Go into the scooter resale business.
And the race is on
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.
good move
These scooters are about 300 bucks fleet price.
They rent for 10 to 20 cents a minute.
It doesn’t take long for them to pay off at which point it’s probably easier to replace than reclaim.
Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
The model these things are following is “available for somebody else”. So the company puts scooters around the city. Somebody who wants to use one uses the app on their phone, goes where they’re going, and leaves it. Ostensibly for somebody else to want to use it. And if they leave them somewhere popular it works ok. Residential zones tend to be a blackhole though. Honestly this person should be bugging their neighbors. Somebody within quick walk of their house is using the things, hassle them to park smarter.
gmta
If it were done with no notice or action to contact the company, I would not endorse it.
But if they didn’t put a stop to it after repeated entreaties, I would throw every single one of them in the dumpster, or take them into remote places in the woods and drop them there.
It’s also not a good idea to throw the batteries in the dumpster because they could cause a fire.
A dumpster fire is bad enough, but it’s even worse when the trash truck catches fire.
Looks like an opportunity. Take out the batteries and sell, throw the location thingy in the dumpster, and sell the rest for scrap metal.
And the race is on
I saw Craig do this on Animal Kingdom (season 5).
Rivers are the best place to dump them, because eventually the city gets ticked off and kicks the scooter or bike company out of town...
They’re like an electric car.
Once the battery is aged out, they’re barely worth scrap metal price.
How can the scooter company stop it from happening? They aren’t the ones parking them there.
They had lime bikes in Reno for a while. A lot ended up in the Truckee river. Others scattered(littering) all over. Eventually at the recycle center. What a waste of time and money and resources.
These scooter deals are a lot like cable tv.
Hugely profitable and a lot of gravy passing under the table back to the govt with approval authority.
Sure seems like it is trash to me.
I've rented a few in Tulsa. Fun and cheap. You load the app on your phone. When you rent one, you open the app and scan the code on the bike. When done, you take a pic of where you parked it.
the tragedy of the commons and elimination of private property under socialism
The article does not provide enough information to determine if these are those "Free" scooters, but I assume they are. If they were not, the problem would be easy to solve. The free scooter could be provided but a credit card and address would have to be provided. There would be a $100 deposit, which would be returned to the user when the scooter was "re-docked". If not returned, the deposit would be put back into tax coffers of the city, not into the hands of the scooter company.
However, I presume that would not work in this case, being a "woke" piece of crap endeavor, executed by brainless leftist dimwits who believe humans are perfectable and will of their own accord treat these "free things" with respect and care, and as a result, they do not have any kind of financial or informational connection to users because...that would be "unfair" and require people to have money, credit cards, and an address.
Anyone with ANY life experience knows, if you expect people to respect property and goods they don't have a monetary interest in maintaining, you are going to be sorely disappointed and if you have money in this kind of stupidity, you are going to lose your shirt. Fortunately for those involved in setting this up, they likely used your money and my money to get it going, so...everyone wins but the taxpayer and people who have to throw these things in the dumpster.
Thomas Sowell discusses this very thing in a few of his books, and it falls under the rubric of "The Tragedy of The Commons", which means that anything which has no owner responsible for maintaining it and the public has open access to that thing, it will be overused or not maintained and will fall into disrepair. Anyone who has two brain cells to rub together who has actually observed human behavior knows this innately, but that does rule out Liberals and Leftists.
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