Why the wharfless motorcycle industry is attacking at a restsor and a bike shop owner

There are more electric scooters than locals in Pacific Beach, a densely populated area of ​​San Diego known for its bars, surfing, attractive students and increasingly unaffordable rent. The Lime, Bird, Lyft, Uber and Razor scooters are parked along the main path. People can even rent tiny electric bikes from a company called Wheels.

John Heinkel, a boarding professional with a head full of graying hair and a small, jagged construction, places a Lime scooter on his rear wheel, setting off the alarm under the scooter's brake. Heinkel chokes the annoying sound with his hand.

"Do you want to throw a couple?" He suggested at one point, pointing to the dumpster, halfway jokingly.

Dan Borelli, his business partner, explains that towing scooters is no different than drafting parking tickets. "We do not just take scooters in the street and throw them in a yard," Borelli insists. "We are writing a parking ticket for each of us."

Together, the two men lead an operation called ScootScoop. They say they have confiscated thousands of dockless scooters around San Diego on behalf of business owners and landowners who are fed up with the flood of two-wheelers without a dock.

ScootScoop is a simple, low budget concept that uses a towing yard and a flatbed truck that Heinkel already owns. Their advertising is word of mouth. They have no employees and no outside funding. But they seem to be an existential threat to the multi-billion dollar scooter industry.

First came the lawsuits. Heinkel and Borelli are charged in a lawsuit in the California Superior Court at the end of March for confiscating Bird's scooters and then buying them back from the company, worth $ 2 billion. Lime engaged in almost identical action soon after.

The same companies that had collected hundreds of millions of dollars to circumvent local permits or regulations now require protections under the California Motor Code, asking a judge to intervene to save their ScootScoop scooters without scooters . Deposits should take place at the end of July.

"The people of San Diego are racing in a local towing company," Bird's press team said in a statement. "Removing scooters, also called ScootScoop, orchestrated by Talon Auto Adjusters," the name of Heinkel's repossession company, "illegally captures micro-mobility devices and demands ransom for their return."

Ransom is a word "that we do not really like," Borelli told me. "It's a fake word of intimidation that was invented to make our character even worse."

Then come chargers, or independent contractors who work in the dishonest industry of charging scooters with low batteries. (Lime calls his subcontractors "centrifuges, while Bird calls them" hunters "). Heinkel and Borelli, as well as one of their ScootScoop customers, tell me that they recently grabbed a centrifuge that got into a ScootScoop storage unit in order to tackle the Lime scooters. The juicers would have become violent when they were confronted. ("It's a disturbing report and such aggressive behavior is never tolerated on the Lime platform," said Lime in a statement.)

But today, on this sunny April afternoon, with scooters parading everywhere, it's hard to imagine how a device that's supposed to be fun and healthy has taken such a bleak turn.

"Their application specifically indicates that you can drive it" anywhere "and leave it" anywhere, "says Borelli, pushing a Bird scooter in the Pacific Beach area. If he looks slightly bitter, it's only because he owns a bike shop nearby and is convinced that manufacturers of scooters without a pontoon are trying to steal his customers.

Nobody cares or tries to stop the men who push the scooters. There are too many scooters in circulation for anyone to miss. In fact, a few minutes later, a construction worker encourages Heinkel and Borelli. "These things are annoying!" He shouts. "They started coming to my place. I live in the suburbs, I was like … "He shakes his head disapprovingly.

Borelli says that the experience is universal. "Everyone says," Where do they come from? "

Last April, Heinkel and Borelli met on the sidewalk in a matching blue collar shirt, with an embroidered scooter on the left chest pocket, to demonstrate what it means to be a scooter ride. They dream of developing, perhaps by going to another city or working with investors. But for the moment, it's just two people in San Diego, working about 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They have small marshalling yards around the city and a larger lot in the suburbs that is guarded by security cameras, dogs and razor wire. They have also launched an application that customers can use to order a tow.

Heinkel, 55, specialized in hunting cars and other valuables south of the border. Among the many items he has recovered on behalf of banks and other clients over his 25-year career: a Cabo San Lucas celebrity yacht, a Hertz rental car left behind by a Russian tourist in Cancun and a Ferrari abandoned by a con artist Mexico. He qualifies his job as a relatively low-risk job repo because he has the support of the court system.

He started as a young man looking for work after a stint in the Marines. "I found out that I was not really good at college," says Heinkel. "I was good at taking things to people in the middle of the night or during the day. I can talk, I can think. I realized that it depends on the ability to defuse the problem. Because no one is happy when you take your things. "

Borelli, 43, has a 29% bicycle rental shop in the neighborhood, just off the sidewalk. The first time he saw electric scooters without a dock, around February or March of last year, they were left brazenly in front of his shop.

Bird, Lime and their supporters believe that dockless electric scooters can help reduce dependency on the car. But for Borelli, it seemed like the scooter industry was really trying to replace bicycles. He threw the wrong scooters into the dumpster, but they were quickly replaced by others.

"They try to take away my clients every day," he told me.

The two men got along well last year after Heinkel took his daughter on a bike ride around the neighborhood. He needed air in his tires and entered Borelli 's shop. They ended up talking about scooters that seemed to take control of the sidewalk. Heinkel noted that it was no longer safe to let a two-year-old ride a bicycle.

Borelli pointed out to Heinkel that he already owned a flatbed truck and a tow truck. The next step was obvious. The first customer was the frustrated owner of Borelli. From there, other business followed.

"We did not look for anyone, these owners came to see us," says Heinkel.

Over the last 54 years, Jim Bostian has managed the day-to-day operations of the Crystal Pier Hotel, a small hotel-owned hotel built at the top of a pier in Pacific Beach. The pier is right in the middle of a particularly touristy strip and has an alley for hotel guests that feeds the sidewalk.

In the middle of the scooter blast, Bostian noticed that people littered the hotel 's alley with scooters, preventing guests from getting in and out. He tried to ask the riders to move the scooters elsewhere. About half accepted. The other half launched f-bombs.

Bostian says that he has nothing against scooters. He insists that he likes the idea of ​​emissions-free transportation. But, like other residents of the city, he discovered that dockless scooters have a disturbing ability to reflect the ugliness of people.

"These are the people," he says. "They do not care. I mean, they do not care where they left them. "

Not far away, a Mission Beach restaurateur told me that she had hired ScootScoop after riders started leaving scooters in front of a wheelchair lift that she had built for her clients disabled, blocking access. And a federal complaint filed by a disability rights group against Bird, Lime, Razor and the City of San Diego in January indicates that scooters are left in front of ramps, curbs and pedestrian crosswalks. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that scooters are a threat.

"I've almost been knocked down several times," says Alex Montoya, a motivational speaker based in San Diego who wears three prosthetic limbs. Montoya is the leading plaintiff in the disability lawsuit. "We are not trying to eliminate scooters. We try to make sure that people drive them responsibly. "

On July 1, the City of San Diego introduced new regulations to deal with scooter complaints. The regulations will require scooter companies to take out insurance, release the city from all legal liability, limit curb speed and obtain a license for each scooter on the road. It is still too early to tell if the new regulations will make a difference.

"We know people are still driving on sidewalks, we know people are coming in and out," said Lieutenant Shawn Takeuchi of the San Diego Police Department.

Bostian, the hotel operator, called ScootScoop last year after reading an article about them in a local newspaper. He first tried to contact scooter manufacturers, but said that they were never doing anything to stop the scooters from blocking his driveway. Since then, he is satisfied with ScootScoop and even let them keep some of the scooters seized in a storage unit located on his property.

But the information regarding the location of the scooters seems to have been pbaded on to the centrifuges: the freelancers paid a small fee to find scooters with empty batteries, charge them during the night and then drop them on the street. Bostian noticed that some limes have disappeared from storage and he thinks juicers have cut the brake cables of the scooters to free them from the pound in the middle of the night.

About a month ago, Bostian claimed to have caught a centrifuge in the act, trying to leave with a scooter that had already been impounded. Bostian ordered him to leave his property. They quarreled, then the juicer pushed him while he was away.

A few weeks later, on June 22, Bostian arrived at work at 5:15 in the morning. Heinkel and Borelli were present and told him that the police were on their way. He remembers that they seemed to have been beaten.

When Heinkel and Borelli lead me on a scooter towing tour, it takes about ten minutes to find a dozen scooters parked on a property owned by a hotelier with whom they work. They write "tickets" in their app, pick up the scooters and bring them to their nearby tow cupboard. It's around noon, but dozens of scooters are already impounded, carefully organized by brand. Their largest suburban land, one that is guarded with razor wire and dogs, contains the thousands of remaining scooters that Bird and Lime refuse to pick up, on the grounds that ScootScoop requires "excessive fees".

Heinkel estimates that the price to be paid is much lower than what towing companies usually ask for when towing cars. ScootScoop charges scooter companies $ 30 for pickup and $ 2 more per day of storage, which limits daily charges after a month.

At first Bird had agreed to play after ScootScoop confiscated 1,800 Bird scooters from July to November 2018. When Bird finally showed up to pick them up, the meeting was not controversial. In fact, company representatives gave a check for $ 40,000 to cover towing costs. Then they all took friendly pictures together.

Subsequently, Bird sent ScootScoop an invitation to bill via Bird Country, the application used by the company to pay its subcontractors. In his lawsuit, Bird admits he initially paid the $ 40,000 fee because the company was confused about his rights.

In hindsight, "it seemed like they thought we were going to leave, and we were not going to do it anymore, so they tried to play a nice guy with us," Borelli said. He submitted the bills, as indicated, but Bird never paid them again. So ScootScoop has stopped releasing its scooters. Lime also discussed a possible settlement with ScootScoop, says Borelli, but has never followed.

In his complaint, Bird claims to have learned that ScootScoop is taking scooters from public sidewalks and other properties in the city where they are not allowed to do business. (Heinkel and Borelli dispute this.)

"The improper impoundment scheme for the accused has caused – and continues to cause – damage to Bird," Bird said in his complaint. "Bird has suffered – and continues to suffer – from lost business, not to mention damage to reputation, because there are fewer scooters on the road.

Bird asks ScootScoop to cease operations, release all its scooters and reimburse it four times the amount they charge Bill Bird for scooters. The company also claims punitive damages and "all the profits made by the defendants" throughout their entire career in towing scooters.

Borelli says that towing has done little to scoop the city. "They have more devices than anyone could think of." (The city of San Diego does not have an official count of the number of free-riding scooters because it still reviews license applications.)

As we walk towards the Pacific Beach Boardwalk, a young man in his twenties perfectly tanned looks to go to the gym. Heinkel says that the man is working for Wheels and the sign, to confirm that ScootScoop fits well with the young entrepreneurs who work for the big scooter. "Keep it clean," says the Wheels worker about the scooter rides.

But not all of their interactions are so friendly.

On June 22, a few hours before hotel operator Jim Bostian discovered the ScootScoop guys, Heinkel was going to the Crystal Pier in the middle of the night to take an order for shipping containers to be used as security for his pounds. He saw that two lime juice was already there. They broke into his warehouse and were running scooters, he said. Heinkel confronted them, trying to pick up the scooters. He says that one of the workers, a man who dominated Heinkel, hit him repeatedly. Then he got on the scooter and started driving him to Heinkel, who said he refused to give in and the scooter overturned him. Borelli, who appeared shortly after the start of the fight, claims to have been sidelined. In a video that Heinkel captured in part during the fight, a male voice said he works for Lime, and a Lime scooter is clearly visible in the video.

"We are reviewing the incident and ensuring that this person is removed from our platform, and we are ready to provide our support, within our means," said a spokesman for Lime in a statement. communicated.

(Lieutenant Takeuchi of the San Diego Police Department confirms that Heinkel filed a police report describing a fight for stolen scooters, but the report does not name a specific scooter brand.)

"On something that costs $ 4.50 each," says Heinkel.

Heinkel seems confident that the new shipping containers will keep centrifuges away for good. And neither he nor Borelli seem very worried about the trial. They responded to Bird's complaint with a counterclaim, and their lawyer tells me that their defense will focus on private property rights, because there is some ambiguity as to whether scooters are considered vehicles. under the California Vehicle Code.

When I call them in July, Heinkel and Borelli say that they recently celebrated the impoundment of their 10th 360th scooter with donuts and big coffees from 7/11. Then they went back to work.

"If you take all the BS they've thrown away, and you take our BS, and you delete it, it's a very simple concept," says Heinkel. "They took their belongings and put them on someone else's property without permission."

"Now it's them, and here we are. We are two guys who went to the owners and got permission from this owner to remove these items from their property. That's all it is.