San Diego's Bird Scooter Hoarding Problem

http://www.scottresearch.com/blog/san-diegos-bird-scooter-hoarding-problem-with-screencaptures

by gscott • 8 years ago

168 190 8 years ago

rcthompson2• 8 years ago

This reminds me of the anecdote where some city tried to deal with their rat problem by offering a reward for every dead rat turned in. Instead, people started breeding rats so they could have more to turn in for reward money, and the rat population actually increased.

Or something like that. I might be mis-remembering some details.

ThePadawan• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

rcthompson2• 8 years ago

Yep, that's the example I was thinking of!

groestl• 8 years ago

A nice, classic variation of this theme, featuring day-care centers: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...

elastic_throe• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

User232• 8 years ago

This happened in Seattle but with human corpses, back in the early days. It worked out exactly how you’d expect.

hopranch• 8 years ago

People hoarded corpses. Weird.

cyphar• 8 years ago

There is actually a term for this in economics. It's called the "Lucas critique", and effectively states that any metric will be gamed eventually. It's slightly more subtle and is actually a critique about macroeconomic policymaking -- that people's actions are not structural and that making a new policy will affect how people act as they try to (ab)use the new policy -- but that's the basic gist.

EDIT: To clarify -- I'm not an economist, it's just something I read about in my spare time. I'm sure that the Lucas critique was pre-dated by other ideas (it's far too obvious to be entirely novel), and that there's a much deeper analysis that I wasn't aware of.

elvinyung• 8 years ago

Lucas critique is predated by Campbell's law and Goodhart's law.

lordnacho• 8 years ago

IMO the deeper history in Lucas Critique is the Problem of Induction.

"XYZ has always worked in the past" doesn't work. Imagine doing machine learning on this problem that Bird has. It could easily suggest that you should up the fees to get more scooter finders, rather than that you need to change the incentives.

thousandautumns• 8 years ago

I believe this is related to another principle in Economics called Goodhart's Law, which essentially states that as soon as something becomes a metric for measuring performance, it ceases to be a valid measure of actual performance. Essentially using something as a performance metric creates the incentive to game the system, inflate their values, and generally divorce the metric from the phenomenon it's trying to measure.

base698• 8 years ago

This was described in "The Wire" as juking the stats: https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM

wickedwiesel• 8 years ago

There are several examples of cash rewards for rat hunting like in Jakarta [1], but the "classic" version of where this went wrong is the "The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre" of 1902 [2] where rat hunters would just chop off live rats' tails to score the reward instead of killing it, because it would diminish their future income.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/21/jakartas-rat-...

[2] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...

ewams• 8 years ago

Could you explain a little better on how this works?

kristianov• 8 years ago

Bird Chargers are people who charge Bird e-scooter for rewards. They take Birds with low battery from the streets, charge them, and release them the next morning to collect their rewards. Each Bird has a different reward for charging. The company's reward algorithm seems to give higher reward for Birds that have been abandoned for a longer time. So the Bird chargers can just take Birds, "abandon" them in their backyard, wait until their rewards reach maximum, finally they will charge them and release them to get max rewards.

Quite like farming, really.

clort2• 8 years ago

It rather seems to me that Bird would know where the scooter was being charged, and where it was accumulating value in a fixed location. They can correlate this information

Bird really need to structure it better, and make it clear that such actions are fraudulent. The people involved need to lose their licence to charge and their user accounts and then they won't have any way to make money or use the scooters.

therefore_• 8 years ago

It seems like Bird has a program that pays people to charge their scooters overnight.

On paper, it seems like the idea is that if you were in this program and you found a scooter, you could take it home with you, charge it, then drop it off on a curb somewhere the next day and you'd be paid for charging it.

In reality, they didn't account for how people actually behave. So people are picking up scooters and "keeping" them in their apartments/houses to let the batteries drain more(?), until it gets to a point where charging it would be most profitable.

RangerScience• 8 years ago

Seems like a way around this is to not pay for scooters that never moved. They're all GPS tracked anyway.

gscott• 8 years ago

Maybe after hitting $20 the price goes down for charging after that. Or never letting the charging fee get beyond $8........

jaimehrubiks• 8 years ago

This is, indeed, a very hard problem to solve. The only option I see is banning somehow by law/agreement, and taking legal actions to people who 'steal' them. But in that case they would just stack them outside the house...

You could ban people who charge bikes to use them (it is as weird as if an uber driver couldn't use uber as a passenger).

ec1096852• 8 years ago

These hoarders display obviously anomalous behavior. Overtime, Bird will be able to weed out this fraud.

solatic2• 8 years ago

a very hard problem to solve

Is it? Honest chargers who go out to the boonies to recover truly hard-to-recover scooters will pick up scooters which turn red from all over the place. Dishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the charger's home).

Developing an algorithm to find the dishonest players should be relatively straightforward, and after dishonest players are found, they should be banned.

Normal_gaussian• 8 years ago

Yes, this seems largely trivial for a moderate sized company.

Will it be perfect? No. Will it be effective? Yes. Will it make a great HN blog post? Absolutely

michaelt4• 8 years ago

  Dishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters
  who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the
  charger's home).

...until the dishonest chargers figure out they can easily block the GPS signal with a few cents of tinfoil when they grab the scooter off the street.

CaptainZapp5• 8 years ago

The only option I see is banning somehow by law/agreement, and taking legal actions to people who 'steal' them.

There's something really funny about the libertarian mindset here:

  - Screw regulations! Disrupt! Use public property for private gain, but then
  - Let the hammer of the law crash down and the state deal with those scundrels if there are unintended consequences

Theres' a smidgeon of hypocrisy here, don't you think?

dnautics• 8 years ago

The libertarian mindset is pretty clear: There should be a small number of regulations, with a specific scope (e.g. protecting against physical harm and protecting property), which are clearly enumerated so that anyone, across most levels of education, can easily and reasonably determine if the regulation is fair or not.

kenhwang3• 8 years ago

I think the incentive structure needs to change to discourage hoarding. Currently, the payout always increases as you hold onto a scooter. What I think solves the problem is:

* An small bonus for nabbing the scooter while it still has a bit of charge left (<10%). Essentially a quick turnaround bonus. For the sake of argument, lets say $1 bonus + $4 base to match the original minimum if it's back on the street within 24h and never lost power.

* $4 if the scooter lost power, but is still returned within 48h.

* +$1 for every day it's missing after 48h up to $10 total.

* -$1 for every person that visits it's last known location after 2h and reports that they couldn't find it, down to $2 minimum. This is to encourage users to quickly attach the nabbed bird to power and "claim" them as soon as they pick them up instead of throwing it into their garage for a week then claiming them.

* The scooter gets set to $20 "lost scooter" bounty after a month, which can only be claimed once a month per user.

If the chargers want to play games, make it a game.

erentz5• 8 years ago

Make it simpler. First this is theft, they should assign some folks to track and report this to police. Let that be known and people might start being more honest.

Second you could just add something to the terms and conditions which allows them to cancel people’s rewards in these obvious cases. “Oh you happened to have 20 scooters at your address for two days and then suddenly charged and returned them. We’re cancelling your account.” Assign someone again to find these obvious examples of people hoarding scooters then cancel their accounts or whatever is appropriate.

As this poster shows, the man power involved shouldn’t be all that much. Browsing on a map. Etc.

dsfyu404ed2• 8 years ago

More police involvement in a petty civil matter is unlikely to be a net positive for society.

btbuildem• 8 years ago

Involving the police and another type of "Bird worker" is not simple, it complicates things.

I think the parent post has the right idea -- use the existing situation (consumers and producers) and gamify it in such a way that reduces hoarding.

That said, maybe there's a simpler way yet to do that.

crankylinuxuser2• 8 years ago

First this is theft, they should assign some folks to track and report this to police.

Sure looks like a private company dumping their trash on the streets for profit.

If I was to dump stuff on the street, I'd be cited for littering. And LiIon batteries are hazardous waste.

sushid• 8 years ago

That’s not a good way to change behavior. You’re essentially hoping that 1) law enformement agencies give a crap about this and 2) chargers learn that there are legal ramifications and change their behavior.

Alternatively, as others have suggested, you can change the incentives to minimize hoarding.

What do you think sounds more scalable/feasible?

eeeeeeeeeeeee3• 8 years ago

I’m loving how persistent some of these comments are about how Silicon Valley creates a “theft” issue with their own business model and the response is to throw the problem at the police to solve, who have actual real problems to deal with.

There is no theft. If these companies don’t want those contractors doing that, don’t incentivize it or remove them from the platform. Then if they continue to interact with the scooters after being banned, then it’s probably theft.

If these docked at a specific location, the case for “theft” might be an easier sell. But they are literally designed to be left ANYWHERE.

wyldfire• 8 years ago

* -$1 for every person that visits it's last known location after 2h and reports that they couldn't find it, down to $2 minimum. This is to encourage users to quickly attach the nabbed bird to power and "claim" them as soon as they pick them up instead of throwing it into their garage for a week then claiming them.

What about giving them a commission on the next day's use of the scooters that they charged? Then they're incentivized to make them available. It might be challenging to balance this against "finding hard-to-spot scooters." Maybe steadily increase the commission on least-recently-used scooters?

alsothrownaway• 8 years ago

Company litters thousands of billboards all over streets and sidewalks, creating city-wide eyesore / road hazard
Citizens remove hazard from streets, profiting at company's expense

Isn't this the definition of poetic justice?

gtirloni2• 8 years ago

I understand these are faceless corporations but, if you're a concerned citizen and want to make a statement through civil disobedience, why not disable the scooters and leave a note? Why profit?

I can't see this as poetic justice. Two wrongs don't make a right, as the saying goes.

gtirloni2• 8 years ago

For the downvotters, I'm not advocating you do any of that. I was writing from the point of view of someone who thinks what's being done is right (people screwing a company that is, in their views, harming their city) and how ripping it off by hiding the scooters and profiting from the charges is kind of messed up.

lazerwalker2• 8 years ago

Only if you only view the scooters as a "hazard" and an "eyesore". An alternate interpretation (even if you're rightfully skeptical of for-profit venture-funded startups like these) is that the scooters are a fairly sustainable and scalable form of individual transit compared to cars, and a world where scooters (or similar devices) fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure.

CaptainZapp5• 8 years ago

is that the scooters are a fairly sustainable and scalable form of individual transit compared to cars, and a world where scooters (or similar devices) fulfill a useful last-mile role

This argument only holds water if public transportation sucks in a city. If you can get to wherever you want to go within a 200 metre radius of a city by public transport (which is the case in a lot of European cities to begin with) then this argument does not make any sense.

fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure.

That's at least debatable. If it's really part of public transport infrastructure then this should be coordinated with the cities. But the mindset seems more a : "We shit 500 of those things throughout a relatively small city and disrupt the holly bejeezus out of this town". As long as this attitude prevails I neither see this as a valid argument.

amyjess4• 8 years ago

a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure

You could also call it "a last-mile role in public transit that's completely inaccessible to the disabled".

Hell, my disability is relatively minor—I have developmental dyspraxia (a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder)—and I attempted to ride one of these scooters once, and I was so completely out-of-control riding it that I had to stop after a block, drag it back onto the sidewalk, and tuck it in a corner so nobody trips over it. It took me several minutes to stop shaking.

And they can also cause externalities for people with other disabilities. For example, people throwing them down on the sidewalks can create tripping hazards for the blind (though from what I've seen, this was a much bigger problem with the bikes that predated the scooters than the scooters themselves).

JamesAdir3• 8 years ago

The solution is super simple. Stop paying in direct payout and start paying in riding credits. I sometimes used Bird from the train station to my home in the evening. I would happily charge it in my home during the night and release it in the morning for Bird credits. But it seems that at this stage since the scooter companies raised so much money, they just have no problem to ignore it and pay directly or just throw more scooters into the pool.

benj111• 8 years ago

Wouldn't you then get to a situation where x gets a bird, takes it home, charges it, uses it the next day, essentially creating a rental model where each scooter is used by one person a day?

Presumably the nature of the beast is that these start off the day next to transport hubs and then spread out from there. It isn't then worth it for some one to go out of their way to take it back to that transport hub.

If you are travelling against the prevailing traffic what you say would work, but not for the majority.

As I understand it the bikes it London (and probably else where) vary the charges depending on where you're going. So if you're taking a bike back to where it needs to be, the charge is less. If you're taking it out to the edge of a zone where it will need to be collected by an employee, you pay more.

davnicwil2• 8 years ago

Could this be solved by saying you stop getting credit after X days using the same scooter?

baybal2• 8 years ago

What I saw in China with Liubike is that middle age people make business "renting" out fully charged Liubikes

JoshuaDavid• 8 years ago

Wouldn't you then get to a situation where x gets a bird, takes it home, charges it, uses it the next day, essentially creating a rental model where each scooter is used by one person a day?

As I recall, Bird uses Xiaomi Mi scooters, which cost ~$500 retail. Even if the credit is high enough that Bird only makes $1 / weekday off the person "renting" the scooter like that, it would still only take 2 years to pay the cost of the scooter, so that "rental" model would probably work fine.

JamesAdir3• 8 years ago

@benji111 Not at all. I'm a casual user and I don't use scooters daily. I think anyone that uses a scooter daily prefers to buying one of his own. Let's say I've taken one from my train station to my home in the evening, charge it, and then ride it back in the morning (creating more income for Bird) and leave it in the train station. It will be used all day long, and I don't expect it to be in the train station when I get back.

I think that just paying with bird credits reduce the entire "let's make a business out of charging" and will just create a better community.

As again, I think that this problem is completely solvable by Bird. And in other threads they've mentioned that there are many signals to those "hordaers". I think that Bird just don't want to deal with it since it has enough funding/focuses on market adoption.

It's the same with Microsoft and piracy tools of Windows. I'm sure they can crack it down completely, but it just don't bother them enough on the bottom line.

goobynight3• 8 years ago

Most people don't want to work for credit at the company store.

JamesAdir3• 8 years ago

It can be completely optional. If someone is doing a great job as a charger for some time, they can be switched to being paid directly.

codezero• 8 years ago

It sure if it’s related but I learned from my brother in law’s girlfriend that her little brother had been hoarding scooters because they had some app that could disable the tracking and let you ride for free.

I guess the fact that these show up on a map contradicts that.

usrusr• 8 years ago

So could it be an alternative client that uses straw-man accounts to cash in every time the hoarder charges a scooter, occasionally using some of the spoils to buy them a "free" ride? That would be fascinatingly twisted: make your accomplices think they are part in an entirely different kind of crime than they are. Even more twisted (but not as creative) if it's an inside job to get a larger slice of the VC pie.

stevecalifornia• 8 years ago

I feel like the obvious solution is to pay chargers based on how much of their charge was used the following day after releasing the scooter into the wild.

noobiemcfoob• 8 years ago

I don't agree that it's obvious, but I like the idea. Chargers would then be investing in the scooter's use the next day but with joules instead of cash.

/joules will be the currency of the future!

whoisjuan• 8 years ago

The scooter business it's proving to be a real life experiment of the many fucked up factors and forces that influence an urban modern society: vandalism, hoarding scooters for profit, tension between governments, companies and users, blatant violation of traffic rules, etc...

As you scale something like this the problems become more evident and harder to manage. These businesses looked pretty solid when they had small fleets, but now that they are scaling it's pretty easy to see the cracks.

Watching how this unfolds in the next two to three years is going to be a hell of a ride (no pun intended)

koliber4• 8 years ago

I came to believe that these negative forces are all around us. They are constantly at play. As the landscape changes, they adapt to the new realities, but are mostly invisible.

When a big company comes is with a sudden alteration to the "environment", these negative forces respond, with a force that is congruous to the speed at which the original change happened.

If a change in society happens quickly, it is very visible. All the reactions also happen quickly and are also very visible.

If the change happens slowly, the reactions also follow gradually and slowly, and everything seems less drastic and less noticeable.

Tepix• 8 years ago

If you put hundreds of vehicles on the streets that cost $500 each you need to seriously think about people taking advantage of you, even if it amounts to stealing. You must not make it too easy and intriguing.

"Gelegenheit macht Diebe" - "Opportunity makes the thief"

jedmeyers• 8 years ago

I came to believe that these negative forces are all around us.

You mean people putting their own interests first?

drpgq• 8 years ago

At the least, there will be plenty of PhD economic thesis material.

TheCondor• 8 years ago

Is there an incentive structure that will fix this? Or one that can fix it? I suspect you’d need some sophisticated machine learning that can adjust the incentive model to each users’ specific antisocial behavior. Even then, it’s not clear to me you’d have a net profit, there might be classes of users you just have to ban.

I wonder how much of the antisocial behavior is subconscious

amyjess4• 8 years ago

I find this interesting, because in Dallas the scooters have proven much less problematic than the bikes.

The bikes could best be described as "a throbbing mass of externalities", but the scooters have largely avoided these problems... except for the issue with people illegally riding them on the sidewalk and nearly running pedestrians over. But that's minor compared to all the problems the bikes had.

distances• 8 years ago

I'm not familiar with the bike problem, mind sharing?

koliber4• 8 years ago

One possible solution is to look at the place where the scooter was charged. Next, look at the place it has spent waiting to be charged. If the distance is less than 100 feet, don't give a payout. This can also be gamed, but more elaborate rules can be implemented. Ultimately, it will not be worth a hassle to game the system on a wide scale. A sort of equilibrium will be achieved. Cat and mouse it is.

IshKebab2• 8 years ago

I feel like a better and solution is to see if the scooter is actually used between charges. If it's in their garage obviously nobody can be renting it.

They may perhaps try and get friends to rent it but if you do it as profit sharing rather than a fixed price then they can't cheat.

koliber4• 8 years ago

I didn't realize that they are keeping them hostage for that long, through multiple recharge cycles. I thought that people are scooping up scooters, holding them in their garage until the price goes up, recharging them, and freeing them.

chillacy• 8 years ago

What if people were paid based on how many users your charged scooters had? That would incentivize you to also place the scooter in a prime location each day, optimizing for events, day of week, and competition

xfitm3• 8 years ago

I think this would negatively impact users in low traffic areas.

Tiktaalik2• 8 years ago

lmao.

So many of these dumb problems would be solved if they worked with cities and created a docked system, but no I guess that's too boring and not ~disruptive~ enough.

tapland• 8 years ago

Problem with docked system is that it isn't nearly as handy. We got scooters in my town yesterday and there are multiple in each block already, whereas the bike docks the city has are spaced reasonably close (bus stop distance) but that prohibits people from going to get them since walking to the dock and back takes as much time as the bike commute.

cycrutchfield2• 8 years ago

Docked systems have been tried and consumers do not prefer them.

orbifold• 8 years ago

It works really well in Paris and where I live as well.

pavel_lishin• 8 years ago

Works ok in New York. I would obviously prefer a dockless system, but I would also prefer free money, a jetpack and a machine that magically manifests sandwiches on demand.

Tiktaalik2• 8 years ago

nope

sschueller2• 8 years ago

Exactly, and it doesn't need to be docked only. Rewards riders if they drop the scooter off at a dock but don't make it a requirement.

beerlord• 8 years ago

Who whole point of escooter rental is to be dockless. You need to be able to leave the scooter anywhere.

adrianmonk2• 8 years ago

Hoarding takes a certain percentage of scooters out of play. For purposes of discussion let's say it's 20%. You can solve this problem by adding more 25% more scooters.

Or you can solve it by adding docks all over the place. But docks cost money to build. And you need them in as many locations as possible; otherwise, your service no longer offers the convenience that is its main selling point. And, like with parking spaces, you can never have 100% utilization of docks. For every scooter, you need multiple spaces in docks.

So, I would not take it for granted that docks would actually be the most efficient way to solve this problem.

randyrand2• 8 years ago

Docking sucks. I used to use docked bikes daily and was constantly frustrated.

I hope they solve this.

quickthrower2• 8 years ago

Over the next few weeks I drove more in gas then I would find scooters.

So much for the environment eh!

pxtail• 8 years ago

Very simple solution: just set additional reward for rescuing poor birds, it will create new jobs, whole new caste will arise: bird hunters. They will just roam cities with smartphone in hand, rifle (for safety!), maybe loyal dog and set free flocks of birds.

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

Why does the pay out have to increase? Have they tested what happens if it starts at $7 and never changes? I get the theory is to discover and incentivize less desirable scoot scoots, but I'm skeptical you actually need that.

pingmurder• 8 years ago

Seems obvious the scooters need to be able to transit themselves to a charging station, like a rhoomba

wffurr• 8 years ago

They should just switch to a docked model.

AimForTheBushes• 8 years ago

The best part is being able to ride directly to your destination though.

NorthOf33rd• 8 years ago

There have been many great pricing models posed in this thread to dis-incentivize gaming, but I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned the simple "make bird hunting a full time job with benefits."

Just like uber before them, bird threatens to upend some reasonably decent jobs in cities with bike share programs- assuming the bike share programs don't learn from taxi drivers and adapt.

So much of the reason these things work- and that the companies themselves become massively valuable is the externalization of costs. That doesn't have to be a given.

dawnerd2• 8 years ago

I think Lime does that? In any case Bird should be inspecting their scooters frequently for safety reasons so really would just make sense to hire teams of people with vans or trucks to pick them up every night.

midniteslayr• 8 years ago

Razor scooters/eBikes do that in San Diego, and I know Jump bikes also have a team of people in San Francisco (as it was mandated by the city).

In SD, the Razor Scooters are much nicer and doesn't seem to have as many problems with their equipment than the Bird scooters do.

aezell2• 8 years ago

Thank you for pointing this out. I'm always bemused at the overly complicated technical solutions proffered when a simple "pay a human a decent wage" solves the original problem and lots of other ones, too.

andrewla4• 8 years ago

Maybe this is all common knowledge; I live in NYC so we don't have Birds yet, so I'm a little ignorant here.

From what I can tell, each scooter that is low on batteries is given a bounty (somewhere between $5 to $20) based on how hard it is to find. I assume that the "hardness" is computed based on how many chargers fail to find the scooter, but there may be something more sophisticated at work. To charge a scooter, a charger finds one, checks it out in the charger app, and then takes it home and charges it, and returns it to its "Bird's Nest" (clever) in the morning, at which point you get paid.

The scooters have GPS trackers to prevent theft.

So what these hoarders are doing is stealing the scooters -- rather than checking them out through the charger app, they're just grabbing them and tossing them in their van, and then keeping them in their home, where other chargers will fail to find them, thus increasing their bounty, until they "discover" the scooters, claim them through the app, charge them, and return them to their nest.

Have I understood this correctly? Given that they are removing the scooter without claiming it through the app (either as a rider or a charger) that means that they are stealing them, which means all Bird has to do is provide the police with the address of the hoarder and that's the end of it.

muthdra• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

_rs• 8 years ago

Another thing I don't see anyone talking about is that some people (users) hoard scooters so they definitely have one available to ride the next morning without having to hunt for one (and hope they find one close enough). I've seen this where someone will ride a scooter somewhere and bring it inside behind a locked door so that it will be available in an hour or two when they are leaving. I would expect this same behavior to happen overnight when scooters have a high enough charge left on them to still be useful.

reureu• 8 years ago

That's not a new strategy. Car2Go had the same problem. I had multiple incidents where I'd reserve a car, only to go find that it was parked in someone's garage.

mannykannot2• 8 years ago

I am not sure that this is a clear-cut criminal matter (Bird knows where the item is, did it make an attempt to recover it? Had it made any attempt to secure said item?), but even if it was, getting the police involved in a problem Bird has brought on itself would just make its already-tricky relationship with municipalities even more difficult.

andrewla4• 8 years ago

The municipalities have a problem with people committing crimes, namely theft. They can blame Bird for creating an attractive nuisance, but it seems like the security measures they have in place are more than sufficient to give law enforcement the information it needs so that they need to do minimal investigatory work in order to prosecute these crimes.

Denying Bird the equal protections of the law is a violation of their constitutional duty to, well, not deny anyone equal protection of the law.

adrianmonk2• 8 years ago

That's how I understand it too.

As a matter of fairness and good PR, it would be great if scooter companies could find ways to enforce this themselves rather than creating grunt work for the local police.

One way to do this is with better fraud detection. There are probably many signals, but an obvious one is to look at per-account trends and ask: did the scooters charged by this account have an unnaturally low rate of being picked up and ridden by users? Even after accounting for other variables including demand in that location at that time and charge available on that scooter? If so, that suggests something has prevented people from riding them, so probably hoarding. Then you temporarily suspend or permanently ban the account.

Of course, it's possible scooter companies know they can solve these things, but they just haven't bothered yet. While they're in growth mode, they may feel their resources should be used solving other problems and Mets prefer just to throw money at the problem by putting more scooters on the street.

ticmasta2• 8 years ago

I'm pretty confident that

(A) the police can't barge into a private residence because some tech company points at a phone and says "see! it says my scooter is inside!" - they would still need legal basis for probable cause. When my home was B&E'd and a tablet stolen the police said unless the device reported it was in a public area they explicitly were "not going to go into a private residence to look for it".

(B) The police should (and probably will) place these complaints at the very bottom of their priority list.

(C) No current-era start-up that's business model is based around ignoring regulation and existing laws is going to assume responsibility and cost for anything they can displace onto another party or, better yet, society at large 'cause, ya know "disruption".

crankylinuxuser2• 8 years ago

This is simple to fix:

Allow a charger-app to trigger a loud horn sound continuously. Make taking these painful to keep.

And then post a way to report illegally impounded scooters, either with address or license plate of where they're kept.

jotux• 8 years ago

Seems easier to fix than that -- just change the incentive. Instead of paying more for scooters that are hard to find or have been dead longer, pay more the faster people pick up, charge, and return the scooters to service. Pick-up, charge, return within 2 hours = $20. If it takes longer than 8 hours, pay $5.

dawnerd2• 8 years ago

I like the sound idea. Could be useful if someone is trying to locate one to rent too. Might prevent people from reserving one. Bird could also offer. Reserved price if you want to have it inside for later use.

JetSpiegel• 8 years ago

Just mute your phone, problem solved.

eeeeeeeeeeeee3• 8 years ago

Just what we need — more sirens. Like car alarm sirens, which are enormously effective ;)

Which go off randomly and in most cities, you can have one going off next to you and you would think everyone around it is deaf by their complete lack of care over your car being stolen. You think people are going to care more about a...scooter?

twtw• 8 years ago

So what these hoarders are doing is stealing the scooters -- rather than checking them out through the charger app, they're just grabbing them and tossing them in their van

This is not my understanding. The scooters I've seen throw an absolute fit if you move them more than ~1 meter without unlocking them via the app.

I don't know much about this, but I didn't think the scooters had to be returned to any particular place. So hoarders pick them up to charge them and when charged "return" them to their garage/backyard. In which case it's not as clearly theft, they are just returning them to an inconvenient place - but that's fine, they are dockless.

andrewla4• 8 years ago

What I've seen indicates that after charging they are required to return the scooters to their "Bird's nest", not to an arbitrary location of their choosing.

It might be that they choose to forfeit the reward for the initial charging by not returning the scooters, but that seems like more of a no-brainer to detect; chargers who routinely do not return their scooters to their nests would be extremely easy to detect.

Easier might be to check them out as riders, then toss them in the van and "return" them to the charger's backyard or garage; if you have a group of people who are in on this, then it seems like you could make this nearly undetectable by pooling the risk.

ProblemFactory• 8 years ago

which means all Bird has to do is provide the police with the address of the hoarder and that's the end of it.

Literally. Bird can provide the address to the police and they will do nothing, and that's the end of it.

If you are leaving your property on public sidewalks, and offering a $20 bounty for temporarily stealing it, then you need to fix your rewards system before wasting police time.

hndamien• 8 years ago

Is it stealing or is it just dockless?

stcredzero2• 8 years ago

What if the bounty was influenced by the duty cycle of the scooters? So the more utilized the scooters are, the higher the bounty? What I'm wondering is if there is a way to shape the hoarder's behavior into something beneficial to the user base.

biophetik• 8 years ago

I've witnessed plenty of people nabbing scooters in rental trucks or vans during the morning in San Diego. Probably 10-30 stacked all over. It occurred to me how scooters not only are a mode of transportation, but now a resource that people rely on for extra cash.

Seems completely justified but oddly weird to me. I haven't witnessed it yet, but I wonder if there have been fights over territory/scooters.

dalbasal• 8 years ago

You might sum this up with "markets & incentives are hard"

dchuk• 8 years ago

I live in Pacific Beach in San Diego (to the left of that first map in the post).

Every morning on my drive to work, I pass a few pickup trucks with 10/20/30+ scooters in the back. Seems like folks have created a full time business out of charging these things, so I'm not surprised it's challenging for a "casual" charger to make a couple bucks with them.

That being said, I was very bearish on the idea of Birds until it clicked to me how brilliant the charging program is. They're essentially paying people to protect these things in their homes overnight, and nicely place them in optimized locations every morning. Other competitors down here (especially bikes) who just left their units out all day and night quickly lost them all to homeless people and vandals chucking them into the ocean. But Birds are cleanly lined up on every corner every morning.

Very clever.

warunsl• 8 years ago

I was in SD this weekend. I did see the pickup trucks you mentioned at night picking up like 15-20 birds/limes. How silly of me. I thought these were the from Bird and Lime distributing the scooters evenly across the blocks!

aezell2• 8 years ago

I rode my first Bird in Pacific Beach last week. They don't exist where I live. I just assumed that those trucks were contracted by the company somehow. I didn't know this whole charging economy existed.

I also saw a few drunken (or angry) [or both] people smash up a few of them as they walked down the street. I'd like to know how many they lose in this way.

PeanutNore• 8 years ago

It's practically an article of faith on here that these scooter companies are providing a valuable public service and deserve to succeed, but I have yet to see a single halfway decent argument for why that's the case.

From where I'm sitting the whole thing seems like a bad joke. The people hoarding scooters are probably just waiting until the company inevitably folds, with the (likely correct) assumption that an already overstretched municipal police force isn't going to be bothered to help a (fiscally and ethically) bankrupt company track down hundreds or thousands of lost scooters across town.

The correct response by cities to the issue of the startups dumping scooters on public sidewalks is to send them to the municipal recycling plant for scrapping.

ricardobeat• 8 years ago

Cheap, quick transport on an electric vehicle. More convenient and comfortable than public transport. What makes you not consider that valuable?

g45y45• 8 years ago

Eventually every scooter will be stolen, GPS disabled and board replaced. They are commodity Xiaomi scooters, retailing for hundreds of dollars. They can be stolen and rebirthed for <$50. Scooter rental was a terrible idea, and the assets of the companies will be redistributed to masses.

randyrand2• 8 years ago

The same can be said for bikes and bike locks.

I don’t think enough people steal for it to prevent all bicycling. Perhaps there is still benefit.

goobynight3• 8 years ago

It certainly prevents many people from leaving unattended bicycles out after dark or using them during this time. Not just after midnight or something.

If you do anything except daytime ride, you're liable to get messed with in some cities. People largely just accept thieves in their society.

millzlane2• 8 years ago

That's exactly what they're doing. There is a dude on scooter talk who isn't shy about letting us know how he's exploiting the system. He intends to keep doing it until bird or lime shut him down.

wheelerwj• 8 years ago

whats scooter talk?

millzlane2• 8 years ago

https://scootertalk.org/

burlesona• 8 years ago

A better incentive would be to give chargers a tiny cut of all the riding fees for the next charge. Make it so the scooter have to be below 50% battery OR not ridden for a day in order to be eligible to move. That would incentivize the chargers to get the scooters back on the street ASAP.

If there’s still hoarding, offer riders (not chargers!) some bounty for reporting hoarding.

As other posters have said it’s a game-design problem to align incentives so that you get the outcomes you want.

xapata2• 8 years ago

Great idea. That'll also motivate chargers to place scooters at useful locations.

shazam• 8 years ago

Then the charging cost would grow with profit and would no longer be considered an overhead cost.

kazinator2• 8 years ago

I don't see the problem. Since the scooters are up for grabs, you're allowed to take one and park it at home. Whether that looks like stealing or just making sure you have it available later when you need it is a gray area that requires interpretation on a case by case basis. That's probably why the police don't care.

If the scooters are indoors, that is good for the scooters, by the way.

mannykannot2• 8 years ago

I don't think it could be any more serious a matter than not abiding by the EULA.

kazinator2• 8 years ago

Basically, the EULA should (and likely does) have some terms against that. That is to say, scooters that are fobbed out by their user should be left in such a way that their are accessible to other users. Identify the violators and charge them fines and/or terminate their accounts.

Keeping scooters in homes and garages can be allowed, provided the scooters are "on the clock": in the middle of a booking that is being paid for.

mkong1• 8 years ago

What is the time scale for increasing the bounty vs how long it takes to charge a scooter?

If we give the 'hoarders' the benefit of the doubt, could it be the bounty is increasing while they have a bunch of scooters queued up to charge? They grabbed 20 in their truck, and it takes 5 hours to charge 1, but they only have 2 outlets, but the bounty goes up every 12 hours, so they have a backlog?

kenhwang3• 8 years ago

They're supposed to scan the QR code the moment they grab them, which essentially marks the scooter as found and the rates are frozen. Then they can take their sweet time charging them.

What they're doing instead is grabbing them without scanning them, chirping be dammed, and holding onto them for a while so the bounty increases. Then they scan them as found and charge them.

sizzle• 8 years ago

Anyone well versed in game theory know an optimal solution to hedge against the problem of hoarding?

undersuit• 8 years ago

The hoarder finds some value in hoarding. In extreme cases of hoarding where you find the house is filled with items often the value comes from the hoarder not having to worry about inadequate supplies. A person who hoards food because of previous issues with having adequate food is sating their need for security.

This isn't an extreme case but the same reasons still exist, hoarding the scooters is providing value. Take efforts to reduce value. Like start letting the scooters talk to each other and you'll be able to find the cycle in the graph where the hoarded scooters only talk to each other until one pays outs handsomely and it joins the rest of the public scooters. Or make a scooter pay out less if it has been idle for an extended period of time even with low battery value. Or the opposite, make a scooter pay out more if it's getting higher than average use.

San Diego's Bird Scooter Hoarding Problem

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