3 ms·
> injury-inducing street litter If you abandon a car in the middle of the road across two lanes, you'll fairly likely see relatively hefty fines, possibly lose
by marginalia_nu 2y ago
> injury-inducing street litter
If you abandon a car in the middle of the road across two lanes, you'll fairly likely see relatively hefty fines, possibly lose your car. This hurts you, the abandoning party directly.
If you abandon a rental e-scooter in the same way, you'll most likely have no repercussions, and at worst the cheap e-scooter is forfeit which doesn't impact you, the abandoning party at all, and not really the e-scooter company either since they're most likely on a VC funded mission to try to flood the market with cheap e-scooter rentals until the competition drowns.
There's some seriously skewed incentives at the root of the rental e-scooter plague.
- huuhee3 2y agoThis. It's a wild west with these e-scoots, and unlike cars they're everywhere. My city has only 100k people and even here they're a huge nuisance.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoThey are super convenient. Cars are the nuance. We will figure out how to deal with scooters the same way Asian cultures figured out theirs. And the same we we figured out how to socially deal with cell phones. Straight banning them because a bunch of fuddy duddies who never took one don’t like them is pretty short sighted.
- shiroiushi 2y ago>We will figure out how to deal with scooters the same way Asian cultures figured out theirs. They did? When? Here in Tokyo, they've only very recently allowed e-scooters to be used.
- zht 2y agoChina?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- itishappy 2y agoThis seems trivial to address. If you misuse HN, you get your account banned and can no longer post on HN. If you mistreat an Uber driver, you get your account banned and can no longer hail a ride. What stops this system from working with e-scooters?
- sokoloff 2y agoSuppose you rent a scooter, park it "properly enough", I come by and move it a few feet into an improper parking place. Do you want your account banned for that? If not, this might not be as "trivial to address" as you first think.
- jack_pp 2y agoThe scooter has gps as well as your phone and they require a photo anyway. The company can check that you ended your ride correctly, what happens after that isn't your liability.
- shiroiushi 2y agoGPS won't help you here, though the photo will. GPS simply isn't anywhere near accurate enough to verify you placed the scooter in spot X, and not 1-2 meters away from spot X where it's now a hazard.
- kurikuri 2y agoA gyroscope on the scooter and location awareness of the renter’s device seems to take care of that. If the scooter’s gyroscope indicates movement after the renter has returned the scooter and left the premises, then assuming the renter didn’t move it seems pretty safe.
- hulitu 2y ago> This seems trivial to address. Yet it is not.