Am I a bad person for throwing scooters in a dumpster? [The writer only did this after repeatedly contacting the scooter company and asking them to please stop leaving scooters on their property. The scooter company ignored their many requests.]

[Kevmo]

good move

[nascarnation]

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.

[Kevmo]

Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[discostu]

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.

[Kevmo]

gmta

[rlmorel]

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.

[brianl703]

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.

[cpt_dave]

Looks like an opportunity. Take out the batteries and sell, throw the location thingy in the dumpster, and sell the rest for scrap metal.

[deport]

Dee's scooters ought to be worth a dollar or two.
Go into the scooter resale business.

And the race is on

[CodeJockey]

I saw Craig do this on Animal Kingdom (season 5).

[cgbg]

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...

[nascarnation]

They’re like an electric car.
Once the battery is aged out, they’re barely worth scrap metal price.

[gitmo]

How can the scooter company stop it from happening? They aren’t the ones parking them there.

[rktman]

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.

[nascarnation]

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.

[joma89]

Sure seems like it is trash to me.

[moovova]

A lot more fun...

[FatherofFive]

If so, why wouldn’t the company charge the renters for scooters that aren’t properly returned? What am I missing?

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.

[mjp]

people just leave them on the street, zoom past on the sidewalk and kids trash them and leave their mangled wrecks all over parks.

the tragedy of the commons and elimination of private property under socialism

[rlmorel]

I read about this very issue in some city in California a few years back, where city tax dollars were spent to buy these "free" scooters that people could use to get around to alleviate traffic, reduce pollution, you name it. IIRC, there was someone on FR who experienced this stupidity first hand, and it was driving them crazy.

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.

---

Tragedy of the commons
The "tragedy of the commons" is one way of accounting for overexploitation.

In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.

The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968.