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Bird, once valued at $2.5 billion by investors, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Florida federal court Wednesday. In a release, Bird said it will use the bankruptcy proceeding to facilitate a sale of its assets, which it expects to complete within the next 90 to 120 days. Bird’s electric scooters are touted as an environmentally friendly alternative to driving and other forms of public transit. ... Bird’s bankruptcy proceedings come after the New York Stock Exchange delisted the company in September. Bird failed to comply with the exchange’s requirements after it was unable to keep its market capitalization...

Paris (AFP) – Paris will on Friday become the first European capital to ban floating electric scooters from its streets, leaving fans desolate but relieving those who loathed their "nuisance" factor. Residents voted by almost 90 percent in an April referendum to ban the scooters -- celebrated as a win for direct democracy by mayor Anne Hidalgo even though turnout was just 7.5 percent. The ban applies to rental scooters which have been offered by several operators since 2018, although people will still be able to whizz through Paris on privately-owned contraptions. With complaints of users jostling through pedestrians on...

NEW YORK (AP) — Authorities on Sunday were investigating a New York City high-rise fire that injured over three dozen people and was traced to a faulty lithium-ion battery, the latest in a fast-growing series of battery blazes that have fire officials concerned. Authorities have pinpointed the cause of the blaze as a lithium-ion battery related to a “micromobility” device, a term for e-bikes, electric scooters and other items that help people get around. Chief Fire Marshal Daniel Flynn said there were at least five bikes in the apartment where the fire started. Investigators believe an occupant did bike repairs,...

Bright orange scooters now share — and sometimes command — Pittsburgh’s sidewalks. They’re an integral part of the Move PGH pilot project, the city’s plan to bundle transit options to help residents get around without owning a car, whether by bus, bike, scooter, zip car or more. Statistics reported by Move PGH, a year into its two-year pilot, are encouraging: People have taken more than 576,000 scooter trips for a total of hundreds of thousands of miles. They have biked tens of thousands of miles, and ridden Scoobi mopeds for more than 14,000 miles. Experience has dispelled Initial fears about...

DALLAS - Rentable scooters and bikes will return to the streets of Dallas soon. On Wednesday, the city opened up the application process for companies that offer shared dockless vehicles. Snip The city has established new parking rules, as well as "No Ride Zones" and "Slow Ride Zones". There will also be limits on the number of units companies can park on each block. READ MORE: Dallas orders electric rental scooters off the streets The city ordered rental companies like Uber, Lyft and Bird to cease operations in 2020 due to safety concerns and public complaints. "We have heard from...

Electric scooters are changing the way we get around, but these quick, cheap and fun devices are also involved in a citywide crime wave. “It’s quiet, and usually there’s not a lot of crime,” said Emily Hardy, who lives in Atlanta’s Ormewood Park neighborhood. Lately, her neighbors have been using social media to warn one another about a rash of crimes involving teenagers on electric scooters. “I can’t even keep up with the thread anymore. There’s just so many people complaining about things being stolen from their cars,” said Hardy. “One of the cops investigating the situation said be careful...

Original articleI live in a newly hip city in the US. Last year a few scooter companies started leaving their dock less electric scooters around town. It wasn’t so bad at first, even pretty neat. But they kept bringing more and more, and now it’s completely out of hand. They are everywhere! The downtown area is clogged with them and people just leave them on the street, zoom past on the sidewalk and kids trash them and leave their mangled wrecks all over parks. I live in a house that has been converted into apartments. There are 6 people including...

Skip Transport Inc., one of the first electric scooter companies to operate in San Francisco, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, according to the San Francisco Business Times. The company was originally founded as Waybots Inc. before launching as Skip in 2018 with seed funding. In August 2018, Skip was one of only two scooter companies (the other was Scoot) allotted one-year permits to operate in San Francisco. But by the end of 2019, the company's scooters were no longer permitted to operate in the city, which may have something to do with several incidents of their scooters bursting into...

Companies like Bird and Lime allow able-bodied people to unlock a set of wheels with their smartphones. In cities around the country, you’ll see millennials scooting through town at speeds of up to 15 mph on their scooter rental. Riders pay $1 to start, then 15 cents per minute to ride—a small price to pay for convenient short-distance transportation. Because the scooters are dockless, riders abandon them as soon as they reach their destination. These next-gen “Bird droppings” litter America’s sidewalks and frequently block wheelchair users’ independence and freedom of movement.

A New York college athlete has sued Disney World after an electric scooter driver ran into him and severed 97 per cent of his Achilles tendon in 2018. In a lawsuit filed against the company, David Maynard, of Utah, said the incident cost him his basketball season after he was forced to undergo surgery and extensive physical rehabilitation. According to the Orlando Sentinel, the suit is seeking more than $30,000 and was filed last week in Orange Circuit Court.

(CNN) -- A man in Florida has been sneaking around his neighborhood tampering with electric scooters parked on the streets, police say. The Fort Lauderdale Police Department posted a surveillance video Tuesday showing 59-year-old Randall Williams walking up to an electrical scooter on the street, slapping a white sticker on its QR code, and cutting its brake lines, essentially rendering it impossible to use. Police say that more than 140 scooters have been disabled and vandalized in a similar way in the southeast part of Fort Lauderdale since April 5. Officers had already homed in on Williams as a possible...

A look at the full lifetime emissions of the vehicles call into question the ecological assumptions around “micromobility.” Bird boasts that its dockless electric scooters allow customers to “cruise past traffic and cut back on CO2 emissions—one ride at a time.” Its rival Lime claims the vehicles “reduce dependence on personal automobiles for short distance transportation and leave future generations with a cleaner, healthier planet.” But the mere fact that battery-powered scooters don’t belch pollution out of a tailpipe doesn’t mean they’re “emissions free,” or as “eco-friendly” as some have assumed. The actual climate impact of the vehicles depends heavily...

Can you park e-scooters anywhere? No, and it's causing serious issues in some cities. It's led to the situation being dubbed Scootergeddon, Scooterpocalypse, and Scooter Wars. San Francisco authorities have begun confiscating illegally parked e-scooters, issuing citations, and sending out cease-and-desist orders as of April 2018. It also kicked e-scooters off the streets on 4 June, but the city doesn't want to ban them. It wants to control them. Part of the problem also stems from these e-scooter companies not following the rules or working with US cities to get permits. In Nashville, Tennessee, the city recently delivered an ultimatum...

If you've been to any major city recently, you've probably noticed people whirring by on motorized scooters to get from point a to be point b. At first what seemed like a convenient and affordable way to venture across a city has now become hazardous and annoying for pedestrians as more and more scooter rental companies pop up, leaving their riders all the more brazed in their travel on their rental transportation.The Texas Senate just passed a bill "that would crack down on increasingly popular motorized scooters, including setting speed limits and banning the use of rented scooters on sidewalks." “We...

After seven rental scooters were abandoned at the Pentagon following this year’s September 11 remembrances, police say they will begin impounding the unauthorized rides. Bikes, too. The Pentagon hates your little scooters, too. In fact, DoD would like you and your ride-sharing company to know that if you leave your rental scooters or shared-bicycles anywhere on Pentagon property, they will be impounded, right quick. Last week, Pentagon police in one day found seven abandoned, stand-up style motorized scooters around its property. It’s the latest example of the vehicles showing up unwanted all over Washington, from office doorsteps to the Lincoln...

The history teacher, who teaches at a Jewish school in Marseille, was attacked by three individuals shouting anti-Semitic abuse. The suspects were on two scooters and one of them was wearing an ISIS t-shirt. The three attackers are still on the run according to Le Monde. One of the men showed the man a picture of Mohamed Merah, an Islamist terrorist who killed seven people in France in 2012.

LONDON — Two teenage boys raced through London on a scooter and threw or sprayed acid in the faces of five other scooter riders apparently chosen at random late Thursday, according to the police. Two boys, ages 15 and 16, were arrested in connection with the attacks, committed during a 72-minute spree across the neighborhoods of Clapton, Hackney, Islington and Stoke Newington in northeast London, the Metropolitan Police said. One of the victims suffered what were described by the police as life-changing injuries to the face. The attacks began when two assailants on a scooter pulled up to a man...

"Beloved former WWE commentator Jim Ross broke the news of his wife’s death on Twitter Wednesday night, two days after a horrific road accident critically damaged her brain and skull. She was 55. “A Priest gave my wife Jan her last rites tonight,” Ross wrote on Twitter. “My little Angel is gone.” The WWE Hall of Famer had been posting updates and prayers on his Twitter page since Monday night, when Jan was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Jan was riding her Vespa home from their local Oklahoma gym when a vehicle hit her from behind, according to...

The government has paid billions to buy power wheelchairs. It has no idea how many of the claims are bogus. LOS ANGELES — In the little office where they ran the scam, a cellphone would ring on Sonia Bonilla’s desk. That was the sound of good news: Somebody had found them a patient.When Bonilla answered the phone, one of the scam’s professional “patient recruiters” would read off the personal data of a senior citizen. Name. DOB. Medicare ID number. Bonilla would hang up and call Medicare, the enormous federal health-insurance program for those over 65.

A Texas-based company that sells wheelchairs and motorized scooters to people with limited mobility announced Friday that it's shutting down for good, following federal scrutiny over its advertising and billing.