this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2026
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That's always one of the tricks these companies pull. They take some communally-owned thing that used to have a clear purpose and start using it for their different for-profit use.
Take sidewalks. They're surprisingly expensive to build, but they're built from community tax money so that people walking don't have to walk on the road. Now Uber is using them as a place where they can drive their robots. Are they paying anything? I assume not. Sidewalks have also become a favourite parking spot for rental scooters. Do the scooter companies pay for that? Of course not. Even when they're parked well they reduce the space available for walking, and when they're parked badly they can force pedestrians out into the street.
Ugh the rental scooters. Thankfully I’ve seen this dying down. A more common sight in my city now is parking spaces getting turned into bike rental stations. I’m all for that.
Ugh, what? The scooters are awesome, and they cut down on car traffic.
No they don’t. They cut down on walking.
Um, no. They cut down on car traffic. Hoooooooly shit you people are unfucking real. I see bitching about car culture on here constantly, but when an urban area has municipal tools for reducing it, you still bitch. God fucking damn.
Oh well that string of profanity really convinced me. Thank you for clearing that up.
The scooters are so much better though? Just park near where you need to go, not where the bike station is. Just take photos of the poorly parked ones and whoever last parked it gets a fine.
A proper bike system is better though, my city has a city-run bike system with stations on practically every street corner, so it's much better and just as practical
Yeah the scooters are great, it's the lack of enforcement for proper parking that sucks.
Like they make you take a picture to prove you parked it properly. One time I screwed up and took a picture of only my feet. Nothing happened.
Better only for the person who drops it right where they arrives at their destination. That is almost never also a sensible place for these things to be. What if everyone just got out do their car the second they were in front of the building they want to go to? That would be so much “better” for them!
That is kind of how taxis work though
The taxi doesn’t just get dropped on the curb when you arrive. It leaves to go serve someone else.
Yeah, it sucks when I get out of a taxi and the driver just gets out and leaves their car there.
I don't need to repeat dark onions response but did you even think for a moment before commenting?
Except you jjust know they are taking audio and visual, and scanning wifi and phone and other freqencies and sending it all back to base, that's the problem.
Throw them all into the river! Why rent everything we used to own anyway?
Even if I had my own, I wouldn't carry it across country for a visit of a few days, but I did rent in such a case more than once.
It's really more about unenforced safety rules, people sometimes drive like crazy and they always do that on the scooters they own, because rental have a speed limit
Rental makes sense for this because not everyone wants to take a scooter back home and charge it
Not the way it's being done it doesn't make sense. A locally owned place that had rules against spying on everyone, and sweeping electronics, yes. A silicon valley operation whose purpose is as much collecting data as it is rental fees, is not.