Lately, I've been following various stories out of San Francisco, and this odd story popped up over the weekend.
Folks there have decided that things with the electric scooter trend have reached a stage where 'control' needs to be established by the city.
Last week, I was reading 'rants' by locals, and one guy got onto this topic.....describing city as now having a Ho Chi Minh City appearance with all the motor scooters that rumble across the city day and night.
So the Municipal Transportation Agency says they want to fix this electric scooter issue....with a two-year permit test program that would limit the city to five e-scooter permits, and no more than 500 scooters for each permit.
There would be an absolute max of 2,500 scooters in San Francisco. If the company could not manage their program.....the license would be yanked.
Adding to the rules....scooters would only be allowed into certain areas of the city.
Then the fee would fall into place (a company paying $5k per year to the city. Later, they suggest it'd go to $25,000).
A maintenance fee? Well, that got thrown into the mess as well....the rental company would have to pay $10k a year into some public fund.
Then the cherry on this whole idea would be that the five companies would have to come up with a plan on their own to help the 'poor' (low-income folks) pay for their scooter.
I sat there looking at the fees involved, the necessity of funding low income users of scooters, and profit-margin for each of the five companies. It'd mean that you as a 'renter' would have to pay in the range of $100 to $150 a month once they got to the higher $25k a year fee for the companies involved.
The odds that people would cooperate? That's the thing about this. I can't see how a user would sign up for some lease program....they'd just bypass this, and buy the scooter on their own.
The city? It's mostly creating a law and pretending that the public will obey it when it's built as a 'joke'.
It's simply another small reason to leave California.
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