tandempower

If cars can park in parking spots without objection, I don't see why dockless share bikes and scooters shouldn't.

I wonder what would happen if car share companies started expanding and filling up all the parking spaces of a city with share vehicles. Would there be a way to regulate that or would they have the same right to park as any other fleet- or personal vehicle?

cooker

You said "parking spaces". That's places where cars are supposed to park. So initially they would have the same right, and where they paid into a meter the city would welcome the influx of cash. If they parked too long they would get ticketed or towed like any other car. However if there were so many that they saturated the parking spaces and nobody could find a place to park, then of course it is pretty certain the city would clamp down in some way.

Also,in my city and probably lots of others, you need a permit to park on the street overnight, so a dockless car share company would have to seek that arrangement, which the city may or may not agree to.

tandempower

The irony is that cars take up a lot more space than bikes or scooters. So when you start talking about bikes and scooters taking up space for cars, it's reversing the fact that the car culture has taken up and thus wasted too much space in the course of indoctrinating so many people to tote their cars with them wherever they go.

Don't you see that the personal-automobile culture is asserting itself to the point of suppressing the introduction of abundantly-available alternatives? Bikes and scooters may be encouraged as a way to reduce traffic, but the moment someone is willing to put enough of them out there as dockless shares to provide a reliable alternative for people wherever they go with multimodal transportation, the automotivists start complaining that they are taking space away from cars and sidewalks.

Bottom line is they should be taking space from cars, not sidewalks and pedestrians, but the moment they start doing that, the car-culture defenders are going to use every tactic they can muster to stop them.

cooker

Here at least, we are steadily increasing bike facilities including on street parking spaces That's great. It's the dump 10,000 (or a million) bikes on the street and let anybody can leave them anywhere attitude I object to, and only because it's already been shown to create abuses.

tandempower

I watched Bird's video for chargers. If you charge their scooters, you have to put them back out in their 'nests' between 4-7 am. The 'nests' are specifically selected as spots where they won't bother people, e.g. near the doorway of a public building but not blocking the way at all. The chargers have to send a photo of the parked scooter to receive payment for charging, so that ensures the scooters are parked responsibly, at least first thing in the morning.

What I like about the Bird language of 'nests,' etc. is that it conveys the idea that people should be free to catch a ride on a scooter the way they might catch a ride on a bird if we were the size of lizards (and if we could avoid getting eaten). Living birds perch as far out of the way as they can, but humans still attack and hunt them (or at least they used to). Nowadays people respect animal life more (maybe because it is more scarce than it used to be). People should respect scooters and bikes as well. There needs to be lots of them available for everyone to use so it would be good to accept as many as possible into the cities and for people not to harm them so it will be as easy and convenient as possible to get around car-free.

cooker

I went to see what you are talking about and the first Bird video I found featured three idiots who jumped on dockless scooters and drove off the wrong way in the bike lane causing a bunch of cyclists to have to brake and veer. Not winning me over, here.

tandempower

That behavior isn't specific to scooters. I see people jumping curbs, going the wrong way diagonal through multilane intersections, and otherwise defying sense. Anytime I see such flagrant and dangerous rebellious behavior, I immediately think of it as a crusade to impose stricter regulations on the rest of us who behave ourselves and bike responsibly. There are many people who seem to just want to live in an authoritarian system where it is taken for granted that people will behave as badly as they can get away with unless the rules and police are strong enough to stop them in their tracks. To me, that is an overly dramatic and stressful model for public life and transportation.