16 ms·

SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

242 points by in3d 7y ago

aurizon 7y ago
competitors felt fear = bribery - as usual...
wallace_f 7y ago
What's the end game of all of this corruption with governments picking winners and losers? I mean there is a difference between reasonable regulations and just outright picking 1-2 cheaters who bribed you for the right to offer a service that supposedly free people are willing to pay for out of pocket. We get stories about this in Russia and China and call it Putinism and Corruption all the time.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  We've lost the ability to evaluate behavior as it is in itself. Before we judge, we have to find out whether it was a "good" or "bad" person who did it. If that doesn't help, we can perhaps find some innuendo to the effect that the actor acted as an "agent" or even "asset" of some known-"bad" "foreign" power. When we fill our brains with garbage, only garbage can come out of them.
  - trophycase 7y ago
    In an extremely complex modern society it's nearly impossible to tell the effects that certain actions and policies will have. Popular discourse around politics and economics support this theory, since almost nobody can seem to agree. This leads to one of the best heuristics for evaluating the merits of an action as the intention of the actor or the ethics of the actor.
    - xvilka 7y ago
      Right to the point. Quite similar to the ideas of Nickolas Nassim Taleb. And part of the reason VC invest in so many "foolish" ventures, but "foolish" only retrospectively.
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      That is possibly the worst heuristic for evaluating an action. You may be right that it is somewhat natural to arrive at it, but it is by no means a good heuristic. And why is it bad? For one, real intentions are inscrutable, so it is very easy to ascribe whatever intentions you want to an action. For another, the intentions behind an action have essentially no correlation with the effects of the action, at least insofar as the intentions are not explicitly malicious (e.g. 'hurt people').
      - harimau777 7y ago
        Is there an alternative that you feel works better? The most common alternative that I can see is "you can do whatever you want as long as it follows the letter of the law". However, that doesn't seem to work well either.
        tsimionescu 7y ago
        I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The question I was essentially answering was 'how can we tell whether an action was "good" or not?'. Rather than looking at the intentions of the author, I think you need to look at the effects, or some proxy thereof (are people I know poorer/richer? How many people died because of this action? Or whatever else is easily measurable and pertinent)
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      That strategy seems like a sure way to get taken for a ride. The only way we can infer the intentions or ethics of other people is to observe their actions and the effects of those actions. The marketing usually lies about squishy things like intentions.
Haga 7y ago
Nobody wants nice guys.. Everyone wants all out war and lipservice
nabdab 7y ago
Sounds like standard bureaucracy. They didn’t submit the required information in the required form. SF wants startups to behave, that doesn’t mean that behaving startups get to ignore the standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.
- isoskeles 7y ago
  Sounds like they made a mistake in their submission, rather than they wanted to ignore something or get an exception. For such a large city with a huge amount of tax revenue, I would expect the bureaucracy in SF to do a little better with processes like this one. It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance or to give companies time to submit corrections. Obviously this isn’t how it works, like you stated “standard bureaucracy”, but I’d love to see certain parts of government move further away from this mentality of being some punishing Old Testament god to serving the community.
  - nabdab 7y ago
    > It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance Absolutely. It is trivial! And the company making the submission is expected to do that. Which I think is very reasonable, considering that they know the requirements and make the actual submission in the first place. It’s silly to want the reviewers to take on an additional burden in the process just because this one company made a dumb mistake which as you say would have been trivial for them to review and catch.
    - xvector 7y ago
      Reviewers are human. If they can’t use their human reasoning skills deal with something trivial like “Heading A3 should be above this paragraph” then frankly society would be much better off without them, and we should just automate them away rather than wasting our tax dollars on them.
- barney54 7y ago
  I hear you, but let’s be honest about what this means—more work for attorneys...
kd5bjo 7y ago
The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world, which is exactly what happened, and there’s an ongoing appeal right now. The founder’s take-away from this should have been “double-check the details, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy” instead of “optimize for the short term”. This was an unfortunate but entirely preventable outcome.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Classic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make trivially fixable mistakes.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    I've made non-trivial numerical errors on my tax returns and the CRA just calls me up and asks, "did you mean X?" It's absurd to punish someone because the formatting was wrong.
  - mrighele 7y ago
    Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is quite clear what you meant. In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you open yourself to lawsuits, corruotion charges and lenghty trials
    - ulucs 7y ago
      I don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.
baby 7y ago
As a non-driver I’ve been following the adoption of e-scooters closely and SF has been full of corruption and anti-scooter behavior since the beginning. It’s been hard to watch.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
argonaut 7y ago
Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying. But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech entrepreneurs already know this: Airbnb and Uber proved this point long ago.
- mstade 7y ago
  > But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale. E.g. when I incorporated my company, I had to send in the same application four times, each time paying an additional fee. Reason was I had minor, pointless really, mistakes in the application, a box I didn't realize had to be ticked, name in the date field and date in the name field, that sort of thing. The data entry people at the government agency could have easily resolved any mistakes with a phone call, but instead I get a letter in the mail a couple of weeks later, saying there's an error but not what the error is. So I have to call and ask, and of course they had no record of what the error was so we had to go over the application on the phone and find them. You'd think they'd tell me about the other errors then, but no, I had to do this four times. It took almost two months to get a simple form approved. I wish that was my only story of wasting time on bureaucracy, but there are plenty more where that came from.
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    As a general rule that is particularily effective when dealing with government is that it is always easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission. Government officials will always choose the easiest path forward - and that is almost always inaction.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale. It doesn't have to be this way. I incorporated my first company in Chicago, and was stunned with how helpful the bureaucrats were. Yes, it was a little complex, especially in the years before "startups" were a thing, and you could do stuff online. But each department I had to work with had people who would sit me down at their desk and explain what they did, why I should care, and how to fill out the forms properly. Maybe the difference is that back then, you were expected to form a company in person, and not do everything online all by yourself and be an expert from day one. A massive thanks to the Illinois Department of Revenue people in the basement of the Thompson Center for all their openness and hand-holding. (In spite of all this, I still moved the company to another state a few years later because of Chicago + Illinois taxes and corruption.)
m0llusk 7y ago
It would be nice to have a linter for government forms.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  There is. It's called an attorney.
  - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
    You can hire a program to review code too, but that isn't a linter.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Online forms have them.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  Organizations that are good at bidding use employees otherwise uninvolved with a particular bid to verify that the instructions are followed. I have a friend who does this for research grant applications.
randomsearch 7y ago
And what a disaster Airbnb and Uber have been for the cities they have invaded. That’s why people legislate against them.
- mikojan 7y ago
  Who is down voting this? It is correct. Uber is contributing to traffic jams, environmental catastrophe and the continued deterioration of public transport. Airbnb is contributing to a housing crisis in many major cities. Of course,the public sector created a lot of the problems Uber alleviates on an individual basis but that doesn't change the fact that is a really bad solution.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Deterioration of public transport is political. NIMBY's don't want public transport in their backyard, out of fear that it might bring in "undesirable" folk. Uber and Lyft have zilch to do with this. If anything, these services make public transport more effective by solving the "last mile" problem for its users and thus obviating the need for a privately-owned car. Airbnb is contributing to a housing crisis? You know the way out of that "crisis": Build more housing. Or more hotels, since the scarcity of hotel services is clearly what's driving Airbnb use in the first place.
    - mikojan 7y ago
      This is just corporate propaganda. Studies have repeatedly shown that a significant number of people are using Uber INSTEAD of public transport
      - rpedela 7y ago
        If Uber/Lyft didn't exist, public transportation in US would still be horrible for a myriad of reasons. I don't know if Uber/Lyft make things worse, but they certainly aren't the root cause.
        7y ago
summertimelover 7y ago
worked there, run by a bunch of bunker creatures who care only and solely about their pensions.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ozzyoli 7y ago
This article is anthropomorphising a company. The journalist has no way of knowing if everyone at Skip was a nice guy. I had to complain to the city twice about a Skip distributor’s aggressive strategy of tying their scooters in the early morning to every available bike hoop (and even trash cans) around the Twitter building. The city has rules about how many scooters can be tied to a public bike hoop and at least one person at Skip was not nice and was ignoring that rule.
asah 7y ago
Comments in this thread are missing the actual takeaway: when interfacing with legacy systems and bureaucracies, get help and don't DIY. Experience counts and experienced people know what to do when the form talks about "A3" which doesn't exist - or they know who to call.
chubot 7y ago
Huh I had been wondering what happened to Skip. They were the first scooter I tried and I had a great experience. After they stopped servicing SF, I tried Uber's red scooters and they really sucked. There was not enough torque to get up 90% of the hills in SF. I downloaded the Spin app in frustration but on one attempt wasn't able to get a scooter. Skip indeed seemed to be doing the best out of all these companies.
souterrain 7y ago
Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved. If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements? Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail to deliver on other requirements. I have worked for a company where I had spent 80 hours building a demo for a potential client. We did not make it to the demo phase due to a failure of our proposal writing team to address some technicality in the written proposal. I don't hold this against the client we lost; this falls on those whose jobs are solely writing and submitting technical proposals.
- xvector 7y ago
  I think this is ridiculous. Formality to the absurdist extreme. Any mildly competent human being would overlook the letters “A3” not being above a certain safety paragraph. If a robot were processing these applications then the error might be forgivable. But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human. I think the sort of person that would reject Skip’s application is someone that society would be better off without them in their current position. Hopefully one day they realize how their incompetence is hurting both people and progress, and either work towards using those reasoning skills or find a position better suited towards them.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    >But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human. Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down voted comments jumped right to bribery for example. Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually wants it to be.
    - xvector 7y ago
      I really think that no one would judge a reviewer for adding a heading where it needed to be. This is trivial, there isn’t really a political connotation here. If a reviewer cannot do something trivial like this, then we don’t need them anyways. If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated, just run the application through a software that checks for word count and header presence and call it a day, and use those tax dollars towards a cause that would actually benefit society.
acd 7y ago
Seems like these scooters ended up else where to cities which were not clever enough to say no. Sweden got Bird scooters the city could have said no to buy and throw scooter companies. Scooters litter the streets which makes it hard for people with vision disabilities. Scooters tend to ride to fast for other pedestrians safety etc. Frankly I do not like these scooters. We have bicycles made from iron and aluminium they are fully recyclable vs this electronic plastic e-waste ie scooters.
newintellectual 7y ago
Startups should shun SF and California generally and operate in appropriately low cost, low bureaucracy venues.
umeshunni 7y ago
Probably because they didn't pay off whomever in city hall was in charge of these licenses
donarb 7y ago
I was surprised back when Segways were first sold, San Francisco was among the first cities to ban them on sidewalks.
quotemstr 7y ago
In lots of arenas of life --- this one included --- if you naively follow the advice that nice and well-meaning people give you, you're going to get hosed.
- ryloric 7y ago
  I'm sorry, give you what?
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    advice
tempsy 7y ago
FWIW I hardly ever see people riding scooters in San Francisco anymore. They all more than doubled their prices in the last year to $1 + .32/min + tax, which works out to more than $20/hour! At that price, it’s cheaper to just use Uber.
- rsanek 7y ago
  I use them frequently and see people on them all the time, especially during commute hours. What Ubers have you taken in the city that work out to less than $20/hour? Even for Uber Pool that's significantly less expensive than what I've experienced.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    The distance you can cover in a car is obviously much greater than that with a scooter in the same amount of time. And it kills the use case of keeping the same scooter rented for a few hours while you hop around and do errands or go around the city since it’s too expensive now.
joshe 7y ago
A lesson for entrepreneurs, it really is better to go around the bureaucracy. Uber and Lyft would not exist if they had "played nice". We can imagine a world where certain regulation would have improved their service for riders and drivers. But in the real world, if they had complied with every ask, cities would have crippled them with requirements when they first started. (Ok, you can do your Lyft thing, but let's start with 100 cars, for say, the first 3 years). A lesson for regulators, regulation creates environments where the people who succeed are the ones who work the refs and skirt intent. These are probably less likely to be the best companies or the nicest people. So a quick call, like "hey, put A3 in here or we can't count it" could make the world a little better. And if you would prefer to regulate people who follow the intent and not the letter of the law, you need to govern that way.
- tempsy 7y ago
  Eh. To me the whole VC e-scooter industry is a “stupid game, stupid prize” sector that won’t be around in a few years anyway. I hardly ever see anyone riding scooters in SF. The scooter companies keep raising their prices in lock step because they have to, but it’s now gone from $.15/min to $.32-.33/min, which is more than $20/hr with tax. It’s cheaper to just use an Uber. Have no idea who they are targeting with those prices. Kids can’t afford that. Adults would rather take an Uber at those prices.
  - llampx 7y ago
    What do you mean? I've always wanted to perch precariously on a machine that's statistically much more likely to leave me bruised and bleeding on the side of the road than the other "fresh air" alternatives, bicycling and walking, and be a hazard to others while I am at it. :)
- P_I_Staker 7y ago
  This is a massive problem though. Businesses should be able to work with the bureaucracy. They shouldn't be incentivized to break the law. The benefits of circumventing the bureaucracy should not exceed the costs.
say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
It's surprising that e-scooters get more attention than the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry on Hacker News. State regulators are playing the same games with cannabis entrepreneurs all over the United States. They do it because they can.
lendinggroup 7y ago
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eddyionescu 7y ago
To add more context, Skip wouldn't have been chosen even if its application were formatted perfectly, you can see the scores here: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2019/10/final_revised_summary_table.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume... And the completed rubrics of each of the applications here: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2019/10/final_revised_permit_application_evaluation_-_all_applications.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume... With other related documents here: https://www.sfmta.com/reports/2019-scooter-application-evaluation https://www.sfmta.com/reports/2019-scooter-application-evalu... While the rubric grading might have seemed overly strict and bureaucratic, keep in mind that at the end of the day it's intended to stand up in court because the SFMTA could get sued given how high the stakes are and would have to demonstrate that it was a fair and transparent process. As well, the priorities are very different now compared to 2018. The initial pilot accepted open-ended proposals and had the goal of determining whether scooters were in the public interest at all - Scoot and Skip won because their applications addressed concerns that none of the other applicants did (https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share-permit-and-pilot-program https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share-permit-...). This process was essentially an RFP where the SFMTA was clear on what they wanted, meaning that the firms with more operating experience, better equipment, and a stronger financial position had an advantage.
- Drunk_Engineer 7y ago
  Looking at the application, Skip appears to have been screwed over on other categories too. They got a low score on "sustainability" even though they rebuild/repair broken scooters instead of throwing in the trash (like many of the other applicants). And they have actual employees instead of contractors, yet they scored low on the employment metric. The broader issue is why even have an artificial limit for scooters? Imagine if SFMTA limited roads to just 2 car manufacturers and a set number of vehicles...
  - Jommi 7y ago
    You need to limit scooter players because otherwise it because a game of funding and attrition, multiple companies dumping city full fo scooters in a competition for availability. All other qualities will be overlooked.
imp800388 7y ago
Start ups and tech companies that want to innvoate definately need a new city to go to. SF is not a good place to start something new and innovative. Why not start a new city say, in an open spot somewhere with minimal regulations and let tech companies build and innvoate as much as they want? Sure, in the beginning you need to provide incentives for some companies to go there. but once the jobs are there, people will definately follow.
- themagician 7y ago
  Like California City? SF and NYC are hotspots because that’s where the money is. That’s where the rich people are. They like to invest locally when possible. They like to see the billboards of “their” companies on the way to the airport. It’s an ego thing. Obviously this is a generalization and not true in all cases. But it’s true enough and that’s why it’s the way that it is.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
artsyca 7y ago
There's a story about a bowl of M&M's that made up a famous rock act's rider it was a heuristic to determine the fitness of the venue if they couldn't get a bowl of brown M&M's ready how could they be trusted with the safety of an entire soundstage?

242 points by in3d 7y ago

competitors felt fear = bribery - as usual...

What's the end game of all of this corruption with governments picking winners and losers? I mean there is a difference between reasonable regulations and just outright picking 1-2 cheaters who bribed you for the right to offer a service that supposedly free people are willing to pay for out of pocket. We get stories about this in Russia and China and call it Putinism and Corruption all the time.

jessaustin 7y ago
We've lost the ability to evaluate behavior as it is in itself. Before we judge, we have to find out whether it was a "good" or "bad" person who did it. If that doesn't help, we can perhaps find some innuendo to the effect that the actor acted as an "agent" or even "asset" of some known-"bad" "foreign" power. When we fill our brains with garbage, only garbage can come out of them.
- trophycase 7y ago
  In an extremely complex modern society it's nearly impossible to tell the effects that certain actions and policies will have. Popular discourse around politics and economics support this theory, since almost nobody can seem to agree. This leads to one of the best heuristics for evaluating the merits of an action as the intention of the actor or the ethics of the actor.
  - xvilka 7y ago
    Right to the point. Quite similar to the ideas of Nickolas Nassim Taleb. And part of the reason VC invest in so many "foolish" ventures, but "foolish" only retrospectively.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    That is possibly the worst heuristic for evaluating an action. You may be right that it is somewhat natural to arrive at it, but it is by no means a good heuristic. And why is it bad? For one, real intentions are inscrutable, so it is very easy to ascribe whatever intentions you want to an action. For another, the intentions behind an action have essentially no correlation with the effects of the action, at least insofar as the intentions are not explicitly malicious (e.g. 'hurt people').
    - harimau777 7y ago
      Is there an alternative that you feel works better? The most common alternative that I can see is "you can do whatever you want as long as it follows the letter of the law". However, that doesn't seem to work well either.
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
        I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The question I was essentially answering was 'how can we tell whether an action was "good" or not?'. Rather than looking at the intentions of the author, I think you need to look at the effects, or some proxy thereof (are people I know poorer/richer? How many people died because of this action? Or whatever else is easily measurable and pertinent)
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    That strategy seems like a sure way to get taken for a ride. The only way we can infer the intentions or ethics of other people is to observe their actions and the effects of those actions. The marketing usually lies about squishy things like intentions.

Haga 7y ago

Nobody wants nice guys.. Everyone wants all out war and lipservice

nabdab 7y ago

Sounds like standard bureaucracy. They didn’t submit the required information in the required form. SF wants startups to behave, that doesn’t mean that behaving startups get to ignore the standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.

isoskeles 7y ago
Sounds like they made a mistake in their submission, rather than they wanted to ignore something or get an exception. For such a large city with a huge amount of tax revenue, I would expect the bureaucracy in SF to do a little better with processes like this one. It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance or to give companies time to submit corrections. Obviously this isn’t how it works, like you stated “standard bureaucracy”, but I’d love to see certain parts of government move further away from this mentality of being some punishing Old Testament god to serving the community.
- nabdab 7y ago
  > It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance Absolutely. It is trivial! And the company making the submission is expected to do that. Which I think is very reasonable, considering that they know the requirements and make the actual submission in the first place. It’s silly to want the reviewers to take on an additional burden in the process just because this one company made a dumb mistake which as you say would have been trivial for them to review and catch.
  - xvector 7y ago
    Reviewers are human. If they can’t use their human reasoning skills deal with something trivial like “Heading A3 should be above this paragraph” then frankly society would be much better off without them, and we should just automate them away rather than wasting our tax dollars on them.
barney54 7y ago
I hear you, but let’s be honest about what this means—more work for attorneys...

kd5bjo 7y ago

The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world, which is exactly what happened, and there’s an ongoing appeal right now. The founder’s take-away from this should have been “double-check the details, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy” instead of “optimize for the short term”. This was an unfortunate but entirely preventable outcome.

IshKebab 7y ago
Classic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make trivially fixable mistakes.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I've made non-trivial numerical errors on my tax returns and the CRA just calls me up and asks, "did you mean X?" It's absurd to punish someone because the formatting was wrong.
- mrighele 7y ago
  Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is quite clear what you meant. In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you open yourself to lawsuits, corruotion charges and lenghty trials
  - ulucs 7y ago
    I don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.

baby 7y ago

As a non-driver I’ve been following the adoption of e-scooters closely and SF has been full of corruption and anti-scooter behavior since the beginning. It’s been hard to watch.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

argonaut 7y ago

Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying. But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech entrepreneurs already know this: Airbnb and Uber proved this point long ago.

mstade 7y ago
> But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale. E.g. when I incorporated my company, I had to send in the same application four times, each time paying an additional fee. Reason was I had minor, pointless really, mistakes in the application, a box I didn't realize had to be ticked, name in the date field and date in the name field, that sort of thing. The data entry people at the government agency could have easily resolved any mistakes with a phone call, but instead I get a letter in the mail a couple of weeks later, saying there's an error but not what the error is. So I have to call and ask, and of course they had no record of what the error was so we had to go over the application on the phone and find them. You'd think they'd tell me about the other errors then, but no, I had to do this four times. It took almost two months to get a simple form approved. I wish that was my only story of wasting time on bureaucracy, but there are plenty more where that came from.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  As a general rule that is particularily effective when dealing with government is that it is always easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission. Government officials will always choose the easiest path forward - and that is almost always inaction.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale. It doesn't have to be this way. I incorporated my first company in Chicago, and was stunned with how helpful the bureaucrats were. Yes, it was a little complex, especially in the years before "startups" were a thing, and you could do stuff online. But each department I had to work with had people who would sit me down at their desk and explain what they did, why I should care, and how to fill out the forms properly. Maybe the difference is that back then, you were expected to form a company in person, and not do everything online all by yourself and be an expert from day one. A massive thanks to the Illinois Department of Revenue people in the basement of the Thompson Center for all their openness and hand-holding. (In spite of all this, I still moved the company to another state a few years later because of Chicago + Illinois taxes and corruption.)

m0llusk 7y ago

It would be nice to have a linter for government forms.

reaperducer 7y ago
There is. It's called an attorney.
- edflsafoiewq 7y ago
  You can hire a program to review code too, but that isn't a linter.
marcosdumay 7y ago
Online forms have them.
greglindahl 7y ago
Organizations that are good at bidding use employees otherwise uninvolved with a particular bid to verify that the instructions are followed. I have a friend who does this for research grant applications.

randomsearch 7y ago

And what a disaster Airbnb and Uber have been for the cities they have invaded. That’s why people legislate against them.

mikojan 7y ago
Who is down voting this? It is correct. Uber is contributing to traffic jams, environmental catastrophe and the continued deterioration of public transport. Airbnb is contributing to a housing crisis in many major cities. Of course,the public sector created a lot of the problems Uber alleviates on an individual basis but that doesn't change the fact that is a really bad solution.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Deterioration of public transport is political. NIMBY's don't want public transport in their backyard, out of fear that it might bring in "undesirable" folk. Uber and Lyft have zilch to do with this. If anything, these services make public transport more effective by solving the "last mile" problem for its users and thus obviating the need for a privately-owned car. Airbnb is contributing to a housing crisis? You know the way out of that "crisis": Build more housing. Or more hotels, since the scarcity of hotel services is clearly what's driving Airbnb use in the first place.
  - mikojan 7y ago
    This is just corporate propaganda. Studies have repeatedly shown that a significant number of people are using Uber INSTEAD of public transport
    - rpedela 7y ago
      If Uber/Lyft didn't exist, public transportation in US would still be horrible for a myriad of reasons. I don't know if Uber/Lyft make things worse, but they certainly aren't the root cause.
      - 7y ago

summertimelover 7y ago

worked there, run by a bunch of bunker creatures who care only and solely about their pensions.

deleted 7y ago

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ozzyoli 7y ago

This article is anthropomorphising a company. The journalist has no way of knowing if everyone at Skip was a nice guy. I had to complain to the city twice about a Skip distributor’s aggressive strategy of tying their scooters in the early morning to every available bike hoop (and even trash cans) around the Twitter building. The city has rules about how many scooters can be tied to a public bike hoop and at least one person at Skip was not nice and was ignoring that rule.

asah 7y ago

Comments in this thread are missing the actual takeaway: when interfacing with legacy systems and bureaucracies, get help and don't DIY. Experience counts and experienced people know what to do when the form talks about "A3" which doesn't exist - or they know who to call.

chubot 7y ago

Huh I had been wondering what happened to Skip. They were the first scooter I tried and I had a great experience. After they stopped servicing SF, I tried Uber's red scooters and they really sucked. There was not enough torque to get up 90% of the hills in SF. I downloaded the Spin app in frustration but on one attempt wasn't able to get a scooter. Skip indeed seemed to be doing the best out of all these companies.

souterrain 7y ago

Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved. If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements? Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail to deliver on other requirements. I have worked for a company where I had spent 80 hours building a demo for a potential client. We did not make it to the demo phase due to a failure of our proposal writing team to address some technicality in the written proposal. I don't hold this against the client we lost; this falls on those whose jobs are solely writing and submitting technical proposals.

xvector 7y ago
I think this is ridiculous. Formality to the absurdist extreme. Any mildly competent human being would overlook the letters “A3” not being above a certain safety paragraph. If a robot were processing these applications then the error might be forgivable. But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human. I think the sort of person that would reject Skip’s application is someone that society would be better off without them in their current position. Hopefully one day they realize how their incompetence is hurting both people and progress, and either work towards using those reasoning skills or find a position better suited towards them.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human. Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down voted comments jumped right to bribery for example. Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually wants it to be.
  - xvector 7y ago
    I really think that no one would judge a reviewer for adding a heading where it needed to be. This is trivial, there isn’t really a political connotation here. If a reviewer cannot do something trivial like this, then we don’t need them anyways. If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated, just run the application through a software that checks for word count and header presence and call it a day, and use those tax dollars towards a cause that would actually benefit society.

acd 7y ago

Seems like these scooters ended up else where to cities which were not clever enough to say no. Sweden got Bird scooters the city could have said no to buy and throw scooter companies. Scooters litter the streets which makes it hard for people with vision disabilities. Scooters tend to ride to fast for other pedestrians safety etc. Frankly I do not like these scooters. We have bicycles made from iron and aluminium they are fully recyclable vs this electronic plastic e-waste ie scooters.

newintellectual 7y ago

Startups should shun SF and California generally and operate in appropriately low cost, low bureaucracy venues.

umeshunni 7y ago

Probably because they didn't pay off whomever in city hall was in charge of these licenses

donarb 7y ago

I was surprised back when Segways were first sold, San Francisco was among the first cities to ban them on sidewalks.

quotemstr 7y ago

In lots of arenas of life --- this one included --- if you naively follow the advice that nice and well-meaning people give you, you're going to get hosed.

ryloric 7y ago
I'm sorry, give you what?
- lopmotr 7y ago
  advice

tempsy 7y ago

FWIW I hardly ever see people riding scooters in San Francisco anymore. They all more than doubled their prices in the last year to $1 + .32/min + tax, which works out to more than $20/hour! At that price, it’s cheaper to just use Uber.

rsanek 7y ago
I use them frequently and see people on them all the time, especially during commute hours. What Ubers have you taken in the city that work out to less than $20/hour? Even for Uber Pool that's significantly less expensive than what I've experienced.
- tempsy 7y ago
  The distance you can cover in a car is obviously much greater than that with a scooter in the same amount of time. And it kills the use case of keeping the same scooter rented for a few hours while you hop around and do errands or go around the city since it’s too expensive now.

joshe 7y ago

A lesson for entrepreneurs, it really is better to go around the bureaucracy. Uber and Lyft would not exist if they had "played nice". We can imagine a world where certain regulation would have improved their service for riders and drivers. But in the real world, if they had complied with every ask, cities would have crippled them with requirements when they first started. (Ok, you can do your Lyft thing, but let's start with 100 cars, for say, the first 3 years). A lesson for regulators, regulation creates environments where the people who succeed are the ones who work the refs and skirt intent. These are probably less likely to be the best companies or the nicest people. So a quick call, like "hey, put A3 in here or we can't count it" could make the world a little better. And if you would prefer to regulate people who follow the intent and not the letter of the law, you need to govern that way.

tempsy 7y ago
Eh. To me the whole VC e-scooter industry is a “stupid game, stupid prize” sector that won’t be around in a few years anyway. I hardly ever see anyone riding scooters in SF. The scooter companies keep raising their prices in lock step because they have to, but it’s now gone from $.15/min to $.32-.33/min, which is more than $20/hr with tax. It’s cheaper to just use an Uber. Have no idea who they are targeting with those prices. Kids can’t afford that. Adults would rather take an Uber at those prices.
- llampx 7y ago
  What do you mean? I've always wanted to perch precariously on a machine that's statistically much more likely to leave me bruised and bleeding on the side of the road than the other "fresh air" alternatives, bicycling and walking, and be a hazard to others while I am at it. :)
P_I_Staker 7y ago
This is a massive problem though. Businesses should be able to work with the bureaucracy. They shouldn't be incentivized to break the law. The benefits of circumventing the bureaucracy should not exceed the costs.

say_it_as_it_is 7y ago

It's surprising that e-scooters get more attention than the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry on Hacker News. State regulators are playing the same games with cannabis entrepreneurs all over the United States. They do it because they can.

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eddyionescu 7y ago

To add more context, Skip wouldn't have been chosen even if its application were formatted perfectly, you can see the scores here: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2019/10/final_revised_summary_table.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume... And the completed rubrics of each of the applications here: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2019/10/final_revised_permit_application_evaluation_-_all_applications.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume... With other related documents here: https://www.sfmta.com/reports/2019-scooter-application-evaluation https://www.sfmta.com/reports/2019-scooter-application-evalu... While the rubric grading might have seemed overly strict and bureaucratic, keep in mind that at the end of the day it's intended to stand up in court because the SFMTA could get sued given how high the stakes are and would have to demonstrate that it was a fair and transparent process. As well, the priorities are very different now compared to 2018. The initial pilot accepted open-ended proposals and had the goal of determining whether scooters were in the public interest at all - Scoot and Skip won because their applications addressed concerns that none of the other applicants did (https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share-permit-and-pilot-program https://www.sfmta.com/projects/powered-scooter-share-permit-...). This process was essentially an RFP where the SFMTA was clear on what they wanted, meaning that the firms with more operating experience, better equipment, and a stronger financial position had an advantage.

Drunk_Engineer 7y ago
Looking at the application, Skip appears to have been screwed over on other categories too. They got a low score on "sustainability" even though they rebuild/repair broken scooters instead of throwing in the trash (like many of the other applicants). And they have actual employees instead of contractors, yet they scored low on the employment metric. The broader issue is why even have an artificial limit for scooters? Imagine if SFMTA limited roads to just 2 car manufacturers and a set number of vehicles...
- Jommi 7y ago
  You need to limit scooter players because otherwise it because a game of funding and attrition, multiple companies dumping city full fo scooters in a competition for availability. All other qualities will be overlooked.

imp800388 7y ago

Start ups and tech companies that want to innvoate definately need a new city to go to. SF is not a good place to start something new and innovative. Why not start a new city say, in an open spot somewhere with minimal regulations and let tech companies build and innvoate as much as they want? Sure, in the beginning you need to provide incentives for some companies to go there. but once the jobs are there, people will definately follow.

themagician 7y ago
Like California City? SF and NYC are hotspots because that’s where the money is. That’s where the rich people are. They like to invest locally when possible. They like to see the billboards of “their” companies on the way to the airport. It’s an ego thing. Obviously this is a generalization and not true in all cases. But it’s true enough and that’s why it’s the way that it is.

deleted 7y ago

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artsyca 7y ago

There's a story about a bowl of M&M's that made up a famous rock act's rider it was a heuristic to determine the fitness of the venue if they couldn't get a bowl of brown M&M's ready how could they be trusted with the safety of an entire soundstage?