If someone did the exact same business model just with cars instead of e-scooters they would probably be celebrated instead of banned.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Carsharing exists
In Prague, specifically?
If you would just leave your rental cars sitting in the middle of the road you'd be fined and shut down pretty quickly.
If a renter just leaves a car or scooter sitting in the middle of a road or walkway, the company should pass the fine for that to them. And if no fines for that exist yet, why not start with introducing them instead of a blanket ban?
Difference is nobody can easily carry your car somewhere you didnt put it or kick it over so it lays in the middle of the road. Scooter companies already make you take a photo of where and how you parked it. But nothing keeps you or anyone else from just throwing it around after you parked it
I'm all for trying that, but I think it will end with the same result.
This will basically turn these rental companies into debt-collection agencies that would have to try to collect fines from hundreds of people every day. I doubt that would be a viable business model.
Not sure if there is a difference based on local culture or amount of drunk tourists, but just some small reminders in the apps and sometimes requiring that you take a photo of how you parked at the end of a trip was enough to get all of this under control in my home city.
Or drive it in a river as a goof
AAA did a similar service with cars in my area and someone did one with mopeds but both those seem to have died. I had to call AAA several times because people parked the cars blocking my apt building’s driveway so the inconvenient clutter issue seems to scale for some reason. The scooter/ebike service that’s survived so far in my area will unload a whole fleet in the middle of a busy sidewalk and just leave them there it really is quite badly managed. The docked (Lyft) bikes are much less of a nuisance clutter-wise but aren’t well maintained so people don’t use them much.
Should've just called a tow tbh.
I support this, they are usually parked very bad and annoying to go around.
Yeah, cars suck
Yes but banning them is not the solution. E.g. in Frankfurt, Germany, we just have parking zones in the city center, usually by train stations. You cannot start or end a ride from anywhere else inside the city center. This has much improved the degree of chaos created.
I suppose Prague does not have dedicated bike lanes.
If it is like in Italy, the problem is not where you drive it but where you leave it at the end of your ride
That’s the exact problem here in Denmark, they’ll get thrown everywhere in especially inconsiderate ways like across the sidewalks or something stupid like that.
True, but banning them altogether seems like the wrong and a somewhat backwards lesson to take from that
They shouldn’t be banned, but there must be some way to force either the company or the user to make sure they’re parked in a way that isn’t across the sidewalks.
It's maybe the most car centric city in Europe. The urbanist Adam something has an indepth video on it.
:`(
They have scooters from the future??
What technological breakthroughs in e-scooter technology have been achieved in the next year?
I’ve been to cities that use e-scooters and I’ve never seen “chaos”. In fact, I saw very few “tossed” on the ground.
They don't need to be tossed on the ground to cause chaos, and if you're abled bodied you might not have noticed the inconvenience because you can easily manoeuvre around them. As a wheelchair user, they are a bane on my existence. I've taken to just pushing them out of the way, often into the street. Maybe I should get a cowcatcher for my chair.
If I may make a suggestion...
I swear it's just attentional bias for most people. You are so used to other things and uniterested in "well-behaved" scooters, that you think there is chaos.