July 31
Los Angeles Times on electric scooter concerns:
Forget about presidential politics. The most controversial and divisive issue in Los Angeles these days may be scooters.
Over the last few months, some 36,000 shared electric scooters and bicycles have been allowed onto the city’s streets, as part of a one-year pilot program to study how so-called micromobility vehicles can be used and regulated in L.A. In some neighborhoods, you can’t travel a block without seeing a scooter parked on - or dumped on - the sidewalk, and customers have taken around 2 million rides since the beginning of the year.
But the city is split at the moment into two camps: scooter lovers, who say the rent-per-ride vehicles are a cheap, convenient way to travel short distances without getting into a car, thereby helping reduce tailpipe pollution and traffic congestion. And scooter haters, who say the vehicles are big, possibly dangerous toys being used irresponsibly and left cluttering the sidewalks when the joy ride is over.
They’re both right.
The scooter lovers are certainly correct that in this traffic-clogged, smoggy city, people need more travel alternatives to cars. Shared scooters and bikes are especially helpful as “first-mile, last-mile” vehicles to move people between their homes or jobs and transit stations. The growing number of scooter riders helps build the case for more protected lanes and redesigned roads that make the streets safer for bicyclists, scooter riders and walkers too.
But the skeptics raise legitimate gripes about the private companies that have, in some neighborhoods, inundated public spaces with scooters but failed to hold their customers accountable. So far, the companies have talked about educating riders and offering them incentives for good behavior, but problems persist. (During the first five months of the pilot project, the city received more than 3,000 complaints about scooters through its 311 app.) How much responsibility should scooter companies bear for the rude, irresponsible or downright dangerous behavior of their customers?
A lot. Scooter companies have essentially introduced a new type of vehicle to the transportation landscape. They have an obligation to make sure their customers know the rules of the road and adhere to the proper etiquette governing how to ride and park the vehicles.
After mostly welcoming scooters with open arms, Los Angeles officials are now considering following the lead of Chicago and some other cities and fining companies when rules or laws are broken. The city already requires companies to respond within two hours to complaints of broken, toppled or improperly parked scooters. If the companies are unresponsive over a long period, they eventually risk losing their permit to operate.
Now, new penalties are being proposed, ranging from $50 for failing to respond to a service request within two hours to $1,500 if a company’s customers repeatedly and consistently park their scooters improperly. (Separately, the Los Angeles Police Department has begun ticketing riders for riding on the sidewalk, which isn’t allowed.)
Ideally, the city won’t need to levy steep penalties on companies. Scooters are still new, and some of the problems may resolve themselves if scooters become less of a novelty and more of a regular mode of transportation. Nevertheless, fines could help prod companies to be more proactive in managing their scooters and their customers, particularly if those companies choose to pass the fine along to offending riders, which would be another incentive for good behavior.
Scooters companies have one big incentive already for being good stewards of the public space - many cities have banned shared, dockless vehicles from operating within their jurisdictions. It’s not hard to imagine that if residents complain enough about bad scooter behavior, Los Angeles will also consider a severe crackdown or even a ban. And other cities would likely follow.
That would be a shame. If scooters are ever going to be taken seriously as a transportation solution, then companies have to do a better job getting their customers to be responsible riders.
___
July 28
Mercury News & East Bay Times on regulating the tech industry:
The day of reckoning for Big Tech is upon us.
Technology companies swung and missed at repeated opportunities over the past decade to work with the federal government on regulations to ensure consumer privacy and fair competition. They had a chance to address the issues and they failed.
So we move to the next, inevitable step: the federal government’s announcement last week that it will conduct an antitrust investigation of Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. Now the stakes are much higher. The industry’s past foot-dragging means that it now faces a real threat that the feds could act unilaterally - and stifle innovation in the process.
It’s a serious risk. Raise your hand if you think the folks at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission understand what drives the innovation economy. That’s what we thought. Yet these are the people who will be drawing up the rules the tech industry will play by in the years ahead.
Let’s hope they don’t forget that innovation is at the heart of our economic growth. Our ability to remain a world power requires that we maintain a technological edge over China and our other global competitors.
That won’t be easy. The Chinese government is investing $300 billion in an effort to dominate the fields of green energy, green vehicles, robotics, medicine and artificial intelligence. Its goal is to overcome the United States’ technological advantage by 2025. Any serious disruption in the way the U.S. tech industry operates could have costly, unintended consequences on our ability to maintain our advantage.
Whatever the federal government does, it must maintain incentives for U.S. tech firms to keep spending on research and development, which is one of their primary tools to evolve and prepare for the future.
Tech leads U.S. companies in research and development spending. Amazon ($14.1 billion), Google ($10.15 billion), Apple ($7.65 billion) and Facebook ($4.76 billion) were among the top 10 investors in R&D in 2018. They are using those billions as a strategic weapon to win what could accurately be described as the World War of Artificial Intelligence.
Time is of the essence. The digital landscape of 2030 is likely to be fundamentally different than it is today. After all, consider how fast it’s changed in the past dozen years. As recently as 2007, MySpace dominated the social networking landscape, receiving more than 70% of all visits to social networks. Facebook, which was only three years old, was a distant second.
That same year, IBM created Watson, its artificial intelligence system. Apple released the iPhone, Airbnb was founded, and Twitter had just gone global. Google had yet to release its Android system and Amazon was still finding its way on the cloud computing scene.
Those companies launched a wave of innovation that helped the United States emerge from the 2008 financial crisis and create what has been the longest bull market in history. Unfortunately, Big Tech’s dominance over those years has led to abuses that deserve greater federal regulation.
As a result, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission now needs to rein in Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. But, in the process, the feds must take extreme caution not to stifle innovation.
___
July 26
Southern California News Group on the state’s diversion of mortgage settlement funds:
The California Supreme Court has finally put an end to the five-year-long shell game played by the state government with $331 million intended to help distressed homeowners during the recession-era mortgage crisis.
The justices refused to hear an appeal from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, filed after the latest in a series of court decisions that went against the state. In April, an appeals court in Sacramento ruled in favor of consumer-advocacy groups that have been fighting for years to stop the state’s diversion of the funds.
The money came from the national settlement in 2012 of a lawsuit filed by 49 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government against the nation’s five largest mortgage servicing companies - Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and the former GMAC, now known as Ally. The financial institutions agreed to pay more than $20 billion directly to affected homeowners and also to pay $2.5 billion to the states. California’s share was $410 million.
Then-Attorney General Kamala Harris directed that the state’s money from the settlement should be used for various services such as homeowner education and programs to stop financial fraud. Instead, then-Gov. Jerry Brown, facing budget pressures, spent the money to cover other state expenses, including using $292 million of the mortgage settlement funds to pay state debt on housing bonds that voters had approved as far back as 2002.
Groups representing distressed mortgage customers, including representatives of the Asian-American and Latino communities, filed suit in 2014 over the diversion of the funds, and courts repeatedly sided with them.
State officials could have accepted those rulings and paid back the money, but instead they doubled down on sketchy conduct. Gov. Brown and the Legislature made an after-the-fact attempt to legalize the state’s rerouting of the settlement money with a hastily passed budget trailer bill, signed into law in September 2018.
The trailer bill, Senate Bill 861, stated that the California Department of Finance spent the $331 million from the mortgage settlement in a way that was “consistent with legislative direction.”
But signing it didn’t make it so. “The money was unlawfully diverted,” the 3rd District Court of Appeal ruled in April.
With the recession-era budget problems in the rear-view mirror and surplus revenue rolling in to the state treasury, Gov. Newsom could have accepted the appeals court’s decision and paid back the money. Instead he filed another appeal, this time to the California Supreme Court.
Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. Newsom now says he will begin work on repaying the $331 million back to the special fund that was intended to help California homeowners who were hard hit by the mortgage crisis.
In the final analysis, three years of state budget expenses were paid with funds that were intended to benefit distressed homeowners. Groups seeking to stop the diversion had to spend five years battling in court as the state tried every trick to keep the money. Homeowners who suffered during the mortgage crisis lost the benefit of five years of programs that might have helped them. And taxpayers had to foot the bill for the private law firm that represented the state after then-Attorney General Kamala Harris refused to defend the diversion of the settlement funds.
The mortgage crisis may be over, but in California, the financial losses continue.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.