The appeal of e-scooters is that you can find one just about anywhere in the central city and, when you’re done riding it, you can leave it anywhere.

The problem, at least for scooter companies Bird and Lime’s operations in San Diego, is that their customers often leave them on private property. That, plus the fact that some San Diegans find the scooters a blight on both the cityscape and common human decency, has led to an aggressive “repo” operation in the California city that threatens the e-scooter business model.

San Diego residents John Heinkel and Dan Borelli are not fans of e-scooters. They view them as vehicular litter and believe they bring out the worst in people, reported tech-news website The Verge.

Some scooter riders knock over pedestrians and just keep going, for starters. This is a problem in every city where e-scooters can be found. “There may be a correlation between the number of irritated, at-risk pedestrians and the number of e-scooters resting on the bottom of the river,” a reader wrote to The Oregonian this month after the newspaper reported that a dive team had pulled more than 50 scooters out of the Willamette River.

Scooter riders also abandon their rented rides in doorways, driveways and other places that are inconvenient or a hazard for people and businesses. And here is where San Diego’s e-scooters rise to the fore.

Last year Heinkel and Borelli went into the “repo” business, which they call ScootScoop. When hotels, restaurants and others in San Diego find a scooter on their private property, they call ScootScoop. Heinkel and Borelli show up, photograph the scooter and write a “ticket” to document what they’re doing, then load the scooter on a flatbed truck and haul it off to a storage facility.

They’ve impounded more than 10,000 scooters in a matter of months, but they admit there’s no evidence there are fewer scooters on San Diego’s roads and sidewalks. The scooter companies just keep bringing in more. The e-scooter business is, after all, big business.

The repo operation has allegedly led to violence as scooter-company “freelancers” have tried to retrieve scooters from impound. It’s also led, inevitably, to 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,” The Verge wrote. “Lime filed a nearly identical suit soon after.”

The repo men, for their part, say ransom is “a fake bully word that’s been made up to make our character look worse.”

Heinkel seems confident that he and his partner are going win the legal battle, and if they do it very well could impact the e-scooter business not just in San Diego but everywhere. He says the impending court case comes down to “a very simple concept. They have taken their stuff and placed it on someone else’s property without permission.”

Read The Verge story.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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