18
‘I want them all crushed’: the council poised to ban ‘dangerous’ Lime bikes
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
18 points (100.0% liked)
London
18 readers
1 users here now
"who’d a thunk it"
For discussion about London including the surrounding Greater London area. Discuss all things from news, travel, culture, and general life around the capital and largest city of England!
Rules and other welcoming info can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They keep conflating public disorder issues with Lime Biker issues and all for what? To further empower cars?
This isn't a problem with bikes that individuals own. This isn't a problem with the Santander bikes either. This is a specific problem with Lime bikes and the likes, because the Lime bike system is set up to encourage people to dump their bikes anywhere and Lime does nothing to discourage this. Lime is a multi-million pound private enterprise that is profiting on what is effectively the littering of our public spaces.
Personally I'd favour using punitive market-based mechanisms to solve this - fine Lime £100 or £200 for every mis-parked bike, which would align their incentives with society's and quickly lead them to being a lot more discerning about who they rent their bikes out to and how they enforce against misuse of the bikes. But I suspect this would destroy their business model anyway - the overwhelming majority of Lime bikes I see out and about are not parked in an orderly way, so what you're calling a public disorder problem must account for the vast majority of their customer base - it's a business model set up to cater to hooligans. So maybe just banning the product outright is the better option. The Santander bikes are very widely available for anyone who needs them and they operate with a system that overwhelmingly enforces orderly parking.
But most people aren't littering the bikes. What you get is a bunch of people attempting to hack the bikes and they leave them anywhere, along with drunk and disorderly people that kick them over. Why are you punishing all the people that leave them properly parked?
It reminds me of how taxi drivers kept objecting to Uber.
Yes, we need more parking bays and that's on local councils to provide, but leaving them anywhere helps everyone. I've never seen a Santander bay South of the river for example.
Punish the bad actors. London has more CCTV than any other city in the world. Put it to good use.
Taxi drivers and Uber was a legitimate issue. Taxis had long been required to buy medallions that were hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate. Uber does the exact same thing and is not required to do the same? Total bullshit.
“Rideshare”. It’s just taxi service by another name. Same rules for everyone, but then suddenly Uber and Lyft would collapse because Taxi services have always been the better option.