Paris Votes To Ban Rental E-scooters (france24.com) 78
Paris voted overwhelmingly Sunday to banish for-hire electric scooters from the streets of the French capital, delivering a blow to operators and a victory for road safety campaigners. From a report: The referendum means the City of Light, once a pioneer in embracing e-scooter services, is set to become the only major European capital to outlaw the widespread devices booked on apps such as Lime. The city's residents were asked to weigh in for or against them in a public consultation organised by mayor Anne Hidalgo, with nearly 90 percent of the votes cast against, official results showed. "We're happy. It's what we've been fighting for over four years," said Arnaud Kielbasa, co-founder of the Apacauvi charity, which represents victims of e-scooter accidents. "All Parisians say they are nervous on the pavements, nervous when they cross the roads. You need to look everywhere," Kielbasa, whose wife and infant daughter were hit by an e-scooter driver, told AFP. "That's why they've voted against them."
Low turnout (Score:4, Informative)
While 90% of the voters expressed against, the turnout only represented 7.5% of the Parisian registered voters. Local vote like these have no legal value (which might explain the low participation), but Mayor Hidalgo had previously announced her decisions would abide to the result.
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Yeah this stuff should never go to referendums. The council/govt should instead have put in the work required to (a) quantify what actual harms these things were causing and (b) attempt to come up with regulations that mitigate those harms. Your average voter cannot weigh up how many people might be benefitting from these things (cheaper/faster commute to work etc) vs the harm they might be causing. Many will just vote no if they once had some young hooligan blast past them in a traffic jam. It's stupid to
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Imagine if they ran a referendum on banning people riding bikes as well. [...] Or maybe they should have a vote on banning SUVs?
They can't. The only reason they could ban scooters is because rental operators need a licence with the municipality. privately owned SUV and bicycles are street legal in the country, a municipality has no power over that.
Within current law what cities can do is to ban vehicles based on pollution criteria. They could tighten the criteria in a way that includes SUVs, but that would also include a lot of other large vehicles.
Re: Low turnout (Score:2)
I suspect that privately owned scooters are legal as well.
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"I suspect that privately owned scooters are legal as well." ... and that's why the vote to 'ban' was entirely on 'widespread devices booked on apps such as Lime' and not privately owned scooters.
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"They can't. The only reason they could ban scooters is because rental operators need a licence with the municipality. privately owned SUV and bicycles are street legal in the country, a municipality has no power over that."
They don't even let you drive on most streets in the center in Paris with your privately owned SUV. To be fair, non-SUVs as well.
In 2020 they eliminated half of the street parking there also.
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I really don't get this. Zurich has been making the city as unpleasent for cars as it can since the 70s but traffic has exploded anyway because people have to get into the city.
After all, having an office in Zurich is prestigious...
Public transportation in Zurich is quite good IMO but I imagine banning cars would overload it immediately.
I could understand it if they made immense parking available outside the city and include a day pass for public transportation i the pricing or something... But the current
Re:Low turnout (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a cycling enthusiast, and all for things that make things better for bikes, but I'm also a realist. There's a limit to making things better by banning cars, because really cars aren't the problem. It's sprawl. Sprawl means everyone needs cars, and you simply can't fix that with more bikes and transit, although they may help a little in certain places. You can't convert Houston into Amsterdam by copying Amsterdam's bike infrastructure; Amsterdam has 4x the population density and Houston has 8x the land area.
Cities exist because it's efficient to concentrate people, jobs and services together in a compact space. If you add cars into the mix, cities can spread out more, and at first this is great. The problem is that as more people need to move into through and around the city, the transport infrastructure you need for their cars grows faster than the footprint of your metro area. Car infrastructure encourages sprawl, but once the sprawl has happened that infrastructure has become critically *necessary* to too many people to remove without a fight. This pits the people who need to live with car infrastructure going through their neighborhood against the ones who need to use that infrastructure.
We can see this in operation in the Parisian anti-car measures of recent years; there's a city-proper vs. suburban conflict involved. Parisians are sick of their city being overrun with infrastructure to serve suburbanites' cars going in and out and through the city. The changes they've made are for their own benefit, but create problems for suburbanites who need to use their car in Paris. The suburbanites don't experience those benefits so they don't see the point of Paris' anti-car policies. I suspect the scooter thing is similar; it's the kind of thing a suburbanite coming in on the metro would see as a convenience but natives would mainly experience as a nuisance.
I don't know the Zurich situation, but I doubt the intent is simply to make drivers suffer. It's more likely they're looking at their projected growth and realizing that if they do nothing, traffic will get worse, but if they try to increase road capacity, traffic will get even worse than that. If what they're doing is less than perfect, it's probably worth considering that nobody's ever found a perfect solution. Once your city has traffic problems, it will always have them.
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The only reason they could ban scooters is because rental operators need a licence with the municipality. privately owned SUV and bicycles are street legal in the country, a municipality has no power over that.
I'm no expert in French law, but typically there are different ways laws can be written, and only some of them compel localities to permit things. Others leave them up to them to decide.
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Absolutely not. Any mechanical vehicle moving faster than about 5-6 mph should be off the sidewalks and on the streets and should be regulated by the Department of Transportation, not a council/govt. *Especially* scooters - those things move ~10-15 mph, so any collision with a pedestrian has about the same kinetic
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Imagine if they ran a referendum on banning people riding bikes as well
The issue isn't the riding.
It's the fact that they get left lying all over the sidewalks by the thousands for people to trip over.
You don't see that with bicycles and SUVs.
https://s.rfi.fr/media/display... [s.rfi.fr]
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The issue for me would be the riding. Where I live scooter riders are on the sidewalks snaking around pedestrians. I don't know how sober they are, and I and them often pass pedestrians that are definitely not sober or sane, and potential victims.
i don't much mind the piles of scooters parked around.
On the streets scooters look dangerously fast, but they'd mostly be the worst in a collision so they can live with their own risk.
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Bikes are already banned from the sidewalk in my city (expect for children riding in residential neighborhoods) and bikes have to obey rules of the roads when on streets. I have encountered rental e-scooters on the sidewalks downtown and they are a menace. Technically, I believe they are banned from the sidewalks downtown, also, but they don't do as well in the streets as bicycles, and they aren't that great in the bike lanes, either
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IMHO govt should only ban stuff if it's an absolute last resort. The default should be to allow something because we want to live in as free a society as possible, []
There is a contradiction here. People want to ban things, but why do you assume "we" want to live in a free society?. You and I might want to live in a free society, but there is no reason to assume that the majority in Paris wants to. They might very well consciously be willing to give up part of their freedom, since they want to take other's freedoms. Many people today (and IMO particularly in France) do not see freedom as a good thing. While the French nation's motto puts freedom and equality next to ea
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That's a good point.
I think it's quite sad that people don't see the fundamental importance of defending liberties and freedoms (perhaps its different in the USA - I'm in the UK), even over issues that don't affect them or that seem minor. Without a society that values these things, we aren't really any different from all the previous societies that fell into authoritarianism.
I do feel like many people would be quite happy with a benign dictatorship in the west - after all, feudalism and the social structur
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Looks like it's one of those things that most people don't give a fuck about and a few feel very strongly about. That may well mean that it's good that this got the result it got, but it may also well mean that the majority who doesn't care about the scooters will now have to deal with the side effects of that ban. And that's something they might indeed care a lot about.
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France: "I don't think people should SCOOT." :-)
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Local vote like these have no legal value
There's no such thing as a vote that has no legal value when perception from lawmakers is influenced by results of such votes. I remind you, the Brexit referendum was informative only, it had no legal value. And yet lawmakers fucked the entire country as a result of it. Same with the EU timezone referendum. The votes were overwhelmingly made by a select group of people in one country representing one political party, and yet they are trying to abide by it as well despite it's obvious flaws and lack of legal
Doesn't seem like it will solve the problem... (Score:2)
People banned them because they were worried about having to look around for people on scooters - however there are still a lot of people who own scooters and use them in the city, and those are still OK as far as I can tell.
So I'm not sure this will make life that much better for the average person who voted for the ban.
That said I'm indifferent to cities allowing them or not, though in a few places I have found them handy. I prefer a bike but rental facilities for those do take up more space and cost mor
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I prefer a bike but rental facilities for those do take up more space and cost more.
Actually E-scooters don't have any such facilities at all, which is both part of their appeal, and a huge reason for the problems they cause.
When done with them, you can just leave them wherever your are, meaning no walk from the closest facility to your actual destination.
But that also means that the less considerate users will just literally leave them in the middle of the side-walk without any regards whatsoever for the other users of the sidewalk... some of which might just take them and toss them int
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This reminds me of e-scooters where I live. People tend to park them in obnoxious places (like in front of doors), ride them in buildings, play chicken on both streets and sidewalks, and in general, rack up a good average of people winding up in the ER. The city wound up having an ordinance where major streets were geofenced to a speed limitation. Of course, a lot of those scooters wound up being "parked" in a nearby dumpster, or go swimming in the local creeks/rivers.
The city did ban the scooters for a
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People are more careful with personally owned eScooters so safety would likely increase even if the number of scooters in use doesn't go down.
Scooters belong on the street (ideally in bike lanes) and not on the sidewalk. This will likely need to
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Actually E-scooters don't have any such facilities at all,
Yes, that's why I noted bike rental facilities take up no space...
It's not like scooters take up zero space, being randomly distributed on sidewalks around the city. They just do not have charging/rental hubs.
Re: Doesn't seem like it will solve the problem... (Score:2)
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âoeThrow them into the Seine.â This is the way.
Indeed. And while we're at it, you can throw your iPhone(tm) right behind them!
Re: Doesn't seem like it will solve the problem.. (Score:2)
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People banned them because they were worried about having to look around for people on scooters - however there are still a lot of people who own scooters and use them in the city, and those are still OK as far as I can tell.
I guess that's a cultural difference between Paris and most of the major cities in the USA. People here who can't stand the scooters are generally of that opinion because the scooters sitting around waiting for a customer are an eyesore and become an ecological hazard when vandals throw them into lakes. [slate.com]
The only sort of scooters I regularly see adults riding in my neck of the woods are ICE-powered Chinese TaoTao scooters and their various clones. Those are actually street legal, but they still manage to be
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"So I'm not sure this will make life that much better for the average person who voted for the ban."
Now they'll be run over by an uninsured privately owned one instead of an insured rented one.
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I don't think they care too much about people on scooters, they care about the scooters themselves. Our capital is pretty much scooter-central, you can't throw a dead cat over your shoulder without hitting one of these things standing about on the sidewalk. And that's what these people very likely were pissed off about, scooters being "discarded" by their former users. Our solution was to have "scooter parking places" where they can be attached, and to "rent" one (for free) you have to give your phone numbe
Re: Doesn't seem like it will solve the problem... (Score:2)
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What we're talking about is a parking space or two, so it's pretty easy to figure out where and how much. The scooters are the alternative to a whole bunch of cars, or several buses and people being late for things, so it's worth making space for them.
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The solution is obvious: A self-driving scooter. Take the scooter driver out of the equation.
John Wick (Score:2)
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It would have been better for him to negotiate through the pick-pockets on the Metro.
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"It would have been better for him to negotiate through the pick-pockets on the Metro."
I always stick plenty of fake wallets in my outer pockets, sometimes with a glitter-bomb.
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Mouse traps are far, far more entertaining.
So, it's a ban against rentals (Score:3)
Non-rental scooters aren't affected. Since they're allowing 12-year-old "drivers", that means a lot of untrained riders are out there on rentals... but also on non-rentals.
Seems like they are fixing part of a problem, and claiming victory.
Re:So, it's a ban against rentals (Score:5, Interesting)
On the contrary, it fixes almost all of the problem. The problem is not so much the scooters, it's the people that rent them. Because they don't see the scooters at as their property they don't treat them with the same caution and respect.
I say good riddance.
I don't think the problem is people (Score:2)
When I used to road cycle I could get up to 25 mph on my cevelo and I was never all that fit. It took months of writing to be able to hit those kind of speeds safely. Put me on an e-bike and have me hitting those speeds day one and there's going to be pro
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Leaving them in the middle of the road. That's just something that irritates people, especially older people.
Not just old people. The parked scooters are a tripping hazard if you're browsing TikTok while walking down the sidewalk. Won't someone think about keeping the sidewalks clear for the distracted Gen Zers?
Personally, I think they're an eyesore. Every couple of blocks looks like some e-scooter store put all their inventory on the sidewalk because they're having a "Biggest blowout scooter sale ever!", except when you look at the "store", it's actually a lawyer's office, coffee shop, etc. It's tacky.
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That mechanism is in place. Some scooter apps have the user take a photo of the scooter before they can "return" it. However, once it is returned, from there, it can be moved or just tossed somewhere.
Anotner culprit are the people who charge the things overnight. They tend to toss them in places they shouldn't belong, like people's front yards, and usually from there, the scooter promptly makes its way to a trashcan.
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Our solution was to make you responsible for the scooter you "rent". Yes, it's free, but if it isn't returned in working condition (or at all), you get to pay for it.
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From what I've seen, people don't treat their own property with caution and respect. Why should this be any different?
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I think the rental ones were more perceived as dangerous because (allegedly) young people don't care because it's not theirs -- they can have another one at next street corner if previous one broke, and daddy won't scold them, won't threaten to take it away from them, won't even know. Also, rentals end up everywhere in a mess.
Ban everything (Score:4, Funny)
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If you put dumb things to any vote you'll end up a result like that. But residents don't hate tourists. They hate some underlying problem tourists bring. E.g. noise, litter, the closure of local shops and the opening of shops that sell tourist junk, the peddlers of tourist crap in the streets, and e.g. the littering of these damn e-scooters everywhere.
You don't need to even talk about putting it to a vote. Some tourist heavy cities have had organised staged protests against tourists including Venice and Bar
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But residents don't hate tourists.
But they understand that they don't want them there.
Some tourist heavy cities have had organised staged protests against tourists
Exactly. They see that banning the tourists would solve the problems.
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Tourists are an easy target to blame for problems. Yes, sometimes things are brought in (crime), but a lot of the issues are secondary things like businesses catering to them as opposed to locals.
I do wonder how well the daily tourist fee Venice charges will do in the long haul, where people pay to actually be in the city. Maybe that might become more commonplace, or just easily abused, where some towns will charge 1000+ euros/day to ensure the only people on their streets are rich or residents.
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E-Scooters suck (Score:4, Interesting)
My city said "ok, we'll let these rental e-scooters exist for a year, let's see how it goes"
By the end of the year, the city said "no thank you". Scooters were left everywhere. In canals, strew across side walks, abandoned in stores. People had to keep chasing after the company that was renting the scooters to pick them up. They had no ability to handle bumps, and in a climate that can see temperatures wildly fluctuate from very cold to mild, that freeze/thaw cycle does a number on your roads and sidewalks. It's very difficult to stay straight on an e-scooter, making them too unwieldly / dangerous to use on sidewalks, bike paths, or the road.
E-Scooters were a curiosity, but they are for the most part, just a gimmicky "last mile" solution, much like motorized unicycles and segways. Bikes continue to be more sensible, and we have a public bike rental service with dedicated stations, and they are transitioning the bikes over to electric ones now. The bikes are beasts, fat tires, good suspensions, very smooth riding. The service is extremely popular and has been growing in usage every year. E-Scooters were never popular enough to motivate anyone to figure out solutions to their problems.
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In my city (Brisbane, Australia) e-scooter uptake has led to less people driving and catching public transport. They work very well here in most places. Some of the numbers are here: https://www.brisbanetimes.com.... [brisbanetimes.com.au]
The rental companies suck because people just leave them scattered over the commons. But the interesting thing is that more and more people seem to buy their own scooter after trying the rentals. I used to live near a major bike path and during COVID saw the numbers switch from mostly rentals to
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There is a study about exactly that, which is summarized here [translate.goog] (google translate link).
Quick takeaway:
In the case of Paris, the Fraunhofer ISI study shows that 40% of journeys made with an electric scooter replace walking, 30% the metro, 9% the taxi/VTC, 7% the bicycle (self-service or not), 5% the bus, and 5% the car or motorbike (electric and thermal). Thus, in 77% of cases (walking, metro, bicycle), electric scooters replace active modes, and less carbon-intensive in the majority of cases.
That said, whether you are for or against, it's a bit sad to see public policies based on polls with a turnout of 7.5% ... Most people who voted were 40+, living in Paris itself during the week-end (vs students who leave during the week-end, or even most people who work in Paris during the week, but live actually in the suburbs and can't be bothered to also go there during the week-end when trafic jams make
As someone who has driven in Paris (Score:4, Funny)
Safety isn't a concern here. They just don't want their streets cluttered with a bunch of e-scooters at every corner. It takes away from the beautiful views they have from sidewalk bistros of the street fires and mounting trash piles.
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Yeah, distracting from the riots is certainly not something you'd want to happen. It just ain't Paris if they don't build barricades at least twice per century.
It's a fundamental issue of conflict (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever modes of transport are in conflict with one another on shared infrastructure it becomes a problem. Drivers hate cyclists on the road. Pedestrians hate cyclists on the footpath. There is a clear winner here ultimately with most cyclists cycling on the road or having a part of the road dedicated for cycling paths.
Along come e-scooters. Where do they go? The things are basically too dangerous to share traffic with cars (unless suicide is your thing), and too dangerous to share traffic with pedestrians (they go way too quickly for Paris's congested streets). There's no good option for scooters here that isn't an immediate danger to someone.
If a city had dedicated third infrastructure then this wouldn't be an issue. There's no anger against stand-up scooters for example in the Netherlands, on a dedicated bike path they aren't a danger nor a hinderance.
Now the fight being fought there is the damn parking of the things. They are littering the sidewalks and people are getting pissy about that.
Re:It's a fundamental issue of conflict (Score:4, Insightful)
Along come e-scooters. Where do they go?
The ironic thing is, having no place to ride them was precisely what caused the Segway to be a flop. Completely ignoring that logic, some venture capitalist cowboys came along and got the idea that if you just carpet bombed cities with cheap Chinese e-scooters, perhaps the cities would be forced to find a solution?
Some of the cities did find a solution: impounding and banning the scooters.
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I know where I lived, after the town was carpet bombed with scooters, and 50+ people wound up in the ER a day, the city council just did a complete ban which held for a while until it was overturned. It was the only real way to handle it, because the scooters wound up everywhere, and it became a SOP for people to just lob them (as their alarms often were going off) into a dumpster or nearby creek (their alarms stopped when the scooters went for a swim.)
Overall they are still around. Some people throw them
Re: It's a fundamental issue of conflict (Score:2)
The ironic thing is, having no place to ride them was precisely what caused the Segway to be a flop.
Perhaps, in part. But Segways are expensive. They had trouble attracting a rental market and never reached a critical mass of users like scooters/bikes do.
I still see the occasional Segway, riden by (I suspect) their owners. They do just fine on sidewalks, since their riders are experienced enough not to ride like maniacs.
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Perhaps, in part. But Segways are expensive. They had trouble attracting a rental market and never reached a critical mass of users like scooters/bikes do.
They were expensive and some cities were preemptively banning them. [slashdot.org]. It was a hard sell if the only thing you could do with it was roll around on your own private property. Although, it did find a niche use specifically for that purpose - I still see security guards at airports/malls/theme parks using them to get around.
The idea of people commuting their way around city sidewalks on e-scooters, though, is still just as troublesome as it was 20 years ago. As the OP said, sidewalks are for pedestrians, the
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During the initial lawless period when 8 vendors were all trying to get a piece of the market, we got "pissy" about asshats leaving them strewn across sidewalks in front of entrances instead of parking them so that you wouldn't have to step over/around them just to get/leave home. The vendors would also tend to leave a dozen or two recharged scooters at corners every couple of days completely blocking people from using crosswalks because setting them up so they wouldn't be obstacles "took too long" for the
Maybe if Gen Z learned to put their toys away (Score:5, Insightful)
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and can't even be bothered to return them to the designated parking zones.
I think you found a main concern but for all the wrong reasons. It is a well known phenomenon that litter is reduced when you put bins within sight of people looking to do something with their garbage.
There ARE NO DESIGNATED PARKING ZONES. That is the fundamental problem here. These things were littered on the streets (literally Lime going around and just dropping them around the place. And when people pick up shit from the street they don't think twice about dropping shit back on the street.
It's easy to bl
Le Not in my back yard (Score:1)
Unfortuntaly, they don't make the roads unsafe... (Score:1)
Safer for them, at least,,,
Question (Score:2)
From a CO2 perspective, do public rental e-scooters have less CO2 impact vs. hopping on a bus, cab, or driving?
My understanding is the scooters are serviced (moved to high traffic areas and charged) by folks driving around in ICE vehicles, and I don't have enough data to swag a guess on it.
We have a bit of a rental scooter problem too (Score:4, Insightful)
This is in Germany.
In my city there are corners that are clogged with rentals from at least 5 different brands, from standy-scooters over eletric bikes right up to electric motorscooters (those with a two-person seat). Just 15 minutes ago I came across one of those corners. Not pretty. ... Given, cars take up way more space and those should go first or pay through the nose to be able to park, especially here in Germany, but there should be some regulations and rules to manage public rental scooters and other single-person transport.
I'd perhaps turn those rental scooters and e-bikes into a public service and allow only those to be placed, along with anonymous user-tracking and fines if someone gets multiple reports for bad parking. Or something like that.
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Whether they should be a public service or not is up for question, but the obvious thing to do is to pass a law saying they can only be left in designated areas or be removed. Then you drive around and pick them up when they are left elsewhere, and ransom them back to the companies that own them for a profitable amount, and auction any unclaimed units periodically. In order to get them back, they have to pay the ransom for all units currently held by the locality, sight unseen.
More proof (Score:2)
More proof that there actually is some intelligent life in this universe.