CITIES BEAT BACK SILICON VALLEY’S GREAT SCOOTER BOOM

GPS-ENABLED RIDES HAMPERED BY NUISANCE ISSUES

A woman rides a shared electric scooter in San Francisco. GPS-enabled scooters and bicycles are spreading across several American cities as policy-makers scramble to find ways to regulate the great scooter boom. to keep people from riding them on sidewalks or without helmets, both violations of municipal laws.

In short, scooting is a pretty good parable on the excesses and hubris of the technology industry. It provides a convenient service that generates a lot of excitement among its users — San Franciscans have already taken tens of thousands of rides on Birds — but also generates ill effects for the rest of the population.

Companies promise to figure out the problems, but they’re mostly focused on outgrowing one another.

They tend to see anything that slows them down as either wrong-headed, ignorable or both.

Bird and LimeBike said they’re committed to working with officials to address their concerns. Bird rolled out a potential solution to the parking issue on Tuesday. It will require people to take a photograph of where they left the scooter at the end of their rides.

David Estrada, Bird’s chief legal officer, said the company would likely implement this in many cities but declined to provide specifics.

Bird’s Uber-style approach to introducing the service — making it available to the public without a lengthy negotiation with each city over policy — is better for everyone, said Estrada. “We actually think we’ve helped create better regulation, because now we have data,” he said. “We actually think we’ve helped create better regulation, because now we have data”

This process grates on many people who have gone through it before, causing flashbacks to Uber under its controversial co-founder Travis Kalanick.

In San Francisco, expressing an opinion about scooting is, in effect, casting a vote in the long-running referendum about the cultural mores of tech bros. Supporters sing the virtues of cheap and accessible transportation with the promise of reduced traffic and cleaner air.

Critics say the service gives rich tech employees a whimsical way to bar-hop at the expense of crowded and dangerous sidewalks. The more scooters, the greater strain on the city. Tech companies, they charge, are often blind to these trade-offs.

“The silver lining of the Bird scooter fiasco is that it’s a great way for econ teachers to explain negative externalities and the tragedy of the commons,” Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired magazine, wrote on Twitter.

The parallels to ride-hailing are irresistible.

Uber constantly butted heads with officials in its hometown and practically every other city it charged into. Santa Monica, Calif., where Bird is based, sued the company soon after it rolled out, and the two sides eventually reached a settlement allowing Bird to continue operating.

Companies looking to disrupt transportation don’t have the same incentives as the governments tasked with regulating it.

“There is a nature to our streets that is a tension between chaos and order. The more you try to create order, the more you infringe upon innovation,” said Adie Tomer, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution, a research organization.

Many officials came away from their fights with Uber and Lyft doubting the good faith of tech companies, Tomer said. “All the ingredients are there to have that kind of scarring.”

Bird and LimeBike were well aware of this dynamic. Yet the companies managed to fall into the trap anyway, in part by pushing each other in.

When Bird launched in San Francisco, the company said it would pick up every scooter every night, remove any vehicle that wasn’t used three or more times a day, and even impose a voluntary tax on itself of US$1 per scooter per day and then send the proceeds to the city.

The company committed to doing this in every city it operated in and asked competitors to follow suit.

A spokesman for LimeBike called Bird’s proposed self-regulation a PR stunt. LimeBike said it wouldn’t launch in any city without the blessing of local officials. But as it tried to iron things out with officials in Austin, Bird simply launched.

The city impounded dozens of scooters but also indicated it wouldn’t shut down the service altogether. So on Monday, LimeBike zipped into Austin. Estrada said Bird went to San Francisco largely because rivals were already operating.

Perhaps the current controversy with scooters will be a bump along the way to a radical shift in urban transportation, where people use their phones to find motorized scooters for short rides, hail cars for longer ones and spend far less time in vehicles they actually own. Despite outcry from residents, city officials aren’t proposing to shut them down.

The main concern for scooting companies is the proposed restriction on parking and caps on the number of vehicles, Estrada said: “We need to be able to grow to take cars off the road.” than two dozen stores this month. Walmart is trying several different new dress rules, and they might not lead to anything permanent, the company said.

“We are always testing new ideas and concepts in a small number of our stores,” Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg said. “Some of these tests are expanded while others are retired. We won’t know next steps on this test until we’ve had a chance to learn what works andwhatcouldworkbetter.”

Walmart has altered its dress code before, most recently in 2015, when it allowed U.S. employees to wear black or khaki-coloured denim pants and let those with more physical jobs, like cart pushers, wear T-shirts rather than collared shirts.