100 bikes that no riders own, but instead pay to rent, meanwhile one billionaire makes a fortune
I’m always amused when people get enraged by scooters or bikes on the sidewalk but see nothing wrong in giving over the vast majority of public spaces to cars. Maybe your priorities might be ever so slightly askew here, brother/sister/other kind of sibling.
I see this at events and festivals in our town all the time and I think it’s a massive win. Every scooter you see is likely one less car clogging up our streets or taking up a parking spot. Plus, a lot of these riders are out-of-towners bringing business to our local shops and helping the economy. It’s a shame there are so many NIMBYs hating on them when the trade-off is clearly better for the town’s bottom line. I’ll take a sidewalk with a few scooters over a gridlocked street any day. Plus they are super fun to ride.
What’s the problem? There was an event, people didn’t use a car. Should they have bought their own Trottinet?
Edit: just so you know: this is a public renting service and the devices are tracked and picked up by employees.
Living in a city- i see this (and what makes this a funny meme) is that it shows the “free market” “solving” a problem by making private profit from a public space. The lime scooters are left all over the place, and these companies do not pick them up every day. They clog side walks, roads, bike racks, etc.
Its so bad that some cities (like the one im in) is negotiating contracts with providers to make them develop some infrastructure to keep their private property that they are profiting off of out of spaces that are public use.
I get its better to use less cars, i ride a bicycle, but there’s a reason people dont leave their personal bikes in the middle of the sidewalk, that motivation isnt there for the scooters. So it creates a “unique form of corporate litter” as I’ve heard others say.
Its a free market solution that companies profit off of by externalizing the cost of storing their shit in public spaces for free - such as what is shown in the meme photo. If you did that with something else then your car would get a ticket or someone would fuck with your bike for being an asshole.
