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Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

france24.com

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Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#401

Post by MengerSponge »

Kuinox wrote: post #202
MengerSponge wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're being sarcastic, but yes, Paris is absolutely treating that menace with the priority it deserves. They've removed parking and turned a lot of streets into pedestrian/bicycle only (with gates or bollards for emergency vehicle access). Most streets are limited to 30kph (18mph). Converted entire lanes of some streets to bike lanes. https://www.childinthecity.org/2021/09/01/streets-to-schools...

Still not enough, on french r/fuckcars: https://old.reddit.com/r/EnculerLesVoitures/comments/11chtfh...

This kind of shenanigans either leads to a lot more car lanes, or even less car lanes and permissions. Paris has tried "more", and they're really enjoying the safety, air quality, and convenience of less.

I'm optimistic they'll keep following the Dutch model. You've seen the pictures of Amsterdam in the 70's, after all.

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#402

Post by TheHappyOddish »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #350
tallanvor wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is replaced is a subway, bus, bike, or walking trip. Perhaps on some rare occasions a taxi/Uber. Apart from that last rare occasion, all other alternatives are MORE eco-friendly than the e-scooters. I firmly believe that people running the scooter rental companies know that they can only succeed by destroying public transit. A survey in Norway showed that over half of the trips on rental scooters replaced publ…

> survey in Norway showed that over half of the trips on rental scooters replaced public transit, and less than 10% replaced trips in private cars I’d be careful about extrapolating these results across cities. In most American cities, for example, I’m going to replace an e-scooter with an Uber.

Most of the modern world has common public transport, the US is a weird edge case.

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#403

Post by nemetroid »

bluecalm wrote: post #317
franky47 wrote: post #185

One major annoyance with these e-scooters is their "take it from anywhere, leave it anywhere" rental model. Sure, it's practical for the user, but it litters the pavement for everyone else with scooters badly parked, sometimes even lying on their side on the floor, requiring teams of maintenance people to patrol the streets (with petrol trucks) and set them back up in an orderly fashion and grouped at strategic locat…

Wait till you see how parked cars litter sidewalks and streets. Every one of them takes as much space as tens of e-scooters as well. It's really annoying cars have that free-for-all start anywhere - leave it anywhere model.

I would wager Paris has very close to zero free street parking.

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#404

Post by raelmiu »

I don't understand how people end up banning things like this.

Yes, people are using them, mainly parking them, poorly. But that's always true with new things. Norms have not been established yet. But it's getting better fast.

Bicycles are still a huge problem in many cities but seen as morally good. The fact that people are using scooters so much is clearly an indicator of usefulness.

I don't think this is a problem. It just takes longer. Seeing bans like this always makes me sad.

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#405

Post by TheHappyOddish »

zirgs wrote: post #399
midasuni wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s forbidden to carry the car keys, let alone drive the car. But Jewish people do seem to be good at creating loopholes — it’s forbidden to press the button for the elevator, so the elevator stops at every floor so you don’t need to. It’s forbidden to turn on the oven, so the timer will turn it on for you. It’s forbidden to push you child in a buggy, so there’s a wire out up around the neighbourhood to make it not…

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/91594/theres-wire-above-... There's a wire around Manhattan. And it costs 100k a year to maintain it.

> The eruv encircles much of Manhattan, acting as a symbolic boundary that turns the very public streets of the city into a private space, much like one's own home. This allows people to freely communicate and socialize on the Sabbath—and carry whatever they please—without having to worry about breaking Jewish law.

This article seems to assume a lot of existing knowledge about Jewish "laws".

To provide further information (from a quick bit of research), it appears that Jews cannot transfer items "between domains" on the Sabbath, effectively they can't take an item from a private place to a public place, or another private place.

The rules appear to get very complx and specific[0], but basically it appears to be a way of Jewish people cheating on the rules by choosing to interpret as liberally as possible ("if we put a wire in a square around our houses and the street between and you, me and the government agree it's only one house today, then we've ticked the box").

How delightfully bizare. I can't imagine God at judgement time going "Well you got me on a technicality, head on up you cheeky rascals", but I guess they know him better than me.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#406

Post by xpl »

petre wrote: post #133
arijun wrote: post #47

I would like to provide a contrasting viewpoint. I can’t speak to the situation in Paris, but in the city I live in, scooters are amazing. They reduce car usage which is better for both pedestrians and car users. They turn a 45 minute walk/30 minute bus ride/20 minute cab into a 10-15 minute trip, which opens up much more of the city (the city I live in was not built for the number of cars it has in it so getting any…

I think that their weight and speed and where one can park them needs to be regulated. Hungary has at least done the last bit in Budapest with rectangles marked in green on the sidewalk. City councils can also rent out this space, preventing scooter chaos. They're also overbuilt for anti vandalism, weighting over 20 kilos. If one hits a pedestrian with a rental scooter, it can cause bad injuries. High speed also puts…

> Since it's a rental, nobody wears a helmet and almost everybody drives them irresponsibly

In Tel Aviv, all rental scooters come with helmets, and wearing a helmet is actually enforced by the police. Also they are banned from riding on sidewalks. So it seems to be just a regulation/enforcement problem, not intrinsical to scooters themselves or being rental or private.

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#407

Post by pasc1878 »

wcoenen wrote: post #390
m000 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Malmo, Sweden; where I live, has excellent cycling infrastructure and the scooter "problem" is really miniscule. It could be that what can turn e-scooters from an amenity to a menace is tourism. Malmö would hardly be on the map as an international touristic destination. This means that e-scooter users are mostly locals. Which in turns means (a) that e-scooters would typically be a complementary mean of personal mob…

Whenever I visit Paris as a tourist, I have another impression. Each time I stop, as a pedestrian, to wait for a traffic light to turn green, grumbling Parisians walk around me and cross the street with complete disregard for the red light. (I'm not sure I've ever even seen a Parisian pedestrian waiting for a traffic light. They might wait for traffic to clear a bit, but not until there's a green light.) So to me, it…

You are American aren't you.

This is how normal people use lights in the rest of the world.

If it is green walk. If it is red - look around and if it is reasonably safe walk.

Jaywalking is not a rule or anything like it. The UK highway Code has recently been changed so that pedestrians have right od way over cars turning into a side street (although not if controlled by traffic lights)

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#408

Post by Fradow »

dijit wrote: post #364
Fradow wrote: post #272

Parisian here, for context I've been cycling to work for about 10 years now (before Paris transformed into a cycle-friendly city). There are a lot of speculations and hypothesis from people who don't live in Paris and try to apply their experience in a different city to Paris, so allow me to offer the experience (obviously I'm biased) of someone living there. The first big misconception is that this ban is only due t…

> Now a last misconception is that this ban is bad because people will revert to cars. No they won't. In the first place, people riding rental e-scooters do not replace a car trip by a rental e-scooter trip This is a hard one to qualify completely. There is a lot of statistical evidence that infers that greater usage of e-Scooters and e-Bikes decreases car traffic. That may not be the case in Paris (and I can definit…

That one is specifically for Paris as seen by a Parisian. I would not argue that's the case globally, and there are certainly studies showing otherwise in other contexts.

Usage of e-scooter and e-bikes decreases car traffic yes. But does banning rental e-scooter (not personal e-scooters, and not e-bikes) lead to an increase in car traffic? In Paris, I argue that no it won't, or if it does it will be negligible.

> There are other points though, "last mile" is a difficult problem

That's not true in Paris. Paris has very good public transportation. There are bus and subway stations everywhere. It's not the case outside of Paris intra-muros, but here I'm specifically talking about Paris intra-muros, because the ban only apply to that location.

> it's not solved with rental bicycles either (they are usually very few and far between).

That's not true in Paris. The city rental bicycles are omnipresent and cheap. Even though I own a good bike, I use those as well, in cases I don't want to take my own bike. And there are other rental e-bikes (by the same company that do rental e-scooters)

In general, personal e-scooters are considered fine. Their owners don't behave nearly as bad as rental e-scooters.

The speed limit, as far as I know, is the same for any e-bike/e-scooter: 25km/h. Otherwise it's in a different class (same as a moped) and is no longer allowed on bike lanes (which doesn't prevent people from doing so, but so far they are few and far between).

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#409

Post by dolmen »

tallanvor wrote: post #342
Fradow wrote: post #272

Parisian here, for context I've been cycling to work for about 10 years now (before Paris transformed into a cycle-friendly city). There are a lot of speculations and hypothesis from people who don't live in Paris and try to apply their experience in a different city to Paris, so allow me to offer the experience (obviously I'm biased) of someone living there. The first big misconception is that this ban is only due t…

> What is replaced is a subway, bus, bike, or walking trip. Perhaps on some rare occasions a taxi/Uber. Apart from that last rare occasion, all other alternatives are MORE eco-friendly than the e-scooters. I firmly believe that people running the scooter rental companies know that they can only succeed by destroying public transit. A survey in Norway showed that over half of the trips on rental scooters replaced publ…

> I firmly believe that people running the scooter rental companies know that they can only succeed by destroying public transit.

This is irrelevant for cities with dense metro network like Paris. Rental scooter and bikes are just complementing the public transit offer. They also allow to have a lower load in the public transit, which is a benefit in place where the public transit is already overloaded at rush hours.

Re: Paris votes to ban rental e-scooters

#410

Post by pasc1878 »

raelmiu wrote: post #404

I don't understand how people end up banning things like this. Yes, people are using them, mainly parking them, poorly. But that's always true with new things. Norms have not been established yet. But it's getting better fast. Bicycles are still a huge problem in many cities but seen as morally good. The fact that people are using scooters so much is clearly an indicator of usefulness. I don't think this is a problem…

Its not only the parking - in London I have nearly been knocked over several times. They are far too fast to be on pedestrian areas.
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