7 ms·

Bird talk about making transportation more environmentally friendly, yet it turns out people are driving the scooters to and from their locations every day... i

Bird talk about making transportation more environmentally friendly, yet it turns out people are driving the scooters to and from their locations every day... it wouldn't be surprising if the scooters are traveling more miles in the back of a gas powered vehicle than they do each day in actual rides.

eriken 8y ago
This is an awesome example of how tricky it is to innovate and regulate towards cleaner environmental behaviour.
- jorleif 8y ago
  This is commercial enterprise, not regulation. Taxation could simply make driving them around too expensive.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Tax the fuel to cover the total externalities
  - gambiting 8y ago
    Going forward we'll have to figure out how to tax electricity used for charging electric cars(probably special chargers that have a car-taxed tariff).
    - isostatic 8y ago
      Why? Does electricity used by cars have more externalities than electricity used by a washing machine?
      - gambiting 8y ago
        No, but at the moment(at least over here in UK) the tax on petrol and diesel covers road building/maintenance for the entire country. With this tax slowly disappearing, we will have to find another way to tax people who use the roads, and the best way to do that is to tax the fuel they use as it's directly proportional to their use. Same reason why heating/farming oil doesn't have this tax, even though it's technically just diesel and your diesel car would happily run on it. Yes, the electricity used in your car is the same as the one used in your washing machine, but it should be taxed more because of its use, exactly the same as we do with oil already.
        isostatic 8y ago
        Petrol tax goes into the exchequer, it's not ringfenced for the roads. Most roads are funded from council tax in any case. Petrol and VED raises £33b a year, but total road spending (including local councils) is under £10b. The solution to rationing road usage and paying for their use is road charging (with heavier vehicles paying proportionally more based on axel weight, and different charges depending how congested the roads are) which should pay for the maintenance of the roads, new road building, and renting the land to have the roads on.
        chriswarbo 8y ago
        This is kind of a perverse incentive though: - Discourage "bad" thing (driving, drinking, smoking, sugar, ...) by applying heavy taxes - Occurrence of that thing goes down - Complain about falling of tax revenue I'm generally in favour of applying taxes like this, but they need to be based on the actual harm/externalities, and be targetted effectively. Taxing electricity-used-for-vehicles seems easy to game, and only indirectly related to harm. It might be more effective to tax fossil fuels, both for transport and electricity generation, due to their environmental problems; and tax ownership of vehicles to cover expenses (infrastructure, medical care, ...) and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? (Although it's currently perfectly legal to alter odometers, as long as it's not used to defraud someone when selling the vehicle)
        gambiting 8y ago
        >>and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; If you mean VED I don't think that achieves anything, perhaps only discouraging people from buying cars with particularly high CO2 emissions, but if you can afford a sports car with 200g/km+ emissions, you can probably afford the annual VED on it. Besides, with VED refresh recently it almost doesn't matter, you only discourage people from buying expensive vehicles as they incur extra tax due to their purchase price, not their emissions. >>perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom, and obviously it's not illegal to use your car abroad. Taxing fuel has the nice property of the taxes going into the budget of the country where you buy it, so the assumption is that visitors to the UK will buy fuel here and contribute at least a bit to the UK road budget - and the same goes for British drivers going abroad.
      - usrusr 8y ago
        Washing machines don't use roads.
        isostatic 8y ago
        So you want to tax the usage of roads, not the fuel. Tax the fuel to cover the externalities of that (pollution) Tax the road use to cover the externalities of that (cost of using the road)
      - s73v3r_ 8y ago
        Wear and tear on the roads done by driving cars.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Why? We're still in the phase of giving out huge subsidies for them. More likely would be a general weight-miles tax to cover repairing the roads.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        How much money do we pay to keep the middle east from devolving into all-out war and keeping a stable oil price?
        pjc50 8y ago
        Eh? Currently or in the future? The war is mostly already there; while Iran and Saudi aren't directly shooting at each other they've on opposite sides of the wars in Syria and Yemen.
        isostatic 8y ago
        Over the last 50 years the US government has spent trillions of dollars and thousands of american lives on keeping the oil flowing from the gulf, directly funding the current shooting wars, but only to a level where the oil carries on flowing. That's a massive subsidy
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - usrusr 8y ago
    Doesn't work if it's teens converting family money into personal money. That is a situation with some surprising similarities to money laundering.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      Why is that a concern to anyone other than the person who pays the bils (presumably the parents) No different to someone mining bitcoin using their parent's electricity, or someone delivering pizzas using their parents car
CalRobert 8y ago
Even if the _only_ thing Bird does is enable people not to use parking spaces, and thereby permit the land for such to be allocated to other things (housing, retail, parks, etc.) that is a huge boon. It should also mean reduced vmt (for cars at least) meaning more lives saved, especially those of people walking or cycling since these scooters are in city centres, where cars are especially dangerous. Similarly one van making grocery deliveries to 20 people is generally a _lot_ better than 20 people driving to the grocery store.
- joosters 8y ago
  I challenge you to find just one example of land that has been repurposed from parking spaces into something else, because of Bird or some other scooter company. ...and will this land, if it even exists, be larger than the amount of sidewalk space that Bird has repurposed into scooter parking spaces?
  - lajhsdfkl 8y ago
    >I challenge you to find just one example of land that has been repurposed from parking spaces into something else, because of Bird or some other scooter company. These companies have existed for how long? The point is that if more and more people switch from using cars to using alternative transportation options we may move away from being a car centric society.
    - joosters 8y ago
      These companies have existed for how long? It was you who chose it as a measure of success for the company! It'd be difficult to find any examples even if the scope was widened to include bike hire schemes, which have been around for almost a decade. I agree that it'd be great if we could switch from using cars, however I'm not sure that scooter hire companies are the way to do this. Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters? The answer isn't clear, but I'm worried because of the excessive waste generated by the cycle hire companies like Mobike and Ofo. I expect we'll see the same problems with the scooter hire companies too.
newfoundglory 8y ago
It could still be environmentally friendly, depends on the total truck distance vs total scooter ride distance across the fleet (since a truck carries multiple scooters). Harder to work out what kind of transport the scooter miles are replacing, though - if it's walking, then it's obviously not helping.
jonknee 8y ago
The article also notes lots of scooters in the car at the same time, which pretty much negates this issue.

eriken 8y ago

This is an awesome example of how tricky it is to innovate and regulate towards cleaner environmental behaviour.

jorleif 8y ago
This is commercial enterprise, not regulation. Taxation could simply make driving them around too expensive.
isostatic 8y ago
Tax the fuel to cover the total externalities
- gambiting 8y ago
  Going forward we'll have to figure out how to tax electricity used for charging electric cars(probably special chargers that have a car-taxed tariff).
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Why? Does electricity used by cars have more externalities than electricity used by a washing machine?
    - gambiting 8y ago
      No, but at the moment(at least over here in UK) the tax on petrol and diesel covers road building/maintenance for the entire country. With this tax slowly disappearing, we will have to find another way to tax people who use the roads, and the best way to do that is to tax the fuel they use as it's directly proportional to their use. Same reason why heating/farming oil doesn't have this tax, even though it's technically just diesel and your diesel car would happily run on it. Yes, the electricity used in your car is the same as the one used in your washing machine, but it should be taxed more because of its use, exactly the same as we do with oil already.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        Petrol tax goes into the exchequer, it's not ringfenced for the roads. Most roads are funded from council tax in any case. Petrol and VED raises £33b a year, but total road spending (including local councils) is under £10b. The solution to rationing road usage and paying for their use is road charging (with heavier vehicles paying proportionally more based on axel weight, and different charges depending how congested the roads are) which should pay for the maintenance of the roads, new road building, and renting the land to have the roads on.
      - chriswarbo 8y ago
        This is kind of a perverse incentive though: - Discourage "bad" thing (driving, drinking, smoking, sugar, ...) by applying heavy taxes - Occurrence of that thing goes down - Complain about falling of tax revenue I'm generally in favour of applying taxes like this, but they need to be based on the actual harm/externalities, and be targetted effectively. Taxing electricity-used-for-vehicles seems easy to game, and only indirectly related to harm. It might be more effective to tax fossil fuels, both for transport and electricity generation, due to their environmental problems; and tax ownership of vehicles to cover expenses (infrastructure, medical care, ...) and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? (Although it's currently perfectly legal to alter odometers, as long as it's not used to defraud someone when selling the vehicle)
        gambiting 8y ago
        >>and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; If you mean VED I don't think that achieves anything, perhaps only discouraging people from buying cars with particularly high CO2 emissions, but if you can afford a sports car with 200g/km+ emissions, you can probably afford the annual VED on it. Besides, with VED refresh recently it almost doesn't matter, you only discourage people from buying expensive vehicles as they incur extra tax due to their purchase price, not their emissions. >>perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom, and obviously it's not illegal to use your car abroad. Taxing fuel has the nice property of the taxes going into the budget of the country where you buy it, so the assumption is that visitors to the UK will buy fuel here and contribute at least a bit to the UK road budget - and the same goes for British drivers going abroad.
    - usrusr 8y ago
      Washing machines don't use roads.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        So you want to tax the usage of roads, not the fuel. Tax the fuel to cover the externalities of that (pollution) Tax the road use to cover the externalities of that (cost of using the road)
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      Wear and tear on the roads done by driving cars.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Why? We're still in the phase of giving out huge subsidies for them. More likely would be a general weight-miles tax to cover repairing the roads.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      How much money do we pay to keep the middle east from devolving into all-out war and keeping a stable oil price?
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Eh? Currently or in the future? The war is mostly already there; while Iran and Saudi aren't directly shooting at each other they've on opposite sides of the wars in Syria and Yemen.
        isostatic 8y ago
        Over the last 50 years the US government has spent trillions of dollars and thousands of american lives on keeping the oil flowing from the gulf, directly funding the current shooting wars, but only to a level where the oil carries on flowing. That's a massive subsidy
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- usrusr 8y ago
  Doesn't work if it's teens converting family money into personal money. That is a situation with some surprising similarities to money laundering.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Why is that a concern to anyone other than the person who pays the bils (presumably the parents) No different to someone mining bitcoin using their parent's electricity, or someone delivering pizzas using their parents car

CalRobert 8y ago

Even if the _only_ thing Bird does is enable people not to use parking spaces, and thereby permit the land for such to be allocated to other things (housing, retail, parks, etc.) that is a huge boon. It should also mean reduced vmt (for cars at least) meaning more lives saved, especially those of people walking or cycling since these scooters are in city centres, where cars are especially dangerous. Similarly one van making grocery deliveries to 20 people is generally a _lot_ better than 20 people driving to the grocery store.

joosters 8y ago
I challenge you to find just one example of land that has been repurposed from parking spaces into something else, because of Bird or some other scooter company. ...and will this land, if it even exists, be larger than the amount of sidewalk space that Bird has repurposed into scooter parking spaces?
- lajhsdfkl 8y ago
  >I challenge you to find just one example of land that has been repurposed from parking spaces into something else, because of Bird or some other scooter company. These companies have existed for how long? The point is that if more and more people switch from using cars to using alternative transportation options we may move away from being a car centric society.
  - joosters 8y ago
    These companies have existed for how long? It was you who chose it as a measure of success for the company! It'd be difficult to find any examples even if the scope was widened to include bike hire schemes, which have been around for almost a decade. I agree that it'd be great if we could switch from using cars, however I'm not sure that scooter hire companies are the way to do this. Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters? The answer isn't clear, but I'm worried because of the excessive waste generated by the cycle hire companies like Mobike and Ofo. I expect we'll see the same problems with the scooter hire companies too.

newfoundglory 8y ago

It could still be environmentally friendly, depends on the total truck distance vs total scooter ride distance across the fleet (since a truck carries multiple scooters). Harder to work out what kind of transport the scooter miles are replacing, though - if it's walking, then it's obviously not helping.

jonknee 8y ago

The article also notes lots of scooters in the car at the same time, which pretty much negates this issue.