Bird Scooters and Social Change
Great piece in the New York Times on Bird, the last-mile scooter start-up based in Venice. I kind of fell in love with the scooters last month in Santa Monica and reached out to the company about bringing them to Boulder. Never heard back. A sign, I guess, of a busy, unruly start-up.
That said, it's so interesting, speaking as a lawyer and urban planner (I only play one on TV), how entrepreneur/founders like Bird's and Uber's have little to no regard for rules, and/or no knowledge of how public policy works and why we have rules in the first place (zoning codes, environmental laws, public health codes, each is a species of the police power, intended, at bottom, to ensure some level of public order and safety). Ask for forgiveness, not permission, is the MO. I wonder if these entrepreneurs ever took a basic civics course, let alone a course in land use law and city planning.
On the one hand, I love their approach. Given how tough it is to break through the status quo (incumbent businesses like taxi cabs and the rules and regs that protect them), this approach seems to be the only way to get traction quickly and at some scale. And the PR effect, while it cuts both ways, at least raises people's awareness and level of consciousness about what's possible (Bird founder VanderZanden's dream of scooters outnumbering cars one day) and what's currently missing (hard to get people to care about something they don't see or experience).
On the other hand, it's a slippery slope, unbridled enterprises flaunting rules at will, rules that, while no doubt imperfect, usually have a very sound rationale (and rule making process) behind them. It's a variation on Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. . . Each entrepreneur pursuing her own grand vision and road (pun intended) to profitability at the expense of the whole, the common good. Santa Monica's sidewalks and streets, as currently configured, can only hold so many moving objects, only so many scooters and bikes and pedestrians and skateboarders, to say nothing of cars. At some point, without new rules and upgraded infrastructure, the "commons," our public streets and sidewalks, will simply be overwhelmed, if not (tragically) destroyed, as city populations grow and the sheer number of vehicles, whether self driving cars or scooters, grows with them (think Kolkata or Beijing).
Which points to, I think, the really hard innovation challenge, which is a social one, not a technological or commercial one: How, in a messy, pluralistic and open democratic society such as ours, can we make smarter, more forward-thinking social policy decisions more quickly, more nimbly, so as to enable commercial innovation to happen in a way that maximizes its benefits while minimizing its risks (think of the flurry of social media platforms like Facebook that have grown so quickly, largely unregulated, and are now the subject, ex post, of so much scrutiny, if not disdain, for their recklessness vis. user privacy).
I don't think it's an either/or. I think we can have great, smart rules (think of Smart Codes and form-based codes for city planning) and great, smart technologies that work hand in hand. I'd prefer the rules to come first, myself. This was the great legal historian Willard Hurst's thesis: our legal order, our constitution and laws, were the great enabler, or as he put it, "releaser," of American enterprise, of our creativity and entrepreneurship as a people. Laws, on Hurst's view, didn't limit or constrain freedom, they made it possible, especially in the area of economic development.
But I guess this is the rub. Chicken/egg, scooters/smart codes. Which came first? My left brain votes for rules first. My right for creative enterprise. I guess the point is, it's not really linear or binary, and rule making is a kind of creative enterprise in its own right. Rules are an ancient technology, a core operating system whose many versions span the centuries.
Social change, even something as simple as scooters on sidewalks, is dynamic and messy, like any creative process, and this includes a role for disruptors and transgressors like VanderZanden. After all, I imagine that if he actually studied all the rules and procedures that make it so hard to change urban mobility systems (think about how hard it was just a decade ago to build a dedicated bike lane in most US cities), he probably wouldn't have started Bird in the first place.
Hurst and Hardin might not have been pleased, but then again, they never sat in LA traffic at rush hour. .
