Originally Posted by tandempower

The irony is that cars take up a lot more space than bikes or scooters. So when you start talking about bikes and scooters taking up space for cars, it's reversing the fact that the car culture has taken up and thus wasted too much space in the course of indoctrinating so many people to tote their cars with them wherever they go.

Don't you see that the personal-automobile culture is asserting itself to the point of suppressing the introduction of abundantly-available alternatives? Bikes and scooters may be encouraged as a way to reduce traffic, but the moment someone is willing to put enough of them out there as dockless shares to provide a reliable alternative for people wherever they go with multimodal transportation, the automotivists start complaining that they are taking space away from cars and sidewalks.

Bottom line is they should be taking space from cars, not sidewalks and pedestrians, but the moment they start doing that, the car-culture defenders are going to use every tactic they can muster to stop them.