On Thursday, the plague of electric scooters that had descended upon San Francisco was just as abruptly dispersed, when the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency declined to issue permits to all but two virtually unknown scooter start-ups. Skip and Scoot will be issued their permits to operate in San Francisco on October 15. Their competitors, meanwhile—which include HOPR, JUMP, Ofo, Razor, Ridecell, and more, as well as the aggressive, venture-capital-backed Bird and Lime—are sadly out of luck. Lime says it plans to appeal the decision: “As a San Francisco-based company, this is where we live and work. We want to serve this community,” Toby Sun, the company’s C.E.O., said in a statement. And although a Bird spokesperson told the Hive that it will “continue to work with San Francisco officials, partners, community organizations, and advocates in hopes of bringing Bird back to the City by the Bay,” the company confessed to be “disappointed with today’s decision.”

In the lead-up to the ruling, both Bird and Lime in particular followed the Uber and Lyft playbook of mobilizing their customer base in the face of regulation from city governments, asking them to write their representatives or attend protests. In the end, the “ask for forgiveness rather than permission” tactic that both companies deployed when they began their operations in San Francisco didn’t win them any favors with the city, but it’s probably not what ultimately led to their undoing. Bird received a relatively low score from the S.F.M.T.A., getting two “fair” grades in safety and disability access, and “poor” ratings in the remaining categories. Lime scored “fair” in five categories, and “strong” in labor (“Should demonstrate understanding of operational needs and resource requirements to ensure service reliability”).

The bigger crux may have been that the city also required each qualifying company to have at least half of its staff be comprised of full-time employees, and not contractors. (Scooter start-ups hire independent contractors who run around the city, gathering up and charging scooters before putting them back on the street, a practice The Atlantic referred to as bird hunting.) “The agency looked for applications that prioritized the city’s concerns around safety, disabled access, equity, and accountability,” the S.F.M.T.A. said in its announcement on Thursday. “Taken as a whole, Scoot and Skip’s applications demonstrated not only a commitment to meet the terms of the permit, but a high level of capability to operate a safe, equitable, and accountable scooter-share service.” The permits will allow a maximum of 625 scooters each for Skip and Scoot in the first six months, and both companies can potentially increase their scooter counts to a maximum of 2,500, at the discretion of the S.F.M.T.A.

The snub is all the more surprising given the V.C. buzz around Bird and Lime. In 10 short months of operation, the former has raised more than $400 million from eager investors, and expanded from Los Angeles to San Francisco—the start-up is currently valued at nearly $2 billion. Lime, meanwhile, has raised $335 million from investors, including Google parent company Alphabet, and Uber. The ride-sharing giant itself, along with rival Lyft, was said to be exploring bike and scooter options—earlier this week, Uber C.E.O. Dara Khosrowshahi signaled that his company would double down on alternative methods of transportation as a means to becoming the “Amazon of transportation,” owning the commuting process from start to finish. In June, when San Francisco banned scooters and made companies pay a $5,000 fee to apply to operate in the city, all four put their hats in the ring. (Lyft and Uber did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Now, all four heavy-hitters have been denied. But Lime and Bird have faced setbacks before. In places like Denver and St. Louis, electric-scooter operations have been suspended pending city investigations and permit issuances. Both companies were temporarily banned in Santa Monica, but as of Thursday both are once again operating with permits as part of the city’s Shared Mobility Pilot. Bird and Lime may yet find openings in San Francisco, but their smackdown is symbolically damning all the same: despite their massive influxes of V.C. cash, and their blitzkrieg of strong-arm P.R. tactics, they were nevertheless banned by regulatory gatekeepers in the city confines of the tech capital of the United States.