Research into the electric scooter business quickly turned up a piece by technology columnist Troy Dreier, writing for the Jersey Journal newspaper in New Jersey. He wrote how surprised he was to see "litter on the street" over the Thanksgiving weekend when he visited his Midwestern hometown, which he remembered as "a pretty tidy town."
He was writing about all the electric scooters he saw littering downtown St. Paul.
Yes, even unfashionable St. Paul had a scooter blight problem. "Nobody washes a rental car" is an old truism you have maybe heard, and it's apparently true that there's also not enough incentive to see to it that a rental scooter gets parked out of the way.
Scooters just left the region at the end of the scootering season, but they are clearly coming back in the spring, maybe just weeks before another nuisance, the mosquitoes, make their reappearance.
Maybe it's time to make our peace with scooters. We don't have to become enthusiastic users, as some of us simply can't, but we have to accept them. And we have to accept the blame, too, for the clutter of privately owned scooters in our public spaces.
They are just another cost of our unwillingness to pay for a better conventional transportation system.
Scooters appeared overnight last summer when Bird Rides Inc. put them on the street. As a matter of corporate policy, the company then refused to specify how many Bird scooters it had actually unleashed. Of course, this was before any regulatory agreement had been worked out.
This invade and then work it out with regulators approach had been famously popularized by the ride-sharing service Uber. Sometimes called "too big to ban," this meant grabbing enough users quickly that the slow-footed municipal officials had no choice but to grudgingly give in.