Hard-to-believe city officials didn't know before bike-shares and e-scooters got dumped in public rights-of-way for these battery-powered 'new modes of transportation'.
Should people ride scooters on the street or the sidewalk?
Helmets or no helmets?
How fast should they be able to go?
What companies can operate the services, and under what circumstances?
Are scooters even safe?
No one put the issue better than Edward Reiskin, San Francisco's Transportation Director:
“We will not tolerate any business model that represents … a safety hazard,” he wrote in a letter to e-scooter companies. That's right it's a business - the Venture Capital companies make money getting your personal data and GPS-track everywhere and everything you do.
Others complain
- that sidewalks are cluttered and clogged
- that scooters are endangering people
- that scooter companies want to monetize public resources -- make money off of infrastructure that they haven’t directly and fully paid for.
Just like bike sharing before it, scooter sharing is primarily for commuting, not recreation.
Exactly how do all these privately-funded Venture Capitalist Unicorns with billions-of-dollars in funding fit it with the gaps in Valley Metro's public transit?
If all goes to plan, commuters could ride an e-scooter to a transit station, take a train, then grab an e-bike, share a ride or take an e-scooter at the arriving station, then walk.
Is "The Old Donut-Hole" a big market for micro-mobility or "alternative fill-in-the-gap transportation options"?? Who are all these VCs trying to serve when downtown Mesa is far from dense in the city center?
Are city officials here thinking in any way ‘Let’s use these to replace cars.’
Will that ever happen here?
Some people say the biggest bottleneck for adoption is infrastructure.
The biggest safety issue usually is that people don’t feel safe enough riding a scooter in the streets, and the bike lanes don’t feel like they’re protected well enough or marked well enough . . .so cities supposedly need more data and the Venture Capital Unicorns need more funding!
Geo-fencing? Creating red-lined parking zones by installing Bluetooth beacons?
Reference:
https://www.governing.com
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Report from Gizmodo: https://gizmodo.com
Following news that Lyft laid off dozens of its employees earlier this month in its scooter and bike division, Bird is the latest scooter outfit to cut staff. The Information reported Friday that the company laid off roughly 5 percent of its employees, amounting to a little over three dozen employees in total.
A spokesperson for the e-scooter startup told the Information the layoffs came as part of the company’s “our shifting needs, geographical business demands and our annual talent review process.” As Bird focuses its energies on service centers in local markets, the spokesperson said that it has “shifting geographic workforce needs.”
Bird, a major player in the ongoing e-scooter takeover of city streets across the globe, saw its valuation double to $2 billion in just four months following two rounds of funding totaling $400 million last summer.The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reported in December that the company’s ambitious goals for additional funding in the hundreds of millions were stalled after interest cooled.
Earlier this month, Lyft’s scooter and bike division slashed roughly 50 employees, TechCrunch reported at the time. The layoffs, which amounted to a slim one percent of the company’s workforce, reportedly affected staff across departments and markets.
