Sudden appearance of electric scooters irks Santa Monica officials

ANTA MONICA, Calif. — Black, electric-powered scooters suddenly began appearing on the downtown streets, suburban sidewalks and beachside a few months ago in this urban coastal city.

Tyler Catudioc, 20, and Kai Wilson, 20, rent a Bird
scooter on the Third Street Promenade in Santa
Monica, Calif., on Feb. 4.

The dockless shared scooters took Santa Monica by surprise, including the mayor, who says he received a LinkedIn message from Bird chief executive Travis VanderZanden, offering to introduce him to the company’s “exciting new mobility strategy for Santa Monica” — after they landed in town.

“If you’re talking about those scooters that are out there already, there are some legal issues we have to discuss,” Santa Monica Mayor Ted Winterer said he told VanderZanden.

And to reinforce the point, the city filed a criminal complaint of nine counts centered on Bird’s failure to obtain a vendor permit, something the company maintains is applicable to food vendors, not dockless shared electric scooters.

Read The Washington Post story by Noah Smith - “Sudden appearance of electric scooters irks Santa Monica officials.”

Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable.

When the skies opened over Houston, some of the worst flooding rose in Greenspoint. The low-income neighborhood off Interstate 45 — south of George Bush Intercontinental Airport and home to a namesake mall known for crime and vacant stores (its “days are definitely numbered,” DeadMalls.com noted in 2005) — is situated along Greens Bayou. The area’s black and Hispanic residents live mostly in multifamily, three- to five-bedroom apartments, in complexes built in not only floodplains but floodways , which the Federal Emergency Management Agency defines as channels or land reserved for discharging floodwaters. In a time-lapse video filmed Saturday night, a residential parking lot in the neighborhood goes quickly from damp to puddle to lake, until sunrise reveals a brown sea that has swallowed the first floor of the adjacent apartment buildings and half a dozen cars.

Alejandra Castillo takes a break from
carrying water-soaked items out of
her family's home after flood waters
receded in Houston.

A resident, Exavier Blanchard, set up the camera as the storm rolled in. “I heard the area floods,” he explained to HuffPost.

He heard right. Just over a year before, much of Greenspoint was inundated under several feet of water in what Houstonians call the Tax Day Flood, an intense storm that dumped 17 inches of rain on the city. Residents were still recovering from that deadly deluge — dealing with moldy apartments and fighting with landlords who had pushed them out with nowhere to go, or who were forcing them to keep paying rent on damaged homes — when Hurricane Harvey came calling.

Read The Washington Post story by by Jonathan M. Katz - “Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable.”