5 ms·

No the purpose of this legislation is to provide a one stop shop for businesses that would have to interact with city departments anyways: scooters with SFMTA,

No the purpose of this legislation is to provide a one stop shop for businesses that would have to interact with city departments anyways: scooters with SFMTA, rental startups with DBI or planning. It is not in theory supposed to be a gatekeeper for businesses that can operate independently of local regulation, though Mar has written bad legislation before. The Hacker News outrage is non-sensical. These are businesses that would have to interact with the city no matter what; a single department instead of many is a strict improvement from status quo. The United States used to have an office of emerging technology too, and it was for the most part very good. Their reports are fun to read.

BurningFrog 7y ago
I'm not ruling out that you're right. Only time will tell, I guess. Though, if this is such a reasonable, common sense idea, there must be other cities that have also implemented something like it. What are their track records?
- shuckles 7y ago
  This is a great question, and I wish it were the direction the larger discussion took instead of hysteria. I'm not sure about other examples, and the USA's office of emerging technology was more of an advisory body to Congress than a regulatory invention. I'm not certain that any city has had quite the mix of bureaucratic morass and eager solutionism of San Francisco. A single point of contact with latitude to interpret existing law for new use cases is, per many, the advantage of more authoritarian governments. It would maybe behoove our community to capture this office and use it to preempt more conservative city departments. This is coverage of the proposal from a year ago. It is the outcome of a process to actually _improve_ what everyone can agree was a totally disastrous rollout of scooters in SF, with blame to be assigned to both the city and operators: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/11/emerging-technologies-scooters-uber-lyft-robots.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/11/eme... Furthermore, the above makes it even more clear that the proposal only applies to people who are trying to test products that use sidewalk and road spaces.

BurningFrog 7y ago

I'm not ruling out that you're right. Only time will tell, I guess. Though, if this is such a reasonable, common sense idea, there must be other cities that have also implemented something like it. What are their track records?

shuckles 7y ago
This is a great question, and I wish it were the direction the larger discussion took instead of hysteria. I'm not sure about other examples, and the USA's office of emerging technology was more of an advisory body to Congress than a regulatory invention. I'm not certain that any city has had quite the mix of bureaucratic morass and eager solutionism of San Francisco. A single point of contact with latitude to interpret existing law for new use cases is, per many, the advantage of more authoritarian governments. It would maybe behoove our community to capture this office and use it to preempt more conservative city departments. This is coverage of the proposal from a year ago. It is the outcome of a process to actually _improve_ what everyone can agree was a totally disastrous rollout of scooters in SF, with blame to be assigned to both the city and operators: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/11/emerging-technologies-scooters-uber-lyft-robots.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/11/eme... Furthermore, the above makes it even more clear that the proposal only applies to people who are trying to test products that use sidewalk and road spaces.