Posted on 08/09/2021 12:17:38 PM PDT by grundle
I live in a newly hip city in the US. Last year a few scooter companies started leaving their dock less electric scooters around town. It wasn’t so bad at first, even pretty neat. But they kept bringing more and more, and now it’s completely out of hand. They are everywhere! The downtown area is clogged with them and people just leave them on the street, zoom past on the sidewalk and kids trash them and leave their mangled wrecks all over parks.
I live in a house that has been converted into apartments. There are 6 people including myself who live here, and we all share a small garage. Only two of the residents have cars and they park them in the garage, the rest of us store out bikes in there. After the scooter scourge started, we noticed people had been leaving the scooters in front of the garage door, obstructing the car owners from entering and exiting. No big deal, we would just move them to the side and go about our business.
But then it started happening every day. I would get home to 4 or 5 scooters left in the driveway every day. I asked around, and none of us in the house ever used the scooters or parked them in the driveway. After a neighbor accidentally ran one over backing out of the garage (it had fallen down and she didn’t see it) we put up a sign stating “no scooter parking” but it did nothing. Someone even vandalized it with some unsavory terms. I contacted a few of the scooter companies and tried to figure out a way to prevent people from leaving the scooters in our driveway, and they directed us to an online form to report illegally parked scooters which involves a QR code scan and filling out a report, which is time consuming, and useless since nobody comes to get the scooters for hours or even days later, not to mention that we had been doing this for weeks anyway. Thanks for nothing!
So now what we all do when we see a scooter on our property is pick it up and take it to our dumpster and toss it right in. All 6 of us have to do this every day. Recently a note was attached to our dumpster by one of the scooter chargers (they are contracted “employees” kind of like Uber or DoorDash who get paid pennies to collect and charge these scooters) saying that we had to stop throwing the scooters in the dumpster because it was hazardous and they were sick of climbing thought the trash to get them. Fair enough. We compromised by leaving the scooters next to the dumpster. Sometimes the trash guys pick them up and take them to the dump. I called the waste management and they told us they sort it and process hundreds of trashed scooters so it was no big deal for them.
Am I an asshole for tossing illegally parked scooters in the trash? They make a terrible screaming beeping sound when I move them and I feel like I’m not doing anything but trying to make a point that no one cares about.
lots of people made a business out of returning shopping carts for money, go for it.
You could pick up THOUSANDS of them in Seattle - - please!
It sure wouldn't cause any damage to my mental health. Those motors and batteries are great for showing the kids how to make robots and other vehicles.
I wouldn’t go to Seattle for anything or anybody. Its the land of deep creeps.
Charge the customers' credit cards a retrieval fee...............
In Paris the banks of the Seine have been blocked with them long before covid. Vendors and strollers alike just grab them and chuck them over the side.
It seemed to make no difference to the companies. They must be making money by the fistful.
make another sign: "Abandoned scooters will be dismantled and sold for scrap"
Maybe send the scooter companies monthly bills for the annoyance caused with documentation of the problem plus a fee on top for the processing of the bill. Save copies of bills sent. If the scooter companies don’t lay bills then sue and present the ignored bills in court so the scooter companies can’t claim ignorance of that the problem was not all.that bad etc. But don’t put them in garbage or you open yourself up to liability.
I don’t understand how this works. Don’t you have to offer some ID and/or a credit card when you rent one? If so, why wouldn’t the company charge the renters for scooters that aren’t properly returned? What am I missing?
Well in my state is someone abandons a vehicle without the property owners consent of the property owner for more than 24 hours you can actually file a motion in common pleas to terminate the owners rights to the vehicle and make it yours.
Now sadly that case won’t be heard quickly, but that is one remedy.
Others are call the cops and they will have a salvor take the vehilcle
The other is can remove ans place it into storage and bring action against vehicle owner to cover the cost of removal and storage.. once judgement is granted if owner does not pay vehicle can be sold at sheriff sale to pay judgement
No one owns the scooters, so no one feels responsible for them. People destroy things they don’t own. Public toilets. Government-provided housing. Buses. Trains.
This was predictable. It just takes a quick scan of a textbook on Social Psychology to find out why.
Before throwing them in the dumpster, remove the batteries. Those are valuable and should be pretty lucrative for your trouble.
There are 6 people including myself who live here...
Never deal with people who use 'myself' when 'me' is appropriate.
Never.
At least with the rent-a-bikes, you have to return those to a special bike rack which locks the bike in place and stops the metered rental; so it provides a very good incentive to return the bike to a rack.
I was at a conference in San Diego at least 5 years ago and at that time they were everywhere. The craze did not start in Santa Monica two years ago.
Anyway, I suspect the story is BS. It makes very little sense that multiple scooters are left blocking one particular driveway every single night. I mean, what are the odds of that.
On the city street I used to live, they removed parking spaces to put a scooter rental thingie with a bunch of scooters. I never saw any missing, meaning being rented/used. They also removed parking and lanes of roads for bicyclists to use. Biggest waste of space. Incredibly annoying.
Nearby city I no longer go to has a canal. They drag it regularly. In addition to wallets, phones, guns and other items, dozens and dozens of these scooters come out. Drunks seem to like them too.
You do if they are rented legally. I believe these are quite easy to “hotwire” because the electricals are simple.
I saw a guy throwing a bunch of them into the Potomac River one time off the Key bridge.
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