Can downvoters please explain why they disagree with this comment?

Agreed on the litter. Imagine I own 1000 scooter-sized fake pink flamingos, imagine they contain a bunch of lithium batteries for some reason. I set them out on city-owned property and encourage strangers to take them. Predictably, they get left all over the damn place. Blocking sidewalks and wheelchair ramps, in storm drains, waterways, and dumpsters. Some of them get picked up one way or another, but the rest become hazardous waste litter that cannot go in the normal trash. Who should bear responsibility for cleanup and disposal?

That a city would allow this to happen with no penalty to the owner is a lavish gift of a public (and at times rivalrous) good to a private party.

Bro, I thought I was taking crazy pills and I'm still baffled as to why I don't see this argument made elsewhere more. I've seen enough blocking sidewalks and I'm just like, well, hey good thing I don't happen to be in a wheelchair right now.

I want to visit Amsterdam to see how they deal with this. Most people there get around on an (almost scooter-sized) bicycle but they usually _own_ it themselves, so there's incentive to look after it and not allow it to be impounded for blocking the way (or stolen or whatever).

I think the "you don't own it so you can forget about it after the ride" aspect of Lime/Bird/etc is a bug, not a feature.

Exactly. It's just kind of wild that there was apparently no accounting whatsoever for dropoffs/pickups/retrievals, i.e. all the things you'd have to think about if you did this with cars.

Especially as I recall, they were kind of halfway there with the deal where anyone could pick them up and charge them for the company?

Probably because cars are littering and polluting cities to a much greater degree; the people making these arguments are invariably drivers to whom the impacts of cars on the urban environment seem to invisible.

Invariably? Right now I ride a bicycle to where I work 4-5x per week, and make car trips maybe 1-3x per week. The nearest grocery store is across a 7-lane stroad. I would believe the externalities of cars are an order of magnitude worse than those of scooters.

But if we're introducing NewThing with new externalities, we should still try to mitigate them. As NewThing becomes ExistingThing, the overton window narrows around norms of its use. The overton window around scooters is still wide open!

If your car is parked illegally, you get ticketed and maybe towed. The threat of enforcement keeps no-parking areas free of cars. (This works in part because cities ticket the _registrant_ of the car -- not the user, who is often impossible to tie to the act.) I think my point is: should we have rules and norms like this around scooters too?

The process is working fine. Scooters are far less likely to block sidewalks these days, because the apps now require riders to photograph where they left them and lock them up. Improper parking can result in a fine.

It's exactly these kind of tweaks that are appropriate, not bans.

Oh cool, I didn't know this.

I agree that they shouldn't be banned; I just also like my idea of helping yourself to a free one if it's clearly been discarded and not taken care of. :)