Lake Merritt, located in the east of Oakland, California, is the first official wildlife sanctuary in the United States. 100 years, it has been a paradise for birds. But this is a thing of the past. Now, this is the collective cemetery of electric scooters.

Just in 10, according to Merritt Lake Research Institute, local sanitation workers have successively salvaged more than 60 electric Scooters from the lake, from overheated birds and lime to the slightly unknown scoot and Wind, which can be called the underwater exposition of electric scooters in Silicon Valley, so that Merritt Lake Research Institute called it a crisis and killed it.

Abandoned electric scooters have been found from Lake Merritt in Oakland to the Pacific coast in Los Angeles, even in the Potsdam River in Washington, and even in the corrugated canal in Indianapolis, central China. On the beach in the San Francisco Bay Area, the waves beat against electric scooters, which even became a common sight.

The flood is just one of many tortures. The outsourcing maintenance personnel of Bird and Lime told the media that the most common way of damage is to cut off the power cord of the scooter and smash the brakes. Bird refused to disclose the number and damage rate of scooters they put on the market; Lime revealed that the damage rate of their scooters was only about 1%.

In Porter, Oregon, local residents couldn't stand scooters lying everywhere any longer, and launched a movement against enjoying scooters. To this end, they set up a website named "Willamette River Electric Scooters", and they tried to find out how many electric scooters were thrown into their mother river. However, the data on the website seems to have not been updated for some time.

The administrator of the website "Electric Scooters on Willamette River" also set up an account @ pdxscootermess on INS to expose the chaos brought by electric scooters to this small town. Hundreds of pictures, extremely disappointed.

However, the complete death log of American scooters is kept in an account named @ birdgraveyard on INS, which records a series of murders against electric scooters and is called the obituary column of scooters. The signature of this account is also full of gunpowder: "If you find a bird or a lime scooter hanging up, please be sure to send us photos and videos. They deserve it. 」

The manager of this website said to the media, "Why did you build this website? For the sake of environmental protection, the reason is simple and clear, and the Willamette River is already overwhelmed. If you add toxic substances to the battery of electric scooters, the river will be completely finished! 」

Some people go out without scooters, and some people hate this kind of transportation. Opposition and anger mainly come from two aspects:

First, disturbing public order is the same as enjoying bicycles. Electric scooters still have the problem of disorderly stopping and misplacing, which not only blocks crosswalks, especially blind roads, but also encroaches on many public green spaces.

On the other hand, electric scooters have also caused many traffic accidents, mainly due to unclear road rights. People can see scooters whizzing by on sidewalks, automatic lanes and even motor vehicles. The speed of these scooters can reach 50 kilometers per hour.

Vox opinion polls in ten cities show that San Francisco people hate electric scooters the most, and nearly half of them have negative comments on this new type of transportation. Residents in southern Atlanta love it most, and nearly 80% of the respondents support electric scooters.

It has formed a broken window effect of car abuse. Dan ariely, a psychology professor at Duke University, analyzed why so many people have no moral sense when destroying scooters: people may still feel guilty when destroying personal property. For example, if you break the window glass of an Uber car, both the driver and the owner will suffer losses, and these scooters belong to the company instead of individuals.

Especially when these scooters make a mess of the city, destruction has become an extreme way of protection. Unlike burning a bus or hijacking a plane, deliberately destroying a scooter is more like a commendable pioneering act than a belief.

The price of electric scooters close to Bird configuration is about $65,438+0,000. According to American law, destroying property worth more than $400 may be a felony. However, LAPD has only received one relevant report so far, but it was dropped because the prosecutor refused to file a case. The police department also turned a blind eye to this. After all, saving people is more important than saving cars.

The wave of protests affected the valuation of birds and limes. According to The Wall Street Journal, Bird received a $400 million financing from Sequoia Capital in June this year. At that time, it was valued at $2 billion, twice as much as at the beginning of the year. However, in the recent 65438+February, the new round of financing was still $2 billion, instead of $4 billion as expected in advance.

Lime has designated some no-parking areas in the application, focusing on some waterfront areas where users can't terminate their trips. Bird, on the other hand, said it would punish those users who vandalized or illegally used it, such as throwing it into the water.

Through GPS positioning technology, the operators and managers of Bird and Lime can clearly know where the life of these scooters ends. The local government has invited relevant companies to talk, and the agreement reached is that the company agreed to salvage ashore 24 hours after learning the situation.

Nevertheless, Bird and Lyme, which were established less than two years ago, are still in a period of rapid expansion. They are still placing additional orders with factories and sending more electric scooters to the streets to satisfy people's enthusiasm for electric scooters.

In Silicon Valley, if you don't drive an electric scooter to work, you are not a qualified geek at all. Many young people also think that scooters are not only environmentally friendly, but also affordable: unlocking is $65,438+0, and riding is $65,438+05 per minute-which is affordable for most Americans.

Bird is very stubborn. Travis VanderZanden, the founder of Bird, said that he was not satisfied until there were as many scooters and cars on the road.

Car abusers have no intention of stopping, just like their usual hostility to capital.