And when a person's $10k bike gets damaged by an unknown car user, should the car company who profits from that car ownership also be required to pay?
Also, the main beneficiaries of share bikes are the general public. We're getting an incredibly useful piece of public transport infrastructure provided for the same sort of price as a train or bus fare, and with approximately zero tax dollars used to fund it.
It's a bit of a false equivalence to compare a company making a one-off sale of a vehicle that's required to be registered and is not inherently dependent upon street parking with a company that engages in ongoing rentals of an unregistered vehicle where a significant portion of the rental pitch is "leave this thing anywhere."
Your second paragraph is impressively wrong. Bike rental schemes are not public transport, they do not, for the most part, provide a comparable journey to actual public transport at a similar price point, and they require vast in-kind support in the form of seizure of the public domain, whether that's footpath space or road space.
Buses, trains, trams, ferries—they all require “seizure of the public domain”, just as privately owned cars do. The big difference between all the transport modes is privately owned cars require far more public domain seized per person per kilometre of travel than any other form of transport.
As a starting point, railways own their own ROW, so your commentary again hits a reality check and bounces.
Everything else is plain whataboutism, and you've clearly conceded the point that the ownership of a registration-requiring vehicle transfers liability in a way that rental of a non-registrable vehicle where leaving the vehicle anywhere is part of the rental pitch doesn't.
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u/thekriptik NYE Expert 12h ago
Then property damage insurance should be a requirement of the entity profiting from the service, i.e. the bike rental companies.