The Great Scooter Crisis of 2018

By Peter Horn

In a rare show of local bureaucratic efficiency, the powers that be in San Francisco heard the desperate cries of their constituents and came together to confront the city’s most pressing issues. Or issue, rather: The Great Scooter Crisis of 2018 (“TGSC2018”).

In a zero-sum resource environment, this act of bravery is not without consequences. All police officers with pre-2010 rent control who’ve managed to maintain an address in the city will be reassigned to the elite Scooter Task Force (“STF”). In a move lauded by local officials as fighting fire with eco-conscious fire, the 2,298-person task force will be given an armory of fully stocked AR-15s and unrestricted use of the city’s 14 police horses normally deployed to city parks in the fight against glass bottle-riddled picnics. They will be given orders to use lethal force when necessary, and if scooter traffic near the Philz truck on Marina Boulevard in the last two weeks is any indication, there will be blood.

With the recent surge in property crimes around the city, the STF is encouraging citizens not to leave valuables in their cars while officers’ resources are occupied by the scooter threat. Citizens should expect additional BART delays as well as a generous amount of public nudity and urination on the trains wholly unrelated to TGSC2018.

Then there’s the question of where to store the abominable things once the threat has been neutralized. Thankfully the city’s leaders had a Plan B after a Mission District homeowners group objected to spray-painting them blue and tossing them in Zuckerberg’s yard. The 95 affordable housing units in the Natalie Grub Commons complex just received its 6,581st lottery application, and it’s going straight to the top of the waiting list.

Critics of the plan will be comforted to know institutional investors have begun to show interest in the Affordable Scooter Storage sector despite its unfortunate abbreviation, and rumor is WeWork is eyeing a WeScoot concept where members pay a premium hourly rate to store their scooters in units with exposed beams and ironic wall murals.

None of these measures, of course, are free, so budget dollars will need to be reallocated from less urgent uses. Homeless shelters and opioid abuse clinics will temporarily shut their doors, while mental health facilities will be converted to post-traumatic scooter centers to give reeling citizens a safe place to work through the stages of Scooter Inconvenience (“SI”).

San Francisco is truly a world class city, complete with its share of world class problems. We can all rest easy knowing our leaders are facing these pressing issues head-on, one two-wheeled menace at a time.