I wonder if there have been any social studies done regarding the apparent sense of entitlement that comes with operating any kind of vehicle. E-scooters are an absolute menace nearly everywhere I've seen them being used, with their operators weaving between pedestrians and cars alike, and littering the kerb when unused. But the same is often true for bicycles, especially the fast electric kind, and it's certainly true for many cars. Only, cars have been given a special kind of kerb where they can take up space.
For some reason, we've come to accept the dominant position of cars and the absolute entitlement (and douchebaggery!) that comes with it. But we seem to be unwilling to accept the same from bikes or scooters.
I'm happy to accept the scooter menace if it means fewer cars on the road. And given how much of a nightmare traffic is in Paris, I'm surprised that Parisians don't seem to agree. But then I guess thes ones who voted against this probably feel entitled to their preferred mode of transport over all others ... ?
Malmo, Sweden; where I live, has excellent cycling infrastructure and the scooter "problem" is really miniscule. There are still issues, people parking in stupid ways or taking scooters into pedestrian areas, but overall there are significantly more dangerous drivers who hit the accelerator as hard as they can to reach the next red-light so that they can make the most noise possible.
I have also noticed that there are a contingent of people who despise anyone having anything nice, and will throw the scooters into the canals, spray their QR codes, intentionally destroy the stands (which means they can't be parked reasonably) and, worse in my opinion, moving the scooters away from where they are safely parked and placing them across the sidewalk, which makes the previous rider look like an arse.
The scooter companies try to combat this, but their combating sometimes has the inverse affect[0]. One thing has always been true though: you have to take a photo when you park so that your parking can be validated.
What's interesting about the two photos on your blog is a lack of a lock. The scooters and bicycles where I am (SF) have a lock so they're locked to a bike rack while waiting, which prevents some classes of vandalizing. We had a problem with pedicab drivers dumping the scooters into the bay because of the competition they posed to their business. I think the photo requirement's largely solved the issue, along with the fact that people have adjusted to the change.
When the scooters first came on the scene there was a lot of gnashing of teeth, the strangest position were the vandals who would see a well parked scooter, kick it over, causing it to be across the sidewalk, and then go around complaining about the scooters being in the way. Anyway the furor has largely calmed down, who knows what exactly did it, but I suspect a large piece of it is simply people hating change and now they've come to accept it, and even use them sometimes.
Malmö municipality view the problem of e-scooters that have been dumped in the canal (or in the coast) as a problem that the owner of the e-scooter is responsible for. They do not want to pay for cleanup. The e-scooter companies on the other hand view it as way to expensive if they had to pay for the cleanup, and that they could not operate profitable in malmö if they were forced to pay for it.
The end result is that e-scooters are now accumulating in the water with a growing concern among researchers about what will happen once those batteries start to break down.
> 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 mobility, (b) there will be relatively few e-scooters.
Paris OTOH, is #1 city tourist destination in the world. It also happens to have a lot of car traffic. This (a) makes moving with an e-scooter convenient, (b) makes deploying a huge number of e-scooters for-rent a very lucrative business, (c) the number of e-scooters is inflated to cater to the tourist clientele. Add to this that many tourists may be unfamiliar with Parisian traffic and norms, and you have a recipe for disaster.
The problem with Paris really is in the lack of respect for pedestrians space. Motorcycles often park on the sidewalk, and most of the time the side walk has an area monopolized by motorcycle. Since motorcycles have to drive from and to these "parking" spaces, you very often end up with pedestrians and motorcycles inches appart.
This simply creates a very blurry line between spared spaces. It's not surprising that e-scooters simply ride on the sidewalk and are a hasard, when the motorcycles themselves also do.
The other problem is the streets are old and often have brick sections. ok if you're a car, annoying on a bike, almost unbearable with the small wheels of the scooters. Often they ride on the sidewalk with is a but less bumpy.
I think you're missing the fact that car infrastructure with curbside parking has evolved over decades, and cities have not managed to even provide ample parking space for standard bikes, as they have been in use for decades as well. Now these scooters just came into existence and over the course of 5-8 years have managed to clutter everything. They're not individuals' property (who would pick them up later) but they're owned and operated by a for-profit company and just being dropped anywhere by people. That's what makes it so very different.
Not that I have a good solution for this, but we have some bikes by the local public transport org, and they have dedicated "parking stations" - if there were more of those (and the bikes wouldn't be more expensive than other rental bikes), or if they'd just nab a few car parking spaces for it.. then it would be nicer. Yes, it is very convenient to leave your scooter next to your door, but I don't think it would be outrageous to walk the last 200m.
It's true that infrastructure has evolved over decades. Though bicycles predate cars, and for various reasons we (as a society) decided to fuck bicycles and pander to cars.
I'm not sure if the ownership vs rental argument holds much water. Bicycles routinely litter the kerb (and every other surface imaginable), even though they are usually owned rather than rented. Perhaps it's because they're relatively cheap? Or maybe it's an infrastructure problem after all?
> I'm happy to accept the scooter menace if it means fewer cars on the road. And given how much of a nightmare traffic is in Paris, I'm surprised that Parisians don't seem to agree. But then I guess thes ones who voted against this probably feel entitled to their preferred mode of transport over all others ... ?
I'd imagine because they are not sharing space with cars but with pedestrians and cyclists.
And this has nothing to do with entitlement, just plainly sense of danger. Those things can go at bicycle speeds with none of the breaking or manoeuvrer capability of one.
The companies operating them were also essentially loitering, putting them wherever they wanted. At least here in Poland it was finally regulated and placed some limits on them (max speed, no zooming around on pedestrian routes etc.) but I can absolutely see why pedestrians or cyclists hated them.
> I'm happy to accept the scooter menace if it means fewer cars on the road. And given how much of a nightmare traffic is in Paris, I'm surprised that Parisians don't seem to agree. But then I guess thes ones who voted against this probably feel entitled to their preferred mode of transport over all others ... ?
It would be interesting experiment to open congested routes for 2 wheel vehicles only(let's say anything between classic scooter and bicycle), but frankly all of them is a misery to drive in proper winter so I'm kinda not surprised by people staying with their cars.
> I'm happy to accept the scooter menace if it means fewer cars on the road. And given how much of a nightmare traffic is in Paris, I'm surprised that Parisians don't seem to agree.
The Parisians were not asked about cars in this poll.
Parisians are less and less car owners as street parking space is being reduced and private parkings are costly.
> I'm happy to accept the scooter menace if it means fewer cars on the road.
At least here in Paris, it doesn't feel like scooters replace cars : the latter being mostly used to reach suburbs (and most of them actually originating from another suburb), while the former replaces long walks - at least journeys which would have been done by foot twenty years ago - or métro.
Two issues with that equivalence: (1) you can't compare a 15kg bike going 20kph with a 2000kg SUV going 70kph, and (2) the city is ENTIRELY designed for cars, with everything else as an afterthought (e.g. where pedestrians can walk is entirely determined around cars and their throughways). Yes, scooters shouldn't mix with pedestrians and they also shouldn't mix with cars. We'll where the fuck should they go? Governments seem permanently unwilling to sacrifice even a single lane of car traffic for a proper bike path / scooter path.
I think that we have different standards here. Street parking for cars is the norm now, but it isn't altogether different in principle from people leaving e-scooters "in the way" on public roads and pavements either. I accept it's a bit different as others have pointed out, but given that we generally permit street parking for cars (subject to some rules), it seems reasonable that we should also permit e-scooters to be parked and it's on society to figure out what the rules for that should be.
Looking at amount of e-scooters kicked over I'd say society decided they do not have a place directly on the pedestrian/cycling path.
Here they eventually forbid it altoghether and now companies have to use dedicated space, not just random patch of ground they find
> Street parking for cars is the norm now, but it isn't altogether different in principle from people leaving e-scooters "in the way" on public roads and pavements either.
The difference is that for the most cars it's someone's personal vehicle parked near where they live, while majority of the scooters are taxi-equivalent, with personal ones just being taken home.
So in first case it's public space serving public, in second it's public space serving company's margins
The ban is on rental scooters only, so more aimed at discouraging carefree casual users and tourists than people who really want to use escooters as part of a commute etc
Half of the reaction aren’t addressing the real vote results. Escooters aren’t banned. People voted against 3 different private companies littering the sidewalk.
Paris’ inhabitants showed strong support of a public, off-the-curb scooter and bike infrastructure.
I should mention that it represent 80% of 7% of people that could vote. Basically people who don't like e scooters bothered to actually get out to a voting booth (no e-voting). Most inhabitants clearly didn't care enough.
More than the usage, a lot voted against the business model and the nature of e-scooters. There are a environmental disaster, they get destroyed / lost after only a few months. They are found everywhere and especially in canals / the Seine. They also need a fleet of precarious workers at night to get recharged.
> For some reason, we've come to accept the dominant position of cars and the absolute entitlement (and douchebaggery!) that comes with it. But we seem to be unwilling to accept the same from bikes or scooters.
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 to elderly going to vote. While the 90% percentage is indeed skewed, recent polls from before the vote showed that about 60% of the population approve of this ban. It's not as overwhelming, but still a majority.
People are fed up with rental e-scooters, but why? Not because they are littered everywhere. It's not longer the case. There are dedicated e-scooters parking spots, that are overall used properly (though they are often on the floor due to wind or being knocked down). The article talks about "tightening regulations", I'm pretty sure there are rules enforcing that.
The real reason is that anytime you see someone egregiously disregarding rules in a way that endanger others, it's more often than not a rental e-scooter, with rental e-bikes coming behind. They are perceived as dangerous, plain and simple. And it's not a lack of cycling infrastructure. While it's not up to Netherlands-level of bike-friendliness yet, it's quite good lately overall.
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, they don't even own one for the most part (or even have a driving license). 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.
> 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 public transit, and less than 10% replaced trips in private cars.
The detrimental affects on public transit, the relatively high injury rates, the disregard the riders have for the blind and handicapped who have to navigate around the scooters being left in the middle of the sidewalk, and just the sense of urban blight from them being left everywhere all add up to enough reason to ban the things.
> 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.
I imagine you must feel the same way, but 20x stronger, about cars, right? Everything you said is even worse, only we've become accustomed to it and treat it as natural (one knocked over scooter? outrageous. 4 lanes of traffic and 2 of parking? par on course).
As a tourist in Paris I found scooters really convenient to get around the city. But I also hated them for their aesthetics as they would be littered everywhere and knocked over.
I definitely saw so many dangerous driving behaviours. I think tourists using scooters aren't treating these like useful day to day transport vehicles but as a way to have fun. For a lot of people it's their first time on a scooter. I saw people zooming through red lights into oncoming traffic. Others tried to jump the curb. It's kind of like giving a kid a toy for the first time.
> The real reason is that anytime you see someone egregiously disregarding rules in a way that endanger others, it's more often than not a rental e-scooter, with rental e-bikes coming behind. They are perceived as dangerous, plain and simple. And it's not a lack of cycling infrastructure. While it's not up to Netherlands-level of bike-friendliness yet, it's quite good lately overall.
Parisian too, but with reality in mind. We should first reduced by 95% the amount of cars and ban taxis :
> Parisian too, but with reality in mind. We should first reduced by 95% the amount of cars and ban taxis
Oh I agree with that, but we can do both!
First link => that's an ongoing project with Crit'air restrictions. Link is 2 years old, Crit'Air 4 have been banned since then (though enforcement is low). And newer cars emit a lot less of pollution.
Second link => that's Ile-de-France and not Paris. That's why I was careful to specify Paris. Ile-de-France as whole is a lot more sprawling, so there is less alternatives to cars. Skimming it, it seems to support your argument even for Paris though, but I have a hard time to find the exact percentage. I'd be curious what's the actual number for Paris only nowadays.
Third link => that's for France as a whole. I did not skim it.
Fourth link => that's from 2016. I'm pretty sure it has evolved a bit since then. Numerous cycle lanes have been created since then, and parking/car lanes removed. Though that's still an ongoing project. I'd be really curious about updated numbers.
If you look at accident statistics, they are indeed dangerous. My friend broke his arm while riding one, and he's far from a careless rider, so I found some statistics, which made me realize that maybe we shouldn't let people ride these around town willy-nilly:
> 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 definitely see that being true) but it does go against everything we know statistically.
There are other points though, "last mile" is a difficult problem, it's not solved with bicycles (they are too onerous to take on public transport, and they are a huge target of theft), it's not solved with rental bicycles either (they are usually very few and far between).
Last-mile is most likely solved with personal e-scooters as they are much more acceptable to take on public transport and can be taken inside so they are a lot less steal-able. The problem with this is that personal e-scooters are significantly less regulated than the "all-seeing-eye" rental ones which impose restrictions on speed (20kph in Sweden, personal vehicles can be modified to go 30kph, legal maximum is 25kph and personal e-scooters all go this speed -- with no slow zones anywhere)
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).
> There are other points though, "last mile" is a difficult problem
"Last mile" is literally solved with two legs and some shoes. A mile is walked in 15-30 minutes, and if you can scooter you can walk. The actually mobility-challenged can be provided vehicles if necessary.
> 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.
So you're saying, compared to other cities, Paris' problem is parisians? And e-scooter don't work because parisians can't be bothered to be civil?
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 anywhere is a slog).
When they first came there were a bunch of scooter on pedestrian collisions, but between an aggressive ticketing campaign, adding bike lanes, and adding slow zones, these numbers have gone way down.
(I rarely use them as I tend to cycle everywhere, I’m just glad my city has them)
The real problem with scooters is cuties unwilling to provide them with proper infrastructure. Bike lanes in most cities (out of the better European cycling cities), tend to be narrow and about 1/4 - 1/3 the size of a car lane.
If a city were to dedicate a single car lane sized lane for “micromobility” and responded quickly to damage to this lane (which wouldn’t be as frequent for the obvious reason that damage is proportional to weight, and scooters and bikes are way lighter than cars), scooters would not be a problem at all.
A city may decide it doesn’t want dockless scooters, but even that problem could be resolved by replacing 1 car parking spot on every street into a scooter/bike dock.
I used the lime scotters in Paris 4 years ago, in the pre pandemic times. Oddly useful the few times I used them. Though some Vandal was drawing over the qr codes, make some of them unusable.
I see them in Cambridge where Harvard students own them and zip across the river to the athletic center.
The can go quite fast and as a biker then can be annoying when the try to go past you at 20 mph, but honestly in the bike lane is probably the best place for them
No one is contending that using scooters is bad for the user. They are saying a bunch of drunk users are using them recklessly for non-users and are getting in people's way by parking them all over the sidewalks and streets.
An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros?
> An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros?
I have proposed this before in my city, ticket the e-scoter company for improper parking not the users.
Most of these business have gps trackers on them they will quickly find a way to enforce proper parking onto users.
We need to stop externalizing problems away from companies.
You don't ticket the tourists directly, you ticket the scooter company. You can be sure that the scooter company will either get their money from the riders, or will develop really quick some methods to make it impossible to leave them in undesignated areas.
> No one is contending that using scooters is bad for the user.
I'll definitely contend they're bad for the user. Now, to your point about being drunk, it could be due to the facet that in my city they seem to be primarily used for bar hopping, but my partner works in a hospital and has seen too many horrific injuries (and deaths) of scooter riders - like way more than bicyclists or even motorcycles (which he refers to as donor-cycles).
> They reduce car usage which is better for both pedestrians and car users.
Most stats show that they don't reduce car usage, the people using them aren't people that give up cars, but people that give up on walking or taking public transport.
Here rental scooters are an absolute plague. Their riders routinely ignore both traffic laws and common sense and are a threat to both themselves and pedestrians. There's talk of some form of crackdown amongst the local city council members and I would be delighted to see them banned outright.
Just ban cars first. They are big, dangerous, smelly, loud, driven too fast and they actually kill thousands of people per year, not just cause dangerous situations.
Any problem e-scooters have is multiple times worse with cars and they actually have 95+% of the infrastructure dedicated to them and aren't forced into narrow parts of sidewalk called bike lines.
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 the scooter operator in danger. Since it's a rental, nobody wears a helmet and almost everybody drives them irresponsibly. Limiting their mass and speed would limit their impact energy.
> 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.
That’s how you solved it. Paris is entirely unable to perform such a campaign, because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say, and Paris is at something like 10x fewer policemen per population compared to the average of US cities, which puts Paris in the category of “self-managed” much more than other cities of the same size.
because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say
Is it true, that Paris police target minorities unfairly?
And, it is interesting that you chose to compare Paris with a very large population, to an "the average of US cities". Would it be more reasonable to compare to the megas in the US, like NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles? Better, it would be more reasonable to compare to large European cities: Berlin, Frankfurt am Maim, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Milan, Madrid, etc.?
This line of reasoning has actually been used by Seattle activists to resist installation of traffic cameras.[1] Our city also refuses to enforce any traffic laws generally.
As it's already being said, you don't ticket the individual riders. You ticket the company and let them deal with recouping the losses or creating ways of making the scooters less of an annoyance.
Here in Tel Aviv, they'll never get rid of them for at least one reason: they're the only form of at-least-semi-public transportation available on the weekend (Shabbat) and Jewish holidays, when the law forbids buses and trains from running.
Meet a date at 10 PM on Friday night? Scoot. Catch the Saturday 5 AM tour bus to a day-hike that's meeting on the other side of town? Scoot.
They've also helped boost demand for better bike-lane infrastructure, which has gotten much better in the last 5-10 years.
Yep, it's a significant contributor to car culture as once you have a car you start using it for trips that could be done using walking. And everybody needs a car to be mobile on Shabbat unless they can pay for taxis with a surcharge or are actually religious.
The Outer Hebrides (islands) of Scotland had a similar situation.
The ferry used not to run on Sundays, and there were protests when Sunday service began. However, the airport operated flights on Sunday, so if you could afford it you could still e.g. visit family for the weekend and return to the mainland in time for work on Monday.
There are still no buses on Sunday, although there seem to be very few Monday-Saturday so that might not be entirely due to religious indoctrination.
The public transport is operated by the government. They consider no one should work on Saturdays so they don't run their services then. I think if using your private car was forbidden it would've been even crazier.
The free Saturday busses [1] fill this niche pretty well, although the scooters are probably more convenient if you’re not traveling along one of the lines. They don’t solve the issue of the trains and inter-city busses being down, so people that want to visit their parents in another township still need to own a car.
While in Tel-Aviv, watch out for e-scooters, they are very fast, aggressive and dangerous. One bumped strongly into me while I crossed the street at green light, didn't even apologize and sped away.
Bird and Lime will always have a special place in my heart for inspiring the last silly season political debate before covid in our town.
The very first day rental escooters were legal in town the company hosted demonstration had someone fall off in the town hall parking lot and require hospitalization. It was all so silly and things only went sideways from there. I saved tens of minutes over the course of a summer taking them on one route and I got two free helmets in the mail.
Leafblowers, historic districts, rental scooters... There has to be some focal point for the nervous municipal energy whether or not there's anything to focus it on. Things got deadly serious during the school reopening discussion and they never really went back to the way they were before.
Pour one out for the micromobility startups' dreams and may whatever comes next be as delightfully odd as those things were.
Bird Bikes were a regular feature on Nextdoor where I live. Lots of hand wringing about them while completely ignoring the lifted pickups with hoods taller than most children.
To be clear: it's not all e-scooter, it's the free service ones.
Parisian can still own and use their own, but they're done with the ones being left on the ground randomly, being used in poor fashion (on the sidewalk, or with two/three people standing on one), being thrown in the river, ... And that's mostly caused by free services ones that you don't own and thus don't care if anything happens to it.
I don't live in Paris anymore but I fully agree with that decision. Especially since this is a city that is working its way into reclaiming the outdoor space for bicycle and pedestrians, you can imagine how poorly received are e-scooter abusing the sidewalk and making people unsafe.
I don't live in Paris but we have them in our small city in the US and they are a nuisance.
We're only a rather small < 60k population city with a ~200k population metro area, but we have a university and these scooters are everywhere. They're left on sidewalks, in parks, in the road. College kids fly by you going far faster than is appropriate. Life altering injuries from crashes have been reported.
There are numerous problems and it's not just the scooters, obviously, and I know I'm a curmudgeon. But I find these companies to be abusing the commons. The scooters are left everywhere because these companies have no parking or maintenance infrastructure and actively rely on users leaving them on sidewalks.
I'm glad scooters are not banned outright, every non-car person on the road is a bonus IMHO because it makes people care more about the road safety and air quality.
I don't know why governments in so many cities decide that scooter "litter" is acceptable in the slightest.
I don't blame startups for trying to get away with using everyone else's public and private property as their cost cutting "free storage" solution but come on now, no way in heck that can be done in society.
Nothing wrong with making them have official racks and bays around town, people can walk a block after they park.
> I don't blame startups for trying to get away with using everyone else's public and private property as their cost cutting "free storage" solution
Don't you? I do. Just because something is technically legal doesn't mean it's good behaviour, and we can absolutely blame people for exhibiting bad behaviour.
Lived in a small city which had mixed use of cars, bikes and shoes for many years. Never saw an accident of any kind. Generally mature and sedate drivers and bikers, but a culture that widely enjoyed adventure sports etc.
E-scooters introduced. In one year I saw three accidents where someone was hurt to the point they require attention, and multiple close misses - one of which would have been extremely serious but for a split-second stroke of luck.
All involving e-scooters.
My observation is the combination of silent operation, effortless acceleration, and the impulsive enabling of randomly deciding you need to go faster right now both at rental and on the scooter, is a hot mess.
I'd frequently have people whizz past me at high speed, inches away, and have no idea they were coming. Had I happened to move slightly, say to avoid an obstacle or bend around to reach for my bag, we'd both have been screwed.
While this can happen with a bike, it's much less often - as the effort and room required to pedal doesn't lend well to instantaneous impulse, nor the "sneak through a tight gap" temptation, it's all simply louder and slower.
I'm sure different demographics and cultures experience scooters differently, and maybe some safely, but where I was, and I can presume in Paris (given how they drive...) it was not a good mix, at all.
> While this can happen with a bike, it's much less often - as the effort and room required to pedal doesn't lend well to instantaneous impulse, nor the "sneak through a tight gap" temptation, it's all simply louder and slower.
That's interesting. The scooters I've tried here in Paris (Lime) were extremely anemic. They also only have token brakes which, apart from skidding, don't really do anything.
Therefore, my reasoning was that since they take forever to pick up speed, and can't reliably slow down, people will tend to take chances and slalom around "obstacles".
The local bike sharing schemes have electric models that accelerate much harder than the scooters do, and as far as I'm aware, they don't have the level of traffic issues scooters do.
This is quite important. While e-scooters are very eco-friendly, in hands of large rending companies they usually have extremely limited lifespan and are not fullfulling this place.
I'd go a step beyond and claim that e-bike sharing services like Lime are extremely detrimental to an urban space while adding nothing to mobility and sustainability. They are mainly gimmicks used to litter urban spaces whose only purpose is to serve as a kind of coin-operated joyrides. These operators come in and dump truckloads of things onto the public space, scatter them around, and pretend that this is ok.
This ban has nothing to do with e-whatever, environment, mobility, or even economy. It's getting rid of an abusive practice that was a net loss for everyone involved.
Funnily enough we have the exact opposite in the UK. Private scooters banned, rental scooters laying all over the pavement.
I lean towards private scooters as more preferable because they don't clutter the public space. However, because they aren't regulated, some people have extremely fast models. Not uncommon to see someone doing 30mph+.
Anecdata, but the vast majority of people I see using using escooters in Australian cities are kids and drunk people.
It’s not hard to see either: they’re bright orange or purple, and are usually seen on a Saturday or Sunday morning dumped thoughtlessly in disabled ramps, in a gutter, or some other place that a drunk might find convenient.
Private ownership would clear this up. (not legal in NSW).
If you paid 600$ for one I don't expect you'd leave it in a gutter.
I'm almost 50 and I'd love to legally write an electric skateboard. I'd use it in most places. Now I just take the car, because it's the only way I can travel at speed with my dog.
Readit News
For some reason, we've come to accept the dominant position of cars and the absolute entitlement (and douchebaggery!) that comes with it. But we seem to be unwilling to accept the same from bikes or scooters.
I'm happy to accept the scooter menace if it means fewer cars on the road. And given how much of a nightmare traffic is in Paris, I'm surprised that Parisians don't seem to agree. But then I guess thes ones who voted against this probably feel entitled to their preferred mode of transport over all others ... ?
Pedestrians and Bikes are a poor mix.
Bikes and Cars are a poor mix.
but scooters and bikes seem to mix quite well.
Malmo, Sweden; where I live, has excellent cycling infrastructure and the scooter "problem" is really miniscule. There are still issues, people parking in stupid ways or taking scooters into pedestrian areas, but overall there are significantly more dangerous drivers who hit the accelerator as hard as they can to reach the next red-light so that they can make the most noise possible.
I have also noticed that there are a contingent of people who despise anyone having anything nice, and will throw the scooters into the canals, spray their QR codes, intentionally destroy the stands (which means they can't be parked reasonably) and, worse in my opinion, moving the scooters away from where they are safely parked and placing them across the sidewalk, which makes the previous rider look like an arse.
The scooter companies try to combat this, but their combating sometimes has the inverse affect[0]. One thing has always been true though: you have to take a photo when you park so that your parking can be validated.
[0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/enforcement-can-have-the-inverse-effec...
When the scooters first came on the scene there was a lot of gnashing of teeth, the strangest position were the vandals who would see a well parked scooter, kick it over, causing it to be across the sidewalk, and then go around complaining about the scooters being in the way. Anyway the furor has largely calmed down, who knows what exactly did it, but I suspect a large piece of it is simply people hating change and now they've come to accept it, and even use them sometimes.
The end result is that e-scooters are now accumulating in the water with a growing concern among researchers about what will happen once those batteries start to break down.
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 mobility, (b) there will be relatively few e-scooters.
Paris OTOH, is #1 city tourist destination in the world. It also happens to have a lot of car traffic. This (a) makes moving with an e-scooter convenient, (b) makes deploying a huge number of e-scooters for-rent a very lucrative business, (c) the number of e-scooters is inflated to cater to the tourist clientele. Add to this that many tourists may be unfamiliar with Parisian traffic and norms, and you have a recipe for disaster.
This simply creates a very blurry line between spared spaces. It's not surprising that e-scooters simply ride on the sidewalk and are a hasard, when the motorcycles themselves also do.
The other problem is the streets are old and often have brick sections. ok if you're a car, annoying on a bike, almost unbearable with the small wheels of the scooters. Often they ride on the sidewalk with is a but less bumpy.
Not that I have a good solution for this, but we have some bikes by the local public transport org, and they have dedicated "parking stations" - if there were more of those (and the bikes wouldn't be more expensive than other rental bikes), or if they'd just nab a few car parking spaces for it.. then it would be nicer. Yes, it is very convenient to leave your scooter next to your door, but I don't think it would be outrageous to walk the last 200m.
I'm not sure if the ownership vs rental argument holds much water. Bicycles routinely litter the kerb (and every other surface imaginable), even though they are usually owned rather than rented. Perhaps it's because they're relatively cheap? Or maybe it's an infrastructure problem after all?
I'd imagine because they are not sharing space with cars but with pedestrians and cyclists.
And this has nothing to do with entitlement, just plainly sense of danger. Those things can go at bicycle speeds with none of the breaking or manoeuvrer capability of one.
The companies operating them were also essentially loitering, putting them wherever they wanted. At least here in Poland it was finally regulated and placed some limits on them (max speed, no zooming around on pedestrian routes etc.) but I can absolutely see why pedestrians or cyclists hated them.
> I'm happy to accept the scooter menace if it means fewer cars on the road. And given how much of a nightmare traffic is in Paris, I'm surprised that Parisians don't seem to agree. But then I guess thes ones who voted against this probably feel entitled to their preferred mode of transport over all others ... ?
It would be interesting experiment to open congested routes for 2 wheel vehicles only(let's say anything between classic scooter and bicycle), but frankly all of them is a misery to drive in proper winter so I'm kinda not surprised by people staying with their cars.
The Parisians were not asked about cars in this poll.
Parisians are less and less car owners as street parking space is being reduced and private parkings are costly.
At least here in Paris, it doesn't feel like scooters replace cars : the latter being mostly used to reach suburbs (and most of them actually originating from another suburb), while the former replaces long walks - at least journeys which would have been done by foot twenty years ago - or métro.
I think that we have different standards here. Street parking for cars is the norm now, but it isn't altogether different in principle from people leaving e-scooters "in the way" on public roads and pavements either. I accept it's a bit different as others have pointed out, but given that we generally permit street parking for cars (subject to some rules), it seems reasonable that we should also permit e-scooters to be parked and it's on society to figure out what the rules for that should be.
Here they eventually forbid it altoghether and now companies have to use dedicated space, not just random patch of ground they find
> Street parking for cars is the norm now, but it isn't altogether different in principle from people leaving e-scooters "in the way" on public roads and pavements either.
The difference is that for the most cars it's someone's personal vehicle parked near where they live, while majority of the scooters are taxi-equivalent, with personal ones just being taken home.
So in first case it's public space serving public, in second it's public space serving company's margins
The private e-scooters are not banned.
Who's "we"? I'm pretty sure this isn't universal.
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 to elderly going to vote. While the 90% percentage is indeed skewed, recent polls from before the vote showed that about 60% of the population approve of this ban. It's not as overwhelming, but still a majority.
People are fed up with rental e-scooters, but why? Not because they are littered everywhere. It's not longer the case. There are dedicated e-scooters parking spots, that are overall used properly (though they are often on the floor due to wind or being knocked down). The article talks about "tightening regulations", I'm pretty sure there are rules enforcing that.
The real reason is that anytime you see someone egregiously disregarding rules in a way that endanger others, it's more often than not a rental e-scooter, with rental e-bikes coming behind. They are perceived as dangerous, plain and simple. And it's not a lack of cycling infrastructure. While it's not up to Netherlands-level of bike-friendliness yet, it's quite good lately overall.
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, they don't even own one for the most part (or even have a driving license). 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 public transit, and less than 10% replaced trips in private cars.
The detrimental affects on public transit, the relatively high injury rates, the disregard the riders have for the blind and handicapped who have to navigate around the scooters being left in the middle of the sidewalk, and just the sense of urban blight from them being left everywhere all add up to enough reason to ban the things.
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.
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.
But did it improve travel time?
I definitely saw so many dangerous driving behaviours. I think tourists using scooters aren't treating these like useful day to day transport vehicles but as a way to have fun. For a lot of people it's their first time on a scooter. I saw people zooming through red lights into oncoming traffic. Others tried to jump the curb. It's kind of like giving a kid a toy for the first time.
Parisian too, but with reality in mind. We should first reduced by 95% the amount of cars and ban taxis :
Cars, Taxis and Motorcycle killed thousands of people in Paris due to there toxic gases. https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/transports/a-paris-la-pollut...
More than 95% of people killed on the road are due to Cars, Taxis, Trucks or Motorcycle. https://www.drieat.ile-de-france.developpement-durable.gouv....
More than 95% of serious injuries are caused by Cars, Taxis, Trucks or Motorcycle. https://www.onisr.securite-routiere.gouv.fr/sites/default/fi...
50% of the streets are congested with cars and car parking. https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2016/11/30/a-pa...
Oh I agree with that, but we can do both!
First link => that's an ongoing project with Crit'air restrictions. Link is 2 years old, Crit'Air 4 have been banned since then (though enforcement is low). And newer cars emit a lot less of pollution.
Second link => that's Ile-de-France and not Paris. That's why I was careful to specify Paris. Ile-de-France as whole is a lot more sprawling, so there is less alternatives to cars. Skimming it, it seems to support your argument even for Paris though, but I have a hard time to find the exact percentage. I'd be curious what's the actual number for Paris only nowadays.
Third link => that's for France as a whole. I did not skim it.
Fourth link => that's from 2016. I'm pretty sure it has evolved a bit since then. Numerous cycle lanes have been created since then, and parking/car lanes removed. Though that's still an ongoing project. I'd be really curious about updated numbers.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
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 definitely see that being true) but it does go against everything we know statistically.
There are other points though, "last mile" is a difficult problem, it's not solved with bicycles (they are too onerous to take on public transport, and they are a huge target of theft), it's not solved with rental bicycles either (they are usually very few and far between).
Last-mile is most likely solved with personal e-scooters as they are much more acceptable to take on public transport and can be taken inside so they are a lot less steal-able. The problem with this is that personal e-scooters are significantly less regulated than the "all-seeing-eye" rental ones which impose restrictions on speed (20kph in Sweden, personal vehicles can be modified to go 30kph, legal maximum is 25kph and personal e-scooters all go this speed -- with no slow zones anywhere)
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).
"Last mile" is literally solved with two legs and some shoes. A mile is walked in 15-30 minutes, and if you can scooter you can walk. The actually mobility-challenged can be provided vehicles if necessary.
So you're saying, compared to other cities, Paris' problem is parisians? And e-scooter don't work because parisians can't be bothered to be civil?
When they first came there were a bunch of scooter on pedestrian collisions, but between an aggressive ticketing campaign, adding bike lanes, and adding slow zones, these numbers have gone way down.
(I rarely use them as I tend to cycle everywhere, I’m just glad my city has them)
If a city were to dedicate a single car lane sized lane for “micromobility” and responded quickly to damage to this lane (which wouldn’t be as frequent for the obvious reason that damage is proportional to weight, and scooters and bikes are way lighter than cars), scooters would not be a problem at all.
A city may decide it doesn’t want dockless scooters, but even that problem could be resolved by replacing 1 car parking spot on every street into a scooter/bike dock.
Most cities do not have a car lane sized lane to spare.
I see them in Cambridge where Harvard students own them and zip across the river to the athletic center.
The can go quite fast and as a biker then can be annoying when the try to go past you at 20 mph, but honestly in the bike lane is probably the best place for them
An aggressive ticketing campaign isn't very helpful in a city with a lot of tourists, because they'll just go home without having paid the ticket. Is Interpol going to seek out 30 euros?
I have proposed this before in my city, ticket the e-scoter company for improper parking not the users.
Most of these business have gps trackers on them they will quickly find a way to enforce proper parking onto users.
We need to stop externalizing problems away from companies.
I'll definitely contend they're bad for the user. Now, to your point about being drunk, it could be due to the facet that in my city they seem to be primarily used for bar hopping, but my partner works in a hospital and has seen too many horrific injuries (and deaths) of scooter riders - like way more than bicyclists or even motorcycles (which he refers to as donor-cycles).
Most stats show that they don't reduce car usage, the people using them aren't people that give up cars, but people that give up on walking or taking public transport.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-city-of-atlanta-banned-e-sc...
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.
That’s how you solved it. Paris is entirely unable to perform such a campaign, because it would “target minorities unfairly” as they say, and Paris is at something like 10x fewer policemen per population compared to the average of US cities, which puts Paris in the category of “self-managed” much more than other cities of the same size.
And, it is interesting that you chose to compare Paris with a very large population, to an "the average of US cities". Would it be more reasonable to compare to the megas in the US, like NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles? Better, it would be more reasonable to compare to large European cities: Berlin, Frankfurt am Maim, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Milan, Madrid, etc.?
[1]: https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/03/01/opinion-seattles-...
Meet a date at 10 PM on Friday night? Scoot. Catch the Saturday 5 AM tour bus to a day-hike that's meeting on the other side of town? Scoot.
They've also helped boost demand for better bike-lane infrastructure, which has gotten much better in the last 5-10 years.
I rarely use them, but I'm glad they exist.
The ferry used not to run on Sundays, and there were protests when Sunday service began. However, the airport operated flights on Sunday, so if you could afford it you could still e.g. visit family for the weekend and return to the mainland in time for work on Monday.
There are still no buses on Sunday, although there seem to be very few Monday-Saturday so that might not be entirely due to religious indoctrination.
[1] https://busofash.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2022-07-%D...
The very first day rental escooters were legal in town the company hosted demonstration had someone fall off in the town hall parking lot and require hospitalization. It was all so silly and things only went sideways from there. I saved tens of minutes over the course of a summer taking them on one route and I got two free helmets in the mail.
Leafblowers, historic districts, rental scooters... There has to be some focal point for the nervous municipal energy whether or not there's anything to focus it on. Things got deadly serious during the school reopening discussion and they never really went back to the way they were before.
Pour one out for the micromobility startups' dreams and may whatever comes next be as delightfully odd as those things were.
Could you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what Homebrew has to do with rental scooters...
Poster is implying that startups like bird and lime are dead or dying.
This is basically just "Fs in chat for rental scooters"
Parisian can still own and use their own, but they're done with the ones being left on the ground randomly, being used in poor fashion (on the sidewalk, or with two/three people standing on one), being thrown in the river, ... And that's mostly caused by free services ones that you don't own and thus don't care if anything happens to it.
I don't live in Paris anymore but I fully agree with that decision. Especially since this is a city that is working its way into reclaiming the outdoor space for bicycle and pedestrians, you can imagine how poorly received are e-scooter abusing the sidewalk and making people unsafe.
We're only a rather small < 60k population city with a ~200k population metro area, but we have a university and these scooters are everywhere. They're left on sidewalks, in parks, in the road. College kids fly by you going far faster than is appropriate. Life altering injuries from crashes have been reported.
There are numerous problems and it's not just the scooters, obviously, and I know I'm a curmudgeon. But I find these companies to be abusing the commons. The scooters are left everywhere because these companies have no parking or maintenance infrastructure and actively rely on users leaving them on sidewalks.
I don't know why governments in so many cities decide that scooter "litter" is acceptable in the slightest.
I don't blame startups for trying to get away with using everyone else's public and private property as their cost cutting "free storage" solution but come on now, no way in heck that can be done in society.
Nothing wrong with making them have official racks and bays around town, people can walk a block after they park.
Don't you? I do. Just because something is technically legal doesn't mean it's good behaviour, and we can absolutely blame people for exhibiting bad behaviour.
I agree with the decision. I am now seeing these things almost as dangerous trash in various cities.
Of course, the problem isn't the e-scooters, it thoughtless people using them.
If users can't be bothered to behave like civilized humans, not sure what options remain on the table other than a ban.
E-scooters introduced. In one year I saw three accidents where someone was hurt to the point they require attention, and multiple close misses - one of which would have been extremely serious but for a split-second stroke of luck.
All involving e-scooters.
My observation is the combination of silent operation, effortless acceleration, and the impulsive enabling of randomly deciding you need to go faster right now both at rental and on the scooter, is a hot mess.
I'd frequently have people whizz past me at high speed, inches away, and have no idea they were coming. Had I happened to move slightly, say to avoid an obstacle or bend around to reach for my bag, we'd both have been screwed.
While this can happen with a bike, it's much less often - as the effort and room required to pedal doesn't lend well to instantaneous impulse, nor the "sneak through a tight gap" temptation, it's all simply louder and slower.
I'm sure different demographics and cultures experience scooters differently, and maybe some safely, but where I was, and I can presume in Paris (given how they drive...) it was not a good mix, at all.
That's interesting. The scooters I've tried here in Paris (Lime) were extremely anemic. They also only have token brakes which, apart from skidding, don't really do anything.
Therefore, my reasoning was that since they take forever to pick up speed, and can't reliably slow down, people will tend to take chances and slalom around "obstacles".
The local bike sharing schemes have electric models that accelerate much harder than the scooters do, and as far as I'm aware, they don't have the level of traffic issues scooters do.
The vote was on renewing or not the contracts of free floating solutions like Tier, Lime, etc
I'd go a step beyond and claim that e-bike sharing services like Lime are extremely detrimental to an urban space while adding nothing to mobility and sustainability. They are mainly gimmicks used to litter urban spaces whose only purpose is to serve as a kind of coin-operated joyrides. These operators come in and dump truckloads of things onto the public space, scatter them around, and pretend that this is ok.
This ban has nothing to do with e-whatever, environment, mobility, or even economy. It's getting rid of an abusive practice that was a net loss for everyone involved.
Are they, though?
I lean towards private scooters as more preferable because they don't clutter the public space. However, because they aren't regulated, some people have extremely fast models. Not uncommon to see someone doing 30mph+.
What's the rationale behind this nonsense?
I wish privates were legal and rentals were gone.
It’s not hard to see either: they’re bright orange or purple, and are usually seen on a Saturday or Sunday morning dumped thoughtlessly in disabled ramps, in a gutter, or some other place that a drunk might find convenient.
If you paid 600$ for one I don't expect you'd leave it in a gutter.
I'm almost 50 and I'd love to legally write an electric skateboard. I'd use it in most places. Now I just take the car, because it's the only way I can travel at speed with my dog.