San Francisco to scooter startups: Your customers are terrible

Enlarge / Bird and Lime scooters sit parked in front of a building on April 17, 2018 in San Francisco. (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

The City Attorney of San Francisco has now sent three cease-and-desist letters to three electric-scooter venture-backed startups that are operating in the famed city-by-the-bay.

In recent weeks, San Francisco and other Bay Area cities have been inundated by a plethora of the dockless, short-term rental scooters. The scooters are accessed via smartphone app, typically for $1 to unlock and then $0.15 per minute afterwards. (Some have already ended up in Oakland's Lake Merritt, seemingly in protest.)

Vice dubbed the new scooterscape a "bizarre scooter war," while Vanity Fair has called the phenomenon "Wheelmageddon." (One venture capitalist has even questioned how this is even a profitable business model.)

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