Paris will become the first European capital to ban rented electric scooters on Friday, as the city hall vowed to “calm down” the streets.
Five years after Paris became the first city in Europe to open up to the “free-floating” shared e-scooter market in 2018, the last of the city’s 15,000 e-scooters were loaded into vans on Thursday afternoon, marking the end of an era.
The five-year rental e-scooter experiment in Paris, where scooters could be left anywhere and picked up by mobile app, saw very high usage – often by under-35s and students — but had been fraught with controversy.
For years, politicians had warned of safety concerns, stress to pedestrians and city streets being clogged up by parked scooters toppled into heaps, as well as questions over how much of a positive impact the scooters actually had on the environment.
In 2020, after complaints of anarchic use of e-scooters and Paris becoming a dangerous “jungle”, the city introduced the strictest regulations in the world, limiting the number of operators and automatically tracking and limiting speeds. But that wasn’t enough to calm the row.
In April, the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, called a referendum on the scooters, with almost 90% of people voting to ban them. It was celebrated as a win for direct democracy by the city hall, even though turnout was just 7.5%.
Riders of rented e-scooters would typically use them for relatively short distances and it is unclear what other form of transport they will now turn to. City hall believes Paris’s ample public transport and expanded network of bike lanes will be sufficient. Many e-scooter users are expected to simply walk instead, or turn to buses or metros, or buy their own scooters. Analysts are watching to see if the take-up increases for electric rental bikes operated by the same companies who ran the scooters – Tier, Dott and Lime – as well as Paris’s Vélib bike-rental scheme. The biggest rise in recent years has been in private bike use in Paris.
David Belliard, the Green deputy mayor in charge of transport and public spaces, said: “We know that it’s possible to live in a big city without an electric scooter rental scheme … This is about our larger work to simplify, calm down and de-clutter the public space in Paris.”
The scooters themselves will be redistributed around other cities. Most Tier machines are returning to Germany or Warsaw, while Lime is shipping them to Lille, London, Copenhagen and German cities. Dott is to send some as far away as Tel Aviv.
