I was thinking about the debate on scooters and it made me realize something:<p>Bike lanes are a disaster, probably one of the biggest mistakes in road design and planning.<p>The basic idea was sound, but it was done the wrong way. Everywhere you see a bike lane, that should've been the concrete sidewalk extended into that area with a painted stripe separating pedestrians and bicycles. Go to a beach and you can see the correct implementation. Our sidewalks are simply not wide enough.<p>What we have now is a cheap and bad solution. Nobody on bikes, scooter, etc. wants to be just a thin painted stripe away from cars that can kill them. But they are forbidden from sidewalks because they are too narrow.<p>The right way to add bike lanes would've been to extend the sidewalks into the road (where the current bike lanes are) by pouring concrete there. Full protection from cars, wide enough for pedestrians and bicycles, scooters, etc.<p>It's not too late to fix this, the bike lanes are there. Cities just need to spend the money to expand the sidewalks there. If they do this, there's potential for a true revolution in non-car mobility in the US.
This partnership could also allow Uber driver partners to basically have another source of income - rebalancing the scooter/bike network and helping with charging (ex. someone drives for Uber Eats, drops off a scooter at pickup restaurant to charge). Current Lime freelance chargers are making ~$1400 earnings per month[1] so this could start being substantial and help the growth for both companies<p>[1] <a href="https://www.axios.com/how-lime-is-pitching-its-bike-a-1529492063-f32aac78-caf6-4455-a7f1-215cc4bf4552.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/how-lime-is-pitching-its-bike-a-152949...</a>
Why not keep the scooters in the cars. Grab one on the way out, leave it behind when you get home. Request an uber with a scooter in it. There will have to be some leveling between cars but that’s surely easier than blanketing the city.
Taxify already has a rider feature in Nairobi, Kenya, called Boda within their app. It's insanely cheap and the ability to circumvent traffic is a huge plus. I'm happy this is coming to Uber as well.
From the article:
>Lime said its service, which lets customers rent scooters scattered around cities and leave them on the sidewalk for the next person to pick up<p>I now look for a "Tragedy of the Common" errors in business models. That's it right there: they freely exploit a public resource without care or consequence. The fallacy is evident when we ask "What if everybody does this?"
I read that in early June, scooter hire was halted in San Francisco and companies had to apply for licenses, which were expected to be issued by the end of the month. Any update on what is happening there?