I feel like maybe they should ban e-scooter companies parking them on the sidewalk or something like that (or did they)? Why would it be illegal to rent e-scooters, but not own or ride e-scooters?
They did have parking zones.
Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
101–110 of 571 posts
Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#102Low turnout elections are antidemocratic by nature. I'd venture there are many more e-scooter users in Paris than voters in this referendum.
Australia, by accident got compulsory voting because no one was showing up. Turns out to be the best things since sliced bread.
Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#103Low turnout elections are antidemocratic by nature. I'd venture there are many more e-scooter users in Paris than voters in this referendum.
There's a pretty big difference between a person who owns and uses an e-scooter (not banned) versus rentals (banned). I don't know about Paris, but in the earlier days of e-thing rentals (especially when Lime first came to our area), they were treated like trash. Users would dump them where ever they were done with them, often in the middle of the sidewalk or on people's lawns. Their batteries didn't last a full day…
> I think I'd have preferred to see something along the lines of unpleasant fines for leaving them anywhere other than a designated drop-off location, plus perhaps electronic governors limiting speed if that was an issue.
Maybe you missed this sentence in the article? "Paris’s regulatory scheme, which automatically limited the top speed of the scooters and required users to use dedicated parking areas or pay fines"
Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#104I went to Paris a couple years ago and it was a mess. There were like 4 or 5 different companies offering e-scooters, they were left everywhere, tourists were driving them in the middle of the road in high traffic areas, I saw 3 people on a single scooter, one guy riding 2 at once, areas along the Seine were restricted and scooters would start to slow down when you entered, instead of leaving people would just get off and drop the scooters, the ground was littered with them. It is not surprising they were banned with how they were rolled out. That said, I love e-scooters, they really add a degree of freedom and make getting around the last mile in cities much easier. And they are just fun. I hope there is space for them in city transport but letting people leave them wherever was always obviously a bad idea.
Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#105The discussion around shared e-scooters (and similar micromobility) tends to have a ton of hidden status quo bias. For example, one of the most common complaints about e-scooters is that people leave them all over the place and they clutter sidewalks. This can be a true and valid complaint!
But people do that, in part, because cities don't provide good alternatives. A city the size of Paris probably has literally millions of on-street parking spots, or at least hundreds of thousands. (E.g. NYC has ~3 million [1]). Each car-sized parking spot can fit 12 scooters. So replacing 5% of parking spots with micromobility parking would provide space for something like 500,000 shared micromobility vehicles. For context, that's order of magnitude larger than the number of e-scooters in Paris.
(FWIW, Paris is maybe not a perfect example here; it's a relative leader in reclaiming space from cars for shared mobility and biking and such. Also when I was there last summer the scooters weren't a nuisance at all because they were overwhelmingly parked in marked areas, not littering sidewalks. YMMV.)
But especially in the US, we're so entrenched in thinking that only cars can be real mobility that we can't imagine shifting even 1% of the space and money we spend on cars towards more shared and less polluting forms of transportation. It sucks.
[1] https://gothamist.com/news/how-else-could-nyc-use-its-12-cen...
Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#106Honestly, I can get behind this. I'm no NIMBY but; E-scooters were recently put into my city here in Perth. All I have seen is downsides. People acting dangerously on them and so forth.
Is street parking allowed in Perth?
Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#107Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#108Rental scooters are often competing with walking. A 10 minute walk might perhaps be a 2 minute scoot. Great. But in my city, for every 1 scooter ride, you will see 100 pedestrians walk past. Ie. they have a sub-1% market share. And the scooters are idle >95% of the time. I suspect, the friction of needing an app is too high. The complex signup process needing a driving license is too complex. The pricing (multiple do…
The biggest friction is not the app, but rather needing to leave home carrying a bike helmet every day on the off chance that you want to use one of these scooters. I don't even ride a bike without a helmet and these scooters are much more dangerous than a bike (small wheels far below the rider's center of mass, inherently dangerous.) The market for helmet-less scooter rides anywhere, let alone on hard surfaced stree…
I rarely ever see anyone, even parents with kids, wear a helmet while using a scooter. The police do not enforce any sort of law regarding them as far as I can tell. The only time I've seen helmets are on what look like privately owned scooters. That's just places I've been, so maybe it's different elsewhere that allows them.
Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#109> She said on Sunday that their business model was "very expensive -- five euros for 10 minutes -- it's not very sustainable, and above all, it's the cause of a lot of accidents." It must be great to have a wise mayor in the government who calls out "expensive business models". > currently be hired by children as young as 12 When I went there, I read the Lime, Dott, etc rules and they all said 16, some 18+. Where did…
> When I went there, I read the Lime, Dott, etc rules and they all said 16, some 18+. Where did they get 12 yo from?
Kids find a way. I live in Canberra, Australia. We have a couple of competing e-scooter hire companies. They're pretty good.
There are always kids on them.
Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters
#110I feel like maybe they should ban e-scooter companies parking them on the sidewalk or something like that (or did they)? Why would it be illegal to rent e-scooters, but not own or ride e-scooters?
E-scooter rental companies are in a contract with the city to allow the scooters to be parked on city property. Paris just ends the contracts. This isn't making anything illegal.
It happened in Copenhagen, too:
E-scooters were restricted to a few areas. When you park them, a GPS has to agree that the e-scooter is within bounds. This can take forever.
I came late to appointments and eventually gave up using them. The apps often have problems processing credit cards. It feels like society is rejecting them, and so they become less valuable. Renting a car is the same price, but with fewer problems.