tandempower's theory of relative rental prices misses a lot of variables and stuff. One thing is the scooters are not as durable as a car and that right now they are testing markets and getting booted from them or finding it not worth the trouble.

But the LCF Superstars are always years ahead and fast-forward thinking..

tandempower

It's not 'years ahead,' but rather years in the making. The 'last mile' problem of public transit has been discussed for years a reason many people are deterred from public transit. You have sprawling cities where it would be cost-inefficient to run bus routes close to everything, so you end up with a mile or more between bus stops and destinations and residences.

So the idea with scooter/bike shares was that people could grab a bike or scooter to get to the bus stop and then grab another one when they got off the bus, so they could get to their home or destination faster. It takes time for people to develop a sense of how to coordinate share vehicles and transit use, and it requires a lot of trust that a share vehicle will be available wherever you get off the bus. So if there is obstruction in whatever way for this multimodal transit+sharing transportation to develop, people are going to stick with driving because they know it and trust it, even if they have to deal with congestion, risk, costs, etc. The automotive sectors bank on this, so people who support the automotive culture have only to obstruct the alternatives a little to stimulate people to cling to driving as a tried-and-true method, even if it is a flawed and wasteful mode with many harmful effects, which dooms us to unsustainabilities environmental and economic.

Mobile 155

Machka 

OK, what makes you think escooter shares are being charged $500/year?

And of course car rental companies get charged a fee/tax!!!




"Hi, I'm tandempower and I'd like to report a scooter that is parked badly ...."


Yeah, OK, that could work.

tandempower

If scooters cost $1 + $0.15 per minute, then, 2-11% fee would be around $0.01 per minute.

The municipal fee schedules I read about included additional fees for scooter removal.

Sorry, I don't remember the source. There were a lot of articles about various municipalities creating fee schedules and unit limits for share bikes and scooters. They seemed overly restrictive to me, and I read an article that explicitly noted that they would stifle the level of unit deployment that would be necessary for providing a popular alternative to driving.

In other words, the municipal governments are trying to restrict them to a certain elite, probably because they've been lobbied by certain business interests that want to limit alternatives to driving, i.e. in order to protect businesses that support driving from potential losses.

In other words, they are trying to force people into driving by blocking alternatives. They use things like sidewalk clutter and safety as excuses to protect their big tax payers from losses.

tandempower

But can you prove that?