It's actually pretty good that there are 5 spots. Bird, Lime, Spin are here now. Lyft has expressed interest. SkipScooters, from 2 of the founders of Boosted skateboards, seems like they might know how to make a great scooter. Maybe Uber/Jump would make 6?<p>The other interesting competition aspect is that each is limited to 250 scooters. Not enough to build a network. So you'll have to join a few of them to make it reliable. This will keep some less competitive companies alive a little longer.<p>Long term it would be crazy to prevent competition like this. And worth watching, cities are laughably poor at good licensing. There are supposed to be 45,000 licensed uber/lyft drivers vs 1,500 taxi medallions in SF. 30 times too few taxis! It's amazing that was the status quo for 40 years. [1]<p>The slow ramp is the huge bummer though. Three months of 1250, 6 months of 2500 would make more sense. Then 10-30 thousand for a couple years. You need a lot of vehicles to make a reliable network. Same goes for Jump style locking bikes.<p>Scooters are a little objectionable and probably need to be managed, but wow cars are so much worse. Any possible replacement for SF's 500,000 cars should get the fullest support and permissiveness from government. They take up huge amounts of space for parking, kill people, cause pollution, and sit in traffic jams. Tesla is cool but in cities cars are not the answer (go Boring company go!).<p>It's worth pointing out that in SF you can still buy and operate your own electric scooter or ebike. Unlike the baffling NYC situation. SF is actually ok at adapting, just really slowly.<p>Some numbers:<p><pre><code> 500,000 cars registered in SF [2]
20 traffic fatalities in 2017, killing
14 pedestrians
2 cyclists
4 motorcycle drivers
0 car drivers
It sounds like they were all killed by cars.[3]
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="http://www.ktvu.com/news/clogged-streets-45000-uber-and-lyft-drivers-in-san-francisco-grab-lawmakers-attention" rel="nofollow">http://www.ktvu.com/news/clogged-streets-45000-uber-and-lyft...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/add5eb07-c676-40b4-98b5-8011b059260a/est_fees_pd_by_county.pdf?MOD=AJPERES" rel="nofollow">https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/add5eb07-c676-40b4...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/5/16854592/traffic-deaths-san-francisco-2017" rel="nofollow">https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/5/16854592/traffic-deaths-san-f...</a>