The Battle Over Scooter Impound In San Diego May Help Cities Improve Scooter Hygiene

An interesting fight is taking place in San Diego between scooter companies like Lime and Bird, and a “repo man” who has discovered a business impounding scooters improperly parked on private property. He impounds the scooters, then charges the companies a surprisingly reasonable $30 plus $2/day to get them back. Accusations of bad activity have flung in both directions, including allegations that Lime Juicers and Bird Hunters (free-lance people who collect and recharge scooters for a fee) have been trying to break into his impound lots to collect the large bounty, and allegations that he’s impounding scooters that he should not.

The story is interesting though. These dockless scooters are absolutely wonderful, by far the most energy and congestion efficient form of motorized transportation out there, using less than a quarter of the energy per person-mile of even the most efficient electric subways. We should keenly want them to work. But various actions, such as scooters left in inappropriate locations, and risky or bad driving by scooter users, have made cities and residents angry at them.

Disclaimer: I am an investor/advisor to a nascent startup attempting to solve some of these problems through scooters that can move autonomously, so I have a bias towards our solutions. Nonetheless, I am interested in all sorts of solutions.

Tow and impound is an ancient solution to improper parking for a long time, though it’s naturally much hated by those towed. The “Scootscoop” team claim they are only removing scooters from private property under arrangement with the property owners. Bird has sued them and accused them of “ransoming” scooters.

If — and it’s a big if — an impound regimen could work in an ideal fashion, it would address many of the problems people have with where scooters are parked. An impound scheme would quickly motivate all the scooter companies to make sure that customers only leave scooters in approved locations. They could use GPS, the photos they make customers take of the scooter after they park it and fines and penalties to force customers to park properly. If you knew that you would personally pay the fine if you parked a scooter improperly, you would take more care.

The scooter companies will not be keen to do this. Punishing customers scares away customers. If you ban customers they can come back with a new phone number or credit card, but you don’t really want to ban them. But they would do it if they were getting high fines to recover impounded scooters.

The big problem is the potential for fraud and malice of several sorts. The difficulty is that a scooter can be moved after it is parked, from a proper location to an illegal one. Or somebody can claim that a scooter was moved.

1. Unscrupulous impounders could move scooters into unlawful areas and then impound them. It would be pretty lucrative. They would just claim that somebody else moved it.
2. “Haters” of the scooter companies, who today are known to damage scooters for non-monetary reasons, could move scooters into improper areas in the hope they would be impounded. They could even call the impounder.
3. The two could secretly work together.

Scooter companies could work a bit against this. Through the use of accelerometers, microphones or cameras in the scooters, they could have evidence that a scooter was moved and when, though they probably would not see who did it. This might not mean the impounder did anything wrong unless it’s clear the scooter was moved immediately before impounding, which unethical impounders would be smart enough not to do.

Scooter companies could also (at some cost) find ways to make video recordings of even a small number of move-and-impound frauds. If caught in a clear fraud, impounders could lose their license to impound, of course, and possibly face large civil and criminal penalties. It is much harder to catch “haters,” who today happily post videos online of themselves destroying scooters with no fear of repercussions.

Unfortunately, GPS is not accurate enough to guide customers to proper parking spaces, which will often be just a few feet from improper ones. So training customers to park well could be a very difficult challenge. If there were a camera in the scooters (there currently is not) one can imagine a more advanced robot localization tool (in the cloud) which figured the exact position and helped better, but that’s a big add-on for the scooter makers.

Once scooter companies accept the idea of impounding, they could take steps to assure their recharge/reposition contractors do not try to steal impounded scooters. In fact, chances are — though it sounds like a protection racket — they would come to an arrangement with the impounders, who would instead recharge and reposition the improperly parked scooters, rather than impound them, for a mutually agreed upon fee.

It’s also possible to imagine an app-based scheme which keeps most sides happy. Consider a system that starts with a tool to let private property owners tag a scooter as parked on their private property using an app to scan the code found on every scooter:

1. Property owner tags the scooter. This starts a clock.
2. Scooter operator is informed immediately about improper scooter. It has a short period of time — 10 to 15 minutes to declare what it is going to do about it.
3. Options could include promising to remove it by some deadline, paying the property owner/resident to accept it or move it, or accepting the risk of impound.
4. The company might immediately phone or signal the customer who left it in the wrong place, hoping they are close enough to fix the problem. It might penalize them if they don’t fix it, or if they say they will fix it and don’t by the deadline.
5. After the deadline, or if the company accepts the risk of impound, then an impound company can be notified. If the company moves the scooter after that notification, and the impound company arrives to find nothing, there may be a fine on the company.
6. Impound companies could charge a standard fee for recovery and storage, but would always be free to negotiate a lower fee, or a fee that includes recharging and positioning.

It’s a little more complex for bad parking in public places. Reporting could still be done by property residents adjacent to the public spaces, but there is a risk that the boundaries and rules for public space should only be enforced by bonded officials.

None of this touches on the other main problem cities have, namely safety and illegal driving of the scooters on sidewalks. But it’s a start.