I don't see how what you described has anything to do with Bird. It could be any scooter, or any random object that's falling out of a pick up truck. Running over things in general is going to be bad for your vehicle.
It's relevant to Bird because Bird makes these scooters available to use at very low cost.
Nobody would leave their own scooter in the street, but people have no problem leaving someone else's scooter wherever it was convenient. People leave them all over the place where I live, and it's been a huge problem. They're constantly being fished out of the rivers, dumpsters, etc.
Bird isn't responsible for securing the load on a truck. They need to go after the driver of the truck that dropped them - he has liability insurance, or his employer does.
My experience suggests that Bird won't tell the victim the identity of the guilty party even if they know it. Here's a video of a Bird scooter rider running a red light and almost causing a collision with me, a cyclist:
I contacted Bird and while they did look at the video and seemed sympathetic, I got the impression that nothing was done in response. That's because they refused to tell me even simple things like "The rider was reprimanded". I didn't ask for the rider's identity, just for what was done in response. And I contacted them within an hour of the incident, providing precise time, location, and the video above, so I'm very confident they knew who the rider was.
(Sorry for the strong language in the video. Note that I included some time before the incident because I know from experience that some people always seem to suggest that if a cyclist had a bad time on the road it was because they antagonized who gave them a bad time. I hope it's clear that I had no contact with this guy before the video.)
To be fair, this kind of idiocy is in no way limited to scooters. In NYC we don't have Bird yet but we do have tons of delivery people on bikes (electric and traditional) that do stuff even more dangerous than this. One time while I was coming off of a steep downhill a delivery guy wheeled his bike out from between two parked cars without looking either way, and another delivery guy who was about 30 feet in front of me hit the bike, went over the handlebars, and smashed his face on the ground. He was visibly dazed for minutes after and bleeding from his head; it would have happened to me if I was about a second ahead of where I was. I've also had electric bikes whiz by about 2 feet from me on the sidewalk at 20+mph many times. They are nearly silent, so it's easy to imagine abruptly turning around or shifting over (as pedestrians are wont to do) and very getting severely injured. I've seen plenty of other awful and dangerous behavior in addition.
Fortunately, I don't see this as much with non-delivery cyclists. In NYC at least, this is mostly a problem with delivery people; the extreme pressure they are under to deliver on time, combined with the fact that many of them have clearly received no safety training, seems to be a major cause.
NYC's bad cyclists (and, in the future, bad scooterists) are actually scarier to me than NYC drivers because they can come at you from so many more angles thanks to their small size; it's much easier to predict and avoid cars and even pedestrians. (People are also used to cyclists here, so the cars are paradoxically not nearly as scary to me as they are in less dense environments.)
Yes, I agree that delivery folks can be particularly dangerous. I also watch out for ridershare drivers as they are frequently distracted by their phone and in a rush.
The small size was a major problem here. I probably would have seen the scooter rider earlier if they were a driver running the red light. I now always check for red light runners at that intersection.
(As for how visible I was, I was wearing a hi-viz jacket at the time. My air horn seems to have been the only thing that caught the scooter guy's attention. Not sure what more I could do.)
Motorized scooter riders in CA are required to have a drivers license and wear a helmet. Most states do not require insurance for motorized scooters that cannot go more than 25MPH.
Yes, I thought about that after posting. I don't think they should give the identity of a user to some random person. For what it's worth, I didn't ask for the Bird rider's identity, and I don't see a good reason why they couldn't have told me whether the rider was reprimanded. I suspect that the rider wasn't reprimanded and they didn't want to lie to me.
Bird most likey is the "employer." They have a gig economy model where people are paid a rate per scooter to pick them up, charge them and drop them off at a specific location.
Its doubtful the truck driver was an employee of bird, but its also likely they were only moving the scooters because of this model. That sounds like enough of a reason to add them to the suit that will also likely hit the driver.
Yes—if Bird’s business model requires the transportation of the vehicles by contractors, Bird is responsible for requiring parameters of safe transport.
It's a fair point, but I personally have been the victim of a piece of scrap metal that flew off a truck and into my windshield.
The issue is not precisely with Bird, but that the big dogs who fund these companies can produce giant pieces of wasted material thanks to how US and Chinese monetary policy works
Eh, I don't agree with this. The issue in your case was that someone didn't properly secure a piece of scrap metal to their vehicle. The fact that China demands scrap metal doesn't seem relevant to me given that this sounds like simple incompetence.
You wouldn't blame the automaker for a drinking and driving incident that resulted in a death, you'd blame the driver.
There's a lot of cheap money floating around in China as well. This is funding business models like that of Ninebot, who is the manufacturer for a lot of these cheap scooters.
Another Chinese company that had a similar business model is Ofo, which essentially went bankrupt a few months ago after raising over $2B in funding for dockless bikesharing.
If the driver of the truck was only transporting the bird as part of their agreement with Bird to charge the scooters, were they acting as an agent of bird at the time they were driving on the highway?
He may be seeing these coming in at a higher rate than other objects. Bird has set up a business of transporting heavy scooters that wasn't there before. I've seen people ride 4 at one time to transport them home to charge
Scooters, including by Bird, have dramatically increased the amount of street obstacles one can run over. It’s absolutely relevant because the entire scooter model is “blanket the city with them”
On top of that, because many of the chargers are “contractors”, you get situations like the OP described where random people just throw scooters in their pickup, unsecured, and then they fly away on the highway.
Is it that hard to see? Bird, at a minimum, is going to have to replace the destroyed scooter, at least if they want to maintain the same capacity to serve that area/market.
We don't know if the pickup was being operated by Bird or a subcontractor. My guess is that it was. I see people picking these things up in pickups and vans, and they don't look at all professional, but they look like they work for Bird (or the other companies in the sector).
