First came the scooter floods, now comes the repo man:
The multibillion-dollar dockless scooter industry is going after a repossessor and a bike shop owner who have 10,000 scooters languishing in a tow yard. John Heinkel, a professional repo man with a full head of graying hair and a small and scrappy build, hoists a Lime scooter on its back wheel, setting off the alarm underneath the scooter’s brake.
Dan Borelli, his business partner, says that towing scooters is no different than writing parking tickets. “We aren’t just grabbing scooters off the street and throwing them in a yard,” Borelli insists. “We write a parking ticket for every single one we have.”
Together, the two men run an operation called ScootScoop. They say that they have impounded thousands of dockless e-scooters around San Diego on behalf of business owners and landlords who are fed up with the deluge of dockless two-wheelers.
First came the lawsuits. Heinkel and Borelli are accused in a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court in late March of improperly impounding Bird’s scooters and then ransoming them back to the $2 billion company. Lime filed a nearly identical suit soon after.
But it's not as though these guys just impound scooters willy-nilly; they're hired by business owners to keep entrances and driveways clear - because many of the scooter riders simply don't care where they leave the rigs when they're done with their rides. In that sense, there's very little difference between scooter impoundment and the local 7-11, where signs are posted warning that vehicles are subject to towing. After all, parking there is for customers only.
As one hotel manager said in reference to the scooter riders: “It’s the people,” he says. “They don’t care. I mean, they just don’t care where they leave them.”
Not far away, a restaurant owner in Mission Beach tells me that she hired ScootScoop after riders started leaving scooters in front of a wheelchair lift that she built for her disabled customers, blocking access. And a federal lawsuit that a disability rights group filed against Bird, Lime, Razor, and the City of San Diego in January says that scooters are being left in front of wheelchair ramps, curbs, and crosswalks. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say the scooters are a menace.
It's nice to see that some actions are being taken to address these issues. But more scooters are on the way:
Spin, the dockless scooter company acquired by Ford Motor Company last year, announced on Thursday that it will deploy 15,000 scooters in eight cities. Starting in August, Spin plans to deploy thousands of new scooters on the streets of Portland; Los Angeles; Denver; Washington, DC; Kansas City; Memphis; and Minneapolis, with more cities to follow.
I can hardly wait - throwing them into the Willamette River seems to have become sort of a Portland pastime. Earlier this month, 60 of them were removed from the river over a two-day operation.