Paris residents can vote today in a poll on whether to keep e-scooter rentals in the city or abolish them. Three rental companies offer around 15,000 e-scooters in Paris, with which tourists and locals are often quite careless.
There are accidents and chaos on the sidewalks and calls for a ban. The license for the landlords expires at the end of August. A city spokesman emphasized that Paris considers the outcome of the citizen survey to be binding, regardless of participation. The results of the survey are expected to be announced later this evening.
E-scooters often cause trouble in German cities. Many municipalities have now declared war on the parking chaos in this country. In some places there are already separate parking areas for scooters and tickets for wrongly parked vehicles.
If Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who initiated the survey, has her way, the rental of e-scooters in her city will be stopped altogether. E-scooters are not environmentally friendly and the company’s employees are not adequately protected, she said. In any case, the use of private e-scooters should not be restricted.
Stricter rules for use
Every month around 400,000 people in Paris use the “Trottinettes”, as the e-scooters are called in French. The newspaper “Le Parisien” reported that 1.7 million trips were made with the scooters in October alone.
At the beginning of December, the scooter rental companies tightened the rules to avert an impending ban. Users are required to scan their ID upon registration so only adults can use the scooters and hooligans can be more easily identified and banned from rentals. This should also make it easier to track traffic violations with the scooters, which should also be given license plates. It was assured that unused scooters lying around on sidewalks and squares would be cleared away more quickly. The landlords wanted to use twice as many staff.
The city’s decision is of immense importance for the large e-scooter providers, because Paris is considered the world’s most important city for so-called micro-mobility with electrically powered small vehicles, the business newspaper “Les Échos” reported. If Paris shows the scooters the red card, many other cities threaten to follow suit, said the head of one of the newspaper’s providers. If the license for Paris is extended, the providers want to invest in improvements – including e-scooters for the disabled and a technology that can be used to quickly locate scooters lying on sidewalks.
