Rentable escooters will be the Death of EUCs in Major cities of the World

[RockyTop]

21 minutes ago, LanghamP said:

Maybe the answer is always more and bigger cars, more pavement, more parking, I mean what could possibly go wrong with this way of life?

Than we agree!   ( Just Kidding!! )

I know you Really Really Hate cars. Cites are changing in ways that make it possible for people to live without cars. One thing that I have noticed in the last few years is the increased number of mixed use buildings. ( The bottom floors are used for commercial and the upper floors for residential) More jobs can be done from a location of your choice. Uber and various ride shares of all kinds are reducing the number of cars in cities. Many people rent cars to go on vacation because It has become easier and more affordable. This reduces the need of and use of cars and parking year round. The American dream of a fancy car and a house in the county is fading away. The cars we use are becoming more efficient and put out less pollution. They are becoming less sexy. (“What kind of car is that? It’s another blob.” ) Some day soon we will have driverless pods that run on ...... who knows? 

  We are getting there. People will look back and be amazed by the short period in history that people drove themselves around in cars.  

“Grandpa LanghamP, tell us the stories of when people drove explosion powered pods that people controled instead of computers” 

[Lutalo]

7 minutes ago, RockyTop said:

“Grandpa LanghamP, tell us the stories of when people drove explosion powered pods that people controled instead of computers”

[Scatcat]

11 hours ago, RockyTop said:

“Grandpa LanghamP, tell us the stories of when people drove explosion powered pods that people controled instead of computers” 

To some extent I share @LanghamP's hate for cars. Not the cars themselves, a sexy Ferrari is still a sexy Ferrari, but what they do to our cities and our environment...

The car as a phenomenon has gradually displaced living breathing humans in our urban environment. 60-80% of the space of a typical street is "car space", add parkings to that situation, and the living bipedal human being is running close to extinction in the city.

As we add more and more cars to the city, the actual usefulness of the car diminishes. A commute of five miles during rush hours takes at least 40-50 minutes, often more. Using an e-bike, e-scooter or riding on a EUC the same distance, takes maybe 20-25 minutes including red lights. The queues are murder, and often leads to murderous feelings among the commuters.

As people are "expected" to use cars, public transportation gets a step-motherly treatment. A hen and egg situation occurs, as people don't use public transport since it's so bad, and since people don't use it, it never gets better.

Then I'm not even talking about particular-, co2- and nox-emissions, hopefully the new generation of electric cars will do something about that.

The personal electric vehicle is quite frankly the only viable future, if we actually want a future. The combustion engine must go, at least as the general goto. Even hybrids are just a stop-gap on the way, being neither fish nor fowl. We need to make the human living space a space for humans.

[RockyTop]

If you look at the old pictures of big US cities that were taken pre car, It is not usually a pretty picture. You see wide spaces between buildings covered with ankle deep mud and manure. The cars are replaced by horse and buggy. Not a tree or bush or flower to be seen. All the buildings are covered with coal dust. The movies don’t exactly show the same picture of the old days in the US. The city that I live in was one of the dirtiest most polluted cities in the 80’s and not it is one of the cleanest. Improvements are being made in the US. 

[Scatcat]

24 minutes ago, RockyTop said:

If you look at the old pictures of big US cities that were taken pre car, It is not usually a pretty picture. You see wide spaces between buildings covered with ankle deep mud and manure. The cars are replaced by horse and buggy. Not a tree or bush or flower to be seen. All the buildings are covered with coal dust. The movies don’t exactly show the same picture of the old days in the US. The city that I live in was one of the dirtiest most polluted cities in the 80’s and not it is one of the cleanest. Improvements are being made in the US. 

Oh, I'm not nostalgic for the "Good Ol' Days" of burning coal and wading through horseshit. Just like I'm not longing for some medieaval vision, where you could get a pot of piss on your head, if you got distracted in the morning... 

What I'd like to see though, is a modern variant where most traffic (that can't go around the city, and is needed) is channeled through some major arteries, while the blocks between those arteries have much less space for cars and lorries.

The idea is called a superblock, and the general idea is that a collection of nine blocks should be impossible to go through from one side to the other. By forcing turns you are basically led out on the same side you entered. That way deliveries can still be made, and if you live there you can still get your car in and out. But it will be very unattractive to try to take a short-cut through. Moreover, the car-lane-part of the mix is about halved from today, and leaves one or two lanes and usually one-way traffic. The remaining space is used to widen bike-lanes and pedestrian space.

The "arteries" in turn might well be three or four lanes each direction, with overpasses for bikes and pedestrians.

Preferably the "arteries" are either slightly lower than the surroundings or walled off - both to lessen the risk of accidents where pedestrians or bikes gets into the road, and to lessen the impact of sound-pollution.

There are a few superblocks being tested in Barcelona, Spain. As I understand it, there are pros and cons, but overall the superblocks have turned out to up the street life and cultural happenings, benefiting both retailers, restaurants and cafés.

[RockyTop]

I have seen the super blocks on Yotube. I am in favor of it. Here where I live we have a few city blocks that have been visually and feature restricted. When you drive threw you feel like you are driving on a sidewalk ( pavement). The street is part of the pedestrian landscaping. Tables are close to the street with decorative lights hanging low overhead. People walk around taking claim of the area. Anyone can drive threw but once you have done it you do your best to avoid that street in the future. 

I am all for improving cultural activities and iterations. This is something that has been lost in cities. I always thought it was crazy that my closest neighbors lived 1/2 mile away yet I know them like family while in the city you know your neighbors sexual habits by the bed thumping the wall. Yet you don’t know their names or even care to. It is said that the loneliest place in the world is in a busy city. 

( I live closer to the city now. My closest neighbor lives 100 feet away) 

[LanghamP]

@RockyTop is absolutely correct in his assessment that closely-compacted urban areas were filthy before the automobile circa 1910-1920, and that "in those days" the automobile was hailed as a clean alternative. And indeed we know Chicago would have filthy snowbanks pilled high even well into summer, and that until the automobile came around cities always had a negative population growth, that is, more people would die of diseases than could be born.

The automobile stopped all of that filth from piling up, and along with sewage and minimum bathroom requirements, made our cities clean and efficient until maybe sometime between the 1970's to now.

But...it's expensive. It's really really expensive, ludicrously so. And the more you spend on the suburban road model, the more you have to spend in the future. There's only one outcome here.

As an example, my local city has decided to put an extra 18 cent per gallon tax, and they (the state gov) released the below document.

http://www.wsfa.com/2019/02/25/report-montgomery-drivers-losing-money-local-roadways/?outputType=amp

There's a few things of note. First, the document states the cost to the driver for bad roads is a tad under $2000 per driver per year. Things like damage to the car ($1400) and wrecks ($400) are socialized out as a driver average. I also know from other research that the real cost is somewhere north of $8000 per driver per year just to maintain roads. It's easy to calculate that figure because you simply look at road outlays per year versus number of drivers. However, it's also pretty easy to get a much much higher number by factoring in Federal new road spending, lost productivity due to tailpipe emissions, and the medical costs of wrecks.

A quick calculation will show the 18c tax won't much, so where does that money really come from? Well, on page 11 it states Alabama raised $1,300,000,000 in 2013 for roads via public debt, then expects to raise about $200,000,000 each year, also mostly to public debt. Debt funding is how they are really paying for this, not via the gas tax; you might want to put that little fact on page 1 instead of page 11.

What I dislike about this government document is how the answer to "everything" is to build more pavement. It's pavement, pavement, pavement, build more and maintain more.

Stop building more shit you can't afford!

So we essentially have between $200 to $500 per driver per month to play with, because that is at least the cost to the driver and the government to drive everywhere.

Congestion? There's only congestion on the 8 am and the 5 pm timeslot; the rest of the time the roads and streets are barely used. How about you bribe each driver/employee $50 a month to come 30 minutes early or later? You'd still come out ahead over building faster and wider roads, with change to spare.

It's like buying a house based on the number of people you have over Thanksgiving. With a loan.

Uber and Lyft are not the answer to congestion, because they increase congestion by pulling riders from public transit. LA reckoned they pulled about 20%. LA's answer? A tax. Personally, I see an awful lot, a swarm really, of Uber and Lyft drivers idling in their cars at every local park. It's come to the absurd situation of you avoiding local parks because of the smog generated by idling cars that aren't in the best of shape.

We're not talking about a dozen cars, it's more like 20-40 cars and you can confirm this by opening up your Uber app.

https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2019/02/26/uber-lyft-metro-tax/

Safety? If you set the speed limit to 20 mph in the city then you'd greatly reduce wear and tear on the roads and basically turn every crash into a fender-bender. The majority of time wasted is from sitting at a red light or sitting behind other drivers; while a speed limit of 20 mph feels vastly slower than 45 mph, you're just going to race up and stop behind that light anyway with no time saved.

Pollution? You could give every driver an eBike/eScooter, and society would recoup the financial cost within 5 months. And scooters / bicycles don't tear up the roads like automobiles.

However, car drivers don't much like bicycles/EUC/eScooters being in their way, and will do everything to get them off the streets.

For example, something like this, which was recently in treatment as a naked ploy to rid streets from bicycles.

http://www.fox46charlotte.com/news/north-carolina-bill-would-require-riders-to-register-bicycles-pay-fee

Legislation like this, an anti bike and anti scooter backlash, is popping up everywhere in the US, for no real reason other than car drivers perceive bicyclists and scooters delaying their commute by a few seconds.

In short, the use of public debt to fund roads must result in each and every city and town in the US going insolvent. This is the inevitable outcome of automobile supremacy. A lot of the other stuff like walkability, safety, pollution, congestion, doesn't really matter if you (our society) cannot afford to build and maintain your automobile lifestyle choice in the first place.

[LanghamP]

Here's some recent data from Louisville, whereby scooter companies were required to share ridership data.

https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last-long

Some months ago I estimated if an eScooter lasted three months and it costs $300-500, then it'd do just fine. However, the scooter destruction seems as substantially higher.

• The average lifespan of a scooter in Louisville from August to December was 28 days

• Median lifespan was 23 days

While the article states fat Americans destroy scooters, then lists theft and vandalism, I'd guess theft and vandalism are far more destructive because they result in the total loss of the vehicle.

Solving the theft and vandalism problem is trivial, because we already have a model to do so; simply list or buy each eScooter at $500, watch enough scooters, then nab the perps for a felony until there's few perps left. And indeed this was the tactic used by NY City bikes to great effect.

However, none of this matters because Louisville legislated eScooters out of existence.

• $2,000 for a probationary license (required for the first six months of operation)

• Additional $1,000 to receive full operating license

• Annual $50 fee per dockless vehicle

• Daily $1 fee per dockless vehicle

• $100 fee per designated group parking area

Since the cap is 200-250 scooters per company, we can estimate the city fees per scooter is at least $420 per year, which is more than the cost of the scooter.

In other news Louisville spent $2,600,000,000 on two new bridges. The two new bridges are mostly empty after opening up, because drivers don't like to pay tolls.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/12/28/for-whom-the-bridge-tolls

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/4/26/the-latest-from-the-louisville-traffic-experiment

Right now, in every single city in the US, you will see this behavior of using public debt to build roads while fining alternative forms of transportation out of existence. Louisville is insolvent, and there's only one outcome here.

 

[Smoother]

2 hours ago, LanghamP said:

Right now, in every single city in the US, you will see this behavior of using public debt to build roads while fining alternative forms of transportation out of existence. Louisville is insolvent, and there's only one outcome here.

Cities and towns are run by idiots.  Almost none of them have any business experience.  They have been bureaucrats and pen pushers since the day they left school/college And they seem incapable of learning from mistakes, either their own or of others.

[Nic]

1 hour ago, Smoother said:

Cities and towns are run by idiots.  Almost none of them have any business experience.  They have been bureaucrats and pen pushers since the day they left school/college And they seem incapable of learning from mistakes, either their own or of others.

Indeed ... its usually people that couldn't get a job in the private sector that end up in government. There are still some very good people in government, but because its a relatively secure job with decent pension it doesn't inspire people to keep improving themselves and become better at what they do ... they can get lazy and are relatively safe being lazy, especially if they get along with their boss. Being lazy doesn't cause the government to go out of business as would happen in the private sector where you have competitors looking to take your business.

[ir_fuel]

On 3/2/2019 at 5:29 PM, LanghamP said:

Solving the theft and vandalism problem is trivial, because we already have a model to do so; simply list or buy each eScooter at $500, watch enough scooters, then nab the perps for a felony until there's few perps left. And indeed this was the tactic used by NY City bikes to great effect.

It seems those companies don't care. Nor do they care about how you park those things. If they would and they get reports from the authorities, it is straightforward to implement a system whereby users get banned for a certain period if they violate parking rules. You could even take money from their CC.