The wheels may be about to come off Paris’ ubiquitous for-hire electric scooters.
Zipping around the City of Light on one of them, wind in the hair, or romantically but naughtily e-scooting à deux on one machine when the gendarmes aren’t looking could soon be over if Parisians vote Sunday to do away with the 15,000 opinion-dividing micro-vehicles.
The question City Hall is asking in a citywide mini-referendum is: “For or against self-service scooters in Paris?”
The answer could doom a leading market for the swift two-wheelers that have expanded locomotion choices in the French capital and other urban centers and towns around the world.
Scattered around Paris, easy to locate and hire with a downloadable app and relatively cheap, the scooters are a hit with tourists who love their speed and the help-yourself freedom they offer.
In the five years since their introduction, following in the wake of shared cars and shared bicycles, for-hire scooters have also built a following among Parisians who don’t want or can’t afford their own but like the option to escape the Metro and other public transport.
But amid complaints that e-scooters are an eyesore and a traffic menace, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and some of her deputies want to banish the “free floating” flotilla — so called because scooters are picked up and dropped off at their renters’ whim — on safety, public nuisance and cost-benefit grounds before the capital hosts the Olympic Games next year.
Paris’ deputy mayor for transport, David Belliard, says the scooters have been involved in hundreds of accidents. He also says they are more environmentally damaging than walking or riding a bike or bus, and too speedy and anarchic in a crowded, compact and historic city where space is at a premium.
They create “a feeling of overall insecurity in the public space, notably for the most vulnerable people, I’m thinking of seniors or people with disabilities,” he said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press. “There are a few benefits but what I see today is that the costs are greater.”
Paris’ contracts with the three rental companies — Dott, Lime and TIER — expire at the end of August. Whether for-hire e-scooters survive in Paris beyond that will depend on Sunday’s poll that’s open to all of the city’s registered voters, including those from other European Union countries.
“Whatever the result, we will respect it,” Belliard pledged. Hidalgo has promised likewise and said that she, too, hopes Parisians will vote against the scooters.
Scooter critics say the machines are particularly dangerous in the hands of tourists who don’t know how to navigate Paris’ frenetic, honk-honk, get-out-of-my-way traffic and the many users who flout the rules and risk fines by riding two to a scooter and by mounting sidewalks, sometimes barreling through pedestrians.
“I regularly, in fact pretty much all the time, see tourists riding them in pairs, people who often are oblivious to what they are doing, who aren’t in control of the scooter,” says Raphael Sicat, an IT manager who commutes on an electric monocycle to his Paris office. He says he often sees crashes involving for-hire scooters on his 25-mile round trip.
