"Two centuries ago, a disturbing new two-wheeled contraption appeared on the streets of New York. Pedestrians and drivers of horse-drawn vehicles saw the velocipede as a cluttering, dangerous nuisance..."

"... and it was quickly banned. It took more than 40 years for it to reappear, this time as the bicycle. A century ago, a disturbing new four-wheeled contraption appeared on the streets of New York. Pedestrians and drivers of horse-drawn vehicles saw the automobile as a cluttering, dangerous nuisance, but they found it impossible to resist. Despite the suspicion, the entire city was redesigned to accommodate it: sidewalks were narrowed, traffic signs installed, rules written, roads built, and police officers’ job description changed. Now another kind of vehicle is joining the ecosystem of the streets...." 

So begins "The E-Scooter Is Part of a Balanced Transit Diet" (NY Magazine).

What was the disturbing vehicle that was around in 1820? It looked like this, idealized...

... and like this, really:

"Scooter sharing companies like Lime and Bird, which were booming, have suffered potentially fatal blows."

From "How the Virus Transformed the Way Americans Spend Their Money" (NYT).

And health care spending is down  — because "those who conduct elective procedures, dentists and specialists not working on the coronavirus response are doing less business. Some hospitals, faced with lower revenues from canceled nonemergency work, have furloughed or cut the pay of doctors, nurses and other staff members."

Sweet? Funny? Sad? Scary?

My birthday present to myself! pic.twitter.com/pGBuOoZ9Lp

— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (@lisamurkowski) May 23, 2019

I checked her age. She's only 62. So... I guess it's not as scary as it looked. It made me think of something the comedian Bob Goldthwait said about the TV show "Life with Lucy," which came out in 1986: "I'm getting really worried about Lucy." It was funny laughing at Lucy's physical comedy in the 1950s and 60s, but in 1986, she was 75, and she was trying to show that she still had what it takes, but we could see she was old, and we were moved not so much to laugh as to feel protective and hope she wouldn't  get hurt.



But Lisa Murkowski is 62. She can still put on a show that she's a kid at heart and up for physical hijinks... can't she? But maybe she hasn't heard that a lot of people find those motorized street scooters annoying, and a lot of people are getting hurt, including the young and youngish.

The Birds.

The 2018 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” pic.twitter.com/8EZvkUfbsO

— Madeline Eskind (@mdeskind) August 7, 2018

ADDED: "Fed-up locals are setting electric scooters on fire, smearing them with poop and burying them at sea" (L.A. Times).

These vandals are destroying or desecrating the vehicles in disturbingly imaginative ways, and celebrating their illegal deeds on social media — in full view of authorities and the public....

Lt. Michael Soliman, who supervises the LAPD Pacific Division’s Venice Beach detail, said he’s aware of some vandalism — his team has seen scooters left in a pile 10 feet high. But because people aren’t reporting such incidents, it’s not something officers are responding to, he said.

“If we have to prioritize the allocation of our time and resources, first and foremost we’re going to prioritize the preservation of life,” Soliman said. “Protection of property comes second.”

So it's open season.

Electric scooters that threaten to call the police and the notion that they are racist.

I'm reading "Scooters littering US city streets shout at people: 'Unlock me or I'll call the police'/Built-in alarm sparks anger from city officials amid concerns over racism and policing: ‘This is a threat to people’" in The Guardian. We've talked about this electric scooter business before — click on the "scooters" tag — and you may be familiar with the underlying problem.

There are no locking stations for the scooters (as there are for bike rental systems like B-Cycle). The scooters are just lying around all over the place, so what prevents people from just swiping them?There's a mobile phone app for unlocking the electric motor and charging the scooterer, but there needs also to be a way to stop people from picking up the locked scooter and throwing it in a car, perhaps with the idea of figuring out how to hack into it or reworking it somehow or just to make mischief.

What can the scooter company do? One company, Lime, had the idea of making the scooter detect that it's being moved without unlocking and to shout, "Unlock me to ride me, or I’ll call the police."

The threat immediately repeats on high volume and is the first and only sound the scooter makes. The words blare after less than a minute of a person standing on and exploring the buttons of the scooters.... 

Whether the scooter actually can and does call the police is another matter. Given Lime's iffy legal status — they're just going ahead and dumping lots of scooters on sidewalks without prior authorization — I can't believe they'd set the controversial vehicles to robocall the police. The taxpayers should pay for this police work?! What's the price of a police intervention compared to the price of the damned scooter?!

The kicker is that Lime stands accused of racism.

“This is not only an annoying noise, this is a threat to people. For black people, that can really be experienced as a death threat,” said [ Oakland councilmember Rebecca] Kaplan, who is crafting legislation to regulate the scooters and now plans to add a proposal to prohibit loud noises and threats...

"The rep made it sound like there was just free money sitting on the sidewalk each night, just waiting for me to scoop up."

"Bird [the electric scooter sharing service] sent me three chargers, and a peppy rep gave me a quick briefing: Each night I was to switch on the newly enabled 'charger' mode in the Bird app and collect scooters flagged as available for charging. Although juicing up most Birds would give me $5, ones that had been AWOL for a while became progressively more valuable, up to $20.... But it turns out the charging system is akin to a real-life Pokémon Go, albeit one rife with cheating. The app purports to tell you where nearby chargeable scooters are, but in reality that’s rarely the case. Duplicitous collectors have created a thriving ecosystem of stockpiling, hiding, and decoying that makes it well-nigh impossible to find a scooter in need of charging...."

From "For the Birds/I spent two weeks trying to charge electric scooters for extra cash. What I got was a lot of headaches" (Slate).

IN THE COMMENTS: Left Bank of the Charles said:

This guy needs to read Moby Dick on the subject of loose fish and fast fish. He assumes the guys in the pickup trucks are ripping off the company, but maybe their strategy is to collect scooters as quickly as possible, and then take the time to log them when they get back to their charging stations. That may be working perfectly well for the company.

And here it is, Chapter 89 of Moby-Dick, "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish." Excerpt:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to do....

Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion with a doorplate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from the poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of 100,000 pounds seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a Fast-Fish. What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law? But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

"The problem is that cities have been shocked to discover that thousands of electric scooters have been dropped onto their sidewalks seemingly overnight."

"Often, the companies ignored all the usual avenues of getting city approval to set up shop. And since the scooters are dockless, riders can just grab one, go a few blocks and leave it wherever they want, causing a commotion on sidewalks and scenes of scooters strewn across wheelchair ramps and in doorways. So officials in cities like San Francisco and Santa Monica, Calif., have been sending cease-and-desist notices and holding emergency meetings. Some even filed charges against the scooter companies. 'They just appeared,' said Mohammed Nuru, director of the San Francisco Public Works, which has been confiscating the scooters. 'I don’t know who comes up with these ideas or where these people come from.'"

From "Electric Scooters Are Causing Havoc. This Man Is Shrugging It Off" in the NYT. "This man" is Travis VanderZanden, the CEO of the electric scooter company Bird Rides.

We saw lots of Bird Rides scooters in Austin, Texas when we were there last week. It made me feel sorry for B-Cycles, which require a docking station to secure the bikes and human muscle power to make them go. Because the scooters are electrically powered, they are essentially self-locking. To make them go, you use your phone app.

"Bird Scooters Have Invaded L.A.’s Westside."

"The Uber-like service for zippy two-wheeled vehicles has taken over the Westside...."

As the public took notice of Bird... Santa Monica officials struggled to regulate the service, which allows users to drop off the scooters wherever they please, assuming the devices are not blocking driveways or endangering the public (the electric contraptions don’t move without an app code and are picked up by trucks every night by 8 p.m.)....

“Preventing car ownership is the goal of all these [car and scooter rental] companies,” [said Bird founder Travis VanderZanden]. “I think if all of us are successful, that’s fine.”

"I had no idea I needed to see photos of Kevin Spacey in giant pants on a scooter..."

"... but I really did need it."