Marcus Hutchins :verified: on Nostr: I lived in LA during the first E-Scooter pilot program. Woke up one day and there was ...

I lived in LA during the first E-Scooter pilot program. Woke up one day and there was just these electric scooters everywhere. You unlock them with an app and can ride them anywhere you want to go. Once you're done, you just leave it wherever. Then someone else can come and take it to wherever they want to go. If you take one home and charge it, you get paid some money.

It solved so many problems. You didn't have to find parking, it was often times faster to travel by bicycle like vehicles due to traffic, you didn't have to worry about getting your vehicle back home if you got drunk, nor worry about having to lock every part of your bike to every other part to stop thieves disassembling it.

Ultimately, it wasn't a good business due to a multitude of reasons. The difference between ride cost and cost of production meant scooters had to do hundreds of hours of rides before people totaled them or threw them in the sea or they couldn't break even. People were force to ride on sidewalks and mow down pedestrians because there's no bike lanes. Residents petitioned and had them banned due to people leaving them blocking driveways or littered across the sidewalk. Literally every single one of those problems would be easily solvable if it were a public service instead of a private business. Some regulation, enforcement, bike lanes, and what you have is an incredible inner-city public transport system.