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Those rental bikes/scooters are stupid though. I see them block wheelchair ramps and sidewalks all the time. And yes I did pick it up and throw it in the bushes.
You're wrong about the bikes. Inexpensive rental bicycles are a great solution to a myriad of problems. And for every bike parked in a wheelchair ramp there is 10 cars blocking handicap parking.
They're great when they're run by the city and there's designated spots to park/charge them. Our city does have one such program, but that doesn't stop the bazingabrains from littering the sidewalks with their versions. There's also the issue that they externalize all the losses by "renting" the bikes to 3rd parties who have to go around at night charging the things and eat the losses when they get broken/stolen.
I disagree, my city has the dedicated drop off zones and guess what, they're ALL on the sidewalks. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if pedestrians were more than an afterthought (compared to cars). Ideally, the rental bikes should be allowed to park wherever, including (especially?) in car parking spaces.
Not sure why you take issue with a company's profits being centered around maintaining the bikes. "Externalizing the losses" is not a meaningful expression - both companies are profiting from the relationship.
The third party is usually a gig worker and not another company.
They're right about the bikes. It's mainly tourists that make use of them, and - unlike with in-person rentals - the people renting are given no course on road safety or how to signal. So you get a bunch of drunk people with no knowledge or respect of trafic barreling thru bikelanes way too fast, only to then ditch their bikes on the aforementioned bikelane, because they do not own the bike and they give no fucks about the place they're at and there is no system of accountability. I see this all the time, it sucks and I hate it.
The bike is also way heavier than a normal bike.
A bike rental run by the city is a good thing, but these private "disruptions" are just leeching off of good public infrastructure whilst making it worse for all involved.Okay, we are simply talking about different things. I'm not advocating for some battery propelled tourist death traps.
Where I've seen it best implemented, the bikes were a single speed with a basket and bell. No one can go dangerously fast, in fact everyone ends up going the same speed regardless of age or fitness.
Due to the high availability of bikes, all the night life spots piled up with bikes and we always had a ride home.
The bikes aren't stupid; they didn't block anything, their riders did. They work great in places with good infrastructure and a conscientious community.
and a conscientious community
So the majority of the west is eliminated from consideration
Probably up to localities to legislate that rental bikes must have designated return locations and fine the companies for violations. Hitting the techbro's bank accounts is the only way to make them think about externalities.
The only socially acceptable way. Giving every tech bro a e-biking funeral where they get cast off to sea on a raft of lithium ion batteries would certainly be satisfying
The bikes are stupid because money spent to ride them is going away to a foreign (i.e. American) tech company. It is another marker of the corporate encroaching itself into public property. Often these vehicles arrive on the streets unconsensually.
Don't most if not all vehicles?
I'd rather a nonconsensual shared bike on my street that I can use than a nonconsensual private car that I can't.
Good point let's destroy all cars
FWIIIIII hee hoo hee hoo
The bikes are stupid because they were designed to be left on the sidewalk instead of having designated charging/parking areas. The city bikes are better and were designed to be left at docking locations, which also solves the charging issues.
Where I was at when they had the city-owned bikes, no one would use them because the locations to drop them off were not where anyone wanted to go, they were nearly unused and stolen often. When lime bike came they were everywhere and hugely popular, we did have the problems with the sidewalks being blocked though and I moved a bike at least a couple times to help an elderly person get past it. If the city could coordinate a program better it could be great, it's almost like they've done it bad on purpose just to help encourage more privatization, which is a common tactic.
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
And the riders are blocking things because the system encourages that act. The system is therefore stupid. The system is the bike rental
The system works fine in other places, it's clearly the actors at fault.
Your naivety is palpable. Yes, in a world devoid of humans and in a vacuum it would probably work. But who would then use the bikes?
Why do you figure that is?
Because the rental companies were all created by bazingabrains who don't care about externalities and never contacted the communities they just dump these things in. There aren't designated zones in place to park these things and even if there were the market is oversaturated by a bunch of VC subsidized companies. The app has the ability to detect when you leave them in a bad spot but won't actually enforce anything.
There aren't designated zones in place to park these things and even if there were the market is oversaturated by a bunch of VC subsidized companies.
Bollocks to that, you could replace every 10th parking spot with bike / scooter parking and that'd be an entirely solved issue. The thing is if you park them somewhere that people think of as car parking space, so most of everything, they'll just huck these things on the sidewalk.
All your other points apply to cars, too, is the point. Sure, at best these'd be a municipal service instead of 10 carbon copies of the same business running them at the same time, but looking at the above picture and thinking "boy those rental scooter / bikes sure are stupid" is missing the forest for the trees here.
Cars and rental bikes can both be bad. The fact that all arguments applies to cars too isn't an argument for bazingarental. If the arguments are the same, then it shows that these rentals aren't in fact a good solution, since they still have the same issue.
I agree that it would be good if car parking was converted to bicycle parking.I'm not going to bat for bazingarentals (great term btw), but looking at this picture and singularly being against the rental bike is such a nonsenical position to hold.
Is it because you care about pedestrian space? If so, at least like 5 other problems should jump at you. I'd have no quarrel with this if it was "Look at how much it fucking sucks to be a pedestrian here", cause, true. But then the bike's not the problem any more than the fact that the streetlight is on the pavement, give or take 2,5 sidewalk spaces of car parking or how that sidewalk looks in fairly rough shape compared to the road surface
It's because I live in a city with public bikelanes and every single rental bike "disruptor" company creates reckless, dangerous and uncaring drivers that make the roads unsafe for everyone else with no repercussions.
See I'd blame this on lack of traffic enforcement and not on a bike rental. It seems odd to me to put forth that people magically get worse as they get onto a rental bike in ways they wouldn't be using other transportation options
I guess i agree with you, my issue is the lack of accountability and learning of laws - ie. Lack of trafic enforcement. These private rentals are just those that do the least to facilitate enforcement
The whole thing genuinely seems like the contradictions heightening here. Everybody got really car brained over the latter half of the 20th century, as such, nigh all public land that isn't VERY explicitly not car-land has been claimed and since everybody likes it that way even the fig leaf of regulations that should stop that from happening are basically unenforced. I mean pretty sure you can't park on the sidewalk with your car in the UK, that red line means you can't park on the street there and that Mercedes isn't even taxed currently. Big ol' free-for-all.
Given basically just cars and some weirdos like myself on bicycles it works out fine for most people, but suddenly, at the intersection of "all public land may be used for whatever as long as it's vaguely transportation" and "we can never ever do anything again as a state or constrict businesses" these bike rentals and scooters get dumped all over the place, making people who've long been blind to how much space we sacrificied to cars see that problem for the first time, just not with cars.
There's just no way out of it that the majority of people would like. You'd have to do traffic enforcement. Basically that entire street of cars would have to be towed to assure compliance. That is political suicide, if done at scale. Other than that you actually just remove the bicycle, at which point the business in question will be very happily point out to you as to why the bike is a problem and all of the illegally parked cars aren't, sue you, and win.
Same basically goes for moving traffic enforcement. Fig leaf at best, really, but most people really, really wouldn't like the other option. I know I would.
