Simply put, the “tragedy of the commons” is the realization that people don’t care about stuff they don’t own. This can be seen in any public space: after a political protest, the grounds are covered in trash; public housing complexes quickly turn into rubbish-strewn, grafitti-covered warzones; roadside ravines fill up with abandoned washing machines and old tires. It’s a reality that is no respecter of political/economic reality… while it is a particular issue in collectivist systems (witness the dour, depressing, run-down nature of communist AnythingAnywhereAnytime, from the factories to the Trabants to the apartment buildings to the nuclear reactors), it also rears its head in free markets.
You might not expect the tragedy of the commons to pop up so much in a system that respects free markets and private property. But it all very much depends on who owns the property vs who is actually in possession of it. It is an old joke about how people abuse rental cars because, hey, it’s not *mine.* And there is of course the issue of factories, powerplants and universities spewing toxic horribleness out into the environment, because, hey, I don’t own the river or the atmosphere.
But now there’s a new tragedy of the commons, one that didn’t exist but a few years ago: scooters. These Lime/bird/Whatever scooters are starting to pop up all over the place. I’m seeing them rapidly increasing in Ogden, Utah, to the point where I witnessed a car/scooter accident a month or two back. The problem – well, *one* of the problems – with them is that the user picks one up wherever they happen to find one, ride it where they want to go… and then abandon it there. After all, the rider doesn’t *own* the scooter; what happens to it after they’re done with it… ehhh, who cares? Well… the people who own the property that the scooters are abandoned on, THEY care. The people whose driveways and handicapped entry ramps are blocked by the scooters, THEY care.
Fortunately, there is a capitalist solution to this capitalism-generated problem: repo men.
They said you could leave electric scooters anywhere — then the repo men struck back
The thing is, the people who are behaving badly are not, strictly speaking, the scooter companies, but the customers. It’s the jackholes who just dump the scooters wherever who are the problem. But since they don’t own the scooters, what do they care?
I can see a couple solutions:
1) When you rent the scooter, you don’t just pay your dollar or whatever the fee is, but you *also* pay, in advance, the repo fee that the scooter company will have to cough up if you’re a jackhole. However, if the scooter is rented *again* or is docked at an official station, your repo fee is automatically refunded.
2) Self-driving scooters. Thy get abandoned then, thirty seconds later, right themselves and toddle off to the nearest collection point.
3) Make abandoning the scooters anywhere inappropriate a crime. When you rent one, you have to face into the small camera that each scooter has; before it’ll move you have to be recognized. If you abandon the scooter like an ass, an APB is put out for you.
I can see #1 being a whole lot easier than #2. But #2 is, I suspect, coming soon enough. Not, perhaps, for scooters, but for self-driving rideshare cabs. These, too, will doubtless become exemplars of the tragedy of the commons; if you call one up, expect it to smell of fresh urine, spraypaint, vomit, smallpox. Unlike a New York City subway, you wont be able to move twenty feet away to get away from the smell. Just make sure to check the seat for any surprises before you it down.
