September 4, 2018

Los Angeles Welcomes Its Scooter Overlords

This is a fancy concept scooter from MINI, shot against the LA skyline from Dodger Stadium. The yellow thing on the left is a car, soon to be obsolete.MINI USA

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The city of Los Angeles has decided to approve the use of scooters within city limits, accompanied by a rather astonishing set of regulations. But at least the poor will benefit, I guess:

The companies will be limited to 3,000 scooters or bikes anywhere in the city, but can deploy up to 2,500 more in low-income areas, and an additional 5,000 vehicles in low-income neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley.

It doesn’t appear that the scooters have to cost any less in low-income areas, they just have to exist. Is this the kind of help that our low-income workers really need? More scooters? I dunno, but several council members who represent poor districts seemed pretty taken with the idea. We’ll see.

BTW, the speed limit is 15 mph and there’s no riding on sidewalks. “We cannot regulate stupidity,” said councilmember Joe Buscaino.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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