this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2026
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If she was not touching the thing then why didn’t it try and get out of her way? It should not be on the sidewalk in the first place, and should not have right of way.
Maybe the robot should be charged for blocking her way
That's always one of the tricks these companies pull. They take some communally-owned thing that used to have a clear purpose and start using it for their different for-profit use.
Take sidewalks. They're surprisingly expensive to build, but they're built from community tax money so that people walking don't have to walk on the road. Now Uber is using them as a place where they can drive their robots. Are they paying anything? I assume not. Sidewalks have also become a favourite parking spot for rental scooters. Do the scooter companies pay for that? Of course not. Even when they're parked well they reduce the space available for walking, and when they're parked badly they can force pedestrians out into the street.
Ugh the rental scooters. Thankfully I’ve seen this dying down. A more common sight in my city now is parking spaces getting turned into bike rental stations. I’m all for that.
The scooters are so much better though? Just park near where you need to go, not where the bike station is. Just take photos of the poorly parked ones and whoever last parked it gets a fine.
Yeah the scooters are great, it's the lack of enforcement for proper parking that sucks.
Like they make you take a picture to prove you parked it properly. One time I screwed up and took a picture of only my feet. Nothing happened.
Except you jjust know they are taking audio and visual, and scanning wifi and phone and other freqencies and sending it all back to base, that's the problem.
Throw them all into the river! Why rent everything we used to own anyway?
Even if I had my own, I wouldn't carry it across country for a visit of a few days, but I did rent in such a case more than once.
It's really more about unenforced safety rules, people sometimes drive like crazy and they always do that on the scooters they own, because rental have a speed limit
Rental makes sense for this because not everyone wants to take a scooter back home and charge it
Not the way it's being done it doesn't make sense. A locally owned place that had rules against spying on everyone, and sweeping electronics, yes. A silicon valley operation whose purpose is as much collecting data as it is rental fees, is not.
Better only for the person who drops it right where they arrives at their destination. That is almost never also a sensible place for these things to be. What if everyone just got out do their car the second they were in front of the building they want to go to? That would be so much “better” for them!
That is kind of how taxis work though
Yeah, it sucks when I get out of a taxi and the driver just gets out and leaves their car there.
I don't need to repeat dark onions response but did you even think for a moment before commenting?
I found myself wondering about this. If you stand blocking the entrance to a building, and won’t move when the police tell you to, I guess I can see them turning that into a disorderly conduct charge. Of course we are solely debating whether blocking a robot is a crime, but their rationale iin court is probably going to be more based around obstructing a place of public accommodation or something like that.
They should've given her a warning, the police. To go right to arrest, is a favour that waymo called in to the local policians, probably followed by others donating some cash.
It really is like that, even with prosecuting attorneys that drop charges against the rich, like former manhattan city da with several people, including Weinstein was it? 30k or something donation right after he drops charges. There were several incidents, they didn't even bother to use intermediaries there.
She did have multiple warnings but she stood true to her rights