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.
> We had a problem with pedicab drivers dumping the scooters into the bay because of the competition they posed to their business.
> 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.
I wonder why cities prefer to go against the tech companies rather than the criminals vandalizing public property.
Anyways here in SF it's unlikely the DA would actually prosecute criminals.
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.
Sure, but I think people throwing loose things into the canal is perhaps unrelated to the points raised in TFA, by the parent or even by me.
If you want to talk about this topic in particular: a similar situation happened where people kept throwing outdoor chairs into the canal from Biraria (a restaurant located near the canal in Malmo)[0], the municipality made them pay for it and it sent them out of business (those trawlers are expensive).
Tugg, the place that leases the space now; has insurance for this.
Insurance would work if the e-scooter companies paid for it. You can't however use a trawler as that would be counter-productive if the concern is ecological damage, so it would need to be commercial divers which is quite expensive when dealing with low visibility canals. The insurance premium would likely be quite high. The companies can naturally try go after the criminals in order to recover the costs.
The two issues are however related. Commercial operations need to pay external costs imposed on the city from commercial activity, be that parking issues or water pollution. If companies refuse to do so it will be up to the citizen to decide if they want those costs be paid through taxes, or issue regulations that may force those companies to go out of business. Either way someone will have to pay for cleanup. Right now no one is doing that in Malmö and other Swedish cities, which is not sustainable.
> 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.
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 looks like the locals have zero respect for traffic rules. Therefore I'm not surprised that new modes of transport come with a lot of problems.
I'm not sure what this has to do with e-scooters in Paris though.
Disregarding red pedestrian traffic lights is the norm in France, they are seen as indicative: green means you can pass regardless of traffic as you have absolute priority, red means you must pay attention to cars but you are still allowed to cross and the law supports that. "Jaywalking" doesn't exist in France and pedestrians can basically cross wherever and whenever they want (it's a bit more complicated than that, but not by much).
Cars do have priority when traffic lights are red for pedestrians but they would still be held responsible for any accident.
Thus, it seems to me that your impression stems from ignorance of French traffic law and norms, as the parent said. Visiting a foreign country and thinking all rules are the same as they are at home is always a recipe for disappointment.
Like, now that I live in Belgium I know that red for cars means that one or two cars will probably still go through the intersection and I shouldn't cross (as a pedestrian or a driver) without paying attention. That's not the case in France and I could think that Belgians (or at least the Flemish, don't know about the rest) "have a total disregard for traffic rules" but that's not true, it's just one difference that you have to be aware of.
The rest of the sentence was "it's a bit more complicated than that, but not by much".
The law also says that pedestrians can be fined all of 4 euros for crossing at red and they have no responsibility in the case of an accident, which means in practice there are no consequences for crossing at red. As long as you check that you aren't going to be run over by a car, which people do. They cross at red if there are no cars.
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)
Not just an American thing, try jaywalking in Germany, they consider it so offensive that even some mothers will shield their children’s eyes to prevent them seeing you do it. You must be British, thinking you speak for the world ;)
> This is how normal people use lights in the rest of the world.
You're generalizing too much and making exact same mistake you're complaining about. Also jaywalking and going on the red light are not the same.
Here in Poland:
* you would get a ticket if police sees you crossing a pedestrian crossing on red light
* you would also get one if there is pedestrian crossing near you(100m) and you don't use it while crossing
* no crossing nearby ? You can pass unless it is something like a highway. You don't get priority in this case.
Not OP but I'm Bulgarian and find it insane how people in France and the UK cross with complete disregard for traffic lights. Afaik it's the same across former socialist countries (at least the ones I've been to). I may cross on a red light sometimes when there are absolutely no vehicles around but red means stop in all situations and when in doubt, for safety, you should assume the person with the heavier vehicle has right of way.
> So to me, it looks like the locals have zero respect for traffic rules. Therefore I'm not surprised that new modes of transport come with a lot of problems.
I imagine they know their city quite well, and suspect many of those traffic lights hinder rather than help pedestrians. Tourists on scooters, on the other hand, don't know the city as well as them, won't know its unwritten rules, and are quite likely to mess up traffic (like you did while waiting for a light to turn green).
The problem though, if taken to extremes would be to ban any form of car-rental (tourists are unfamiliar with the streets) and bike rental for similar reasons.
I would add though, that it's possible to gate these things and the scooter companies seem willing to do it; in the US for example I couldn't use an e-scooter because the app wouldn't accept my European driving license. (and you must have a driving license to use them in California)
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?
Maybe it depends what you see as "littering" - when I'm talking the city center here, without bike racks, people 99% line them up against the walls of the houses, or lock them on to streets signs, which are usually ~30cm from the curb next to the cars. I honestly can't remember when an actual non-rental, personal bike was in my way, so does not seem to be problem here, at all. If you define "they're all standing there", well, ok :P
I guess that depends on where you live, which takes us back to this being an infrastructure problem after all. Where I live, if you're lucky, the kerb is 1m wide, and half of that width is often occupied by bikes (or scooters). Making things difficult for pedestrians, and impossible for wheelchair users.
> 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 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...
I don't see why this distinction matters. In both cases, it's for the direct benefit of some individual, at a direct cost to others - especially those who do not benefit from and have no interest in subsidizing that particular mode of transport. In both cases, some companies profit from that (whether it's car sales and leases or e-scooter hire fees).
The difference is taxes going into stuff the locals use vs some corporation gets for free. If they want to use public space to run their business they should pay.
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.
You clearly haven't explored the modern world then. Or may have visited 3-5 cities and think you have seen it all. Some non-US metro areas where I found public transport to be inadequate based on my travels in the last 3-4 months - Toronto, Vancouver, Bangalore, Mumbai.
I've been to over 20 countries, many of which I'd consider modern world. I would have been to > 80 cities.
I spent months in both Vancouver and Torono without a car, and both have perfectly workable public transport systems, with Toronto's being a bit better. Both are better than every US city I've been to, and scooters replace neither.
India is a third world country with a pretty low standard of living. I haven't been to Bangalore or Mumbai, but I can't imagine them being relevant to this discussion.
> both have perfectly workable public transport systems
Only if you confine yourself to downtowns. Which is why I said metro areas.
> India is a third world country
It is a third world country with lots of modern parts. If you don't think Mumbai or Bangalore or modern cities, that just means you have a very different definition of what modern means.
You seems to have missed the context of this comment chain. We were discussing cities. I have no idea what a "metro" or "downtown" is.
> 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.
I also never said modern cities, I said "the modern world", of which India would generally not be considered part of. I may have defined that poorly though, my bad.
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.
I mean, it's not, because if the options are too time consuming too uncertain and/or too inconvenient people will move further away and buy a car (then expect that everywhere they go to have open roads and 12sqm of open space wherever they decide to stop).
To break down what you're suggesting, imagine 20-25 minutes walk to the train station, 10 minutes waiting for the train (you want to be early if it's an infrequent train!), 30 minutes on a train, 20-25 minutes walk on the other side.
For what looks like a quick walk and a "comfortable" 30 minute train journey you're suddenly realising that a lot of your day has gone. Somewhere in the region of 1hr20m - 1.5hrs~ has gone to your "30 minute" commute, and that's twice a day.
You could reduce both walks, and instead: bike or scooter (which are roughly three times faster on average) that journey collapses from 1h20m (in the best case) to under an hour for the worst case... (6-8.5 mins or so for each last-mile instead of 20-25)
And I mean, do this twice a day?... For a month?
That's 16 hours saved.
Last mile is not solved by ignoring it and telling people they have legs, that logic is what boomers use to tell us we're all living wrong for having a lifestyle that isn't revolving around servitude and living to work..
What you describe is not your typical trip inside Paris. That would better describe a suburb to Paris trip, for which 1h to 2h is indeed normal.
A typical Paris trip is 2 minutes walk to a station (at most 5 min if you are slow), then 30 to 45 minutes subway, then 2 more minutes walk to your destination. There are subway station roughly 2 minutes from anywhere in Paris, and you can go from anywhere to anywhere else in about 30 to 45 minutes. During rush hour, subways are every 2/3 minutes on most lines. The highest time you have to wait is 10 minutes during "dead" hours when going somewhere there is a fork.
It will take about the same time by bike or scooter. But if you choose to take a car? At least the same time, and it can easily be double or triple the time depending on traffic. Then you have to park, which is expensive.
Note that for suburbs to Paris trips, very few people take scooters, because then you have to carry it in the suburb train. Most people will either take a bus to the train station, or take their car and park at the train station (not drive to Paris, that would take double the time).
Now again, I'm only describing what I know about Paris and its suburbs. It's a very different situation in other places (since I'm pretty sure the scenario you're describing is one you lived)
to be perfectly fair, I haven't spent a lot of time in Paris, but I have lived in London and I feel like what I said doesnt apply so strongly to London, or at least the centre of london- it is still common to live over 10 minutes from a station in London- but commuter trains are frequent in the north.
When I have been to Paris it has been how I described, but to he fair Ubisoft studios could be located in hard to reach places for cost reasons.
When travelling to the hotel it was a 35 minute walk because google maps said it would be faster to walk, and travelling to the Eiffel tower (actually, it was to a dock near the eiffel tower but I forgot the name) it took 20 minutes to get to the metro station and 5-6 minutes to get to the dock.
So at least for trips like those its difficult to say they couldn't be served better.
It is really hard to get a "feel" for a city as a tourist, because almost by definition you're going to be in the "central/old" area or traveling to the central area from a cheap hotel on the outskirts somewhere, and those are optimized for tourist activity.
I also found walking in Rome and Paris to be as fast as transit, but I'm not going to even begin to pretend the vast majority of "average" Romans or Parisians live within the 'old city'.
It also helps that almost by definition the 'old cities' in Europe are very old and quite compact. Once you start trying to get to the "central business district" instead of the "city center" it gets more American-esque, but still doable.
The problem down that argument, is if we go by time alone, the car wins almost every time (there are a few cities with certain commutes that are faster by transit, but not many, even WITH traffic jams).
almost no journeys inside the city of malmo are faster with a car if you include parking too, nearly all are faster with a bicycle — and its not even close most of the time
> 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.
It sounds like the parent comment is talking about expanding & improving bike lanes, rather than forcing electric scooters into car lanes (where they are at risk), undersized bike lanes (where they endanger bicyclists), or banning them outright (where you’re now stuck with more demand for car traffic).
There's an answer to this, an answer which I see implemented in some places: cutting into the car lanes. Because you don't have to drive through the historical center.
In the cities, where nobody really lives in the historical center, it is doable. (We are not talking about driving through; we are talking about access/servicing; there are very few cities without a ring -- or several rings -- where driving through center is the fastest way from one end to another).
In the cities, where real people live there, it is not. Every part of the city needs servicing, including center. Your plumber won't lug his tools on a scooter; your furniture won't teleport itself into your house either. Every now and then, the residents themselves need to bring in or out their heavier or larger crap, so issuing permits to entry to well-connected companies is not a solution.
Yes, I do live in city center; and yes, we also have people who know nothing about living there, but they go to pub there every Saturday night, so they have strong ideas how it should be. It is not limiting them, after all.
It's never this black and white, also not needed. Usually city centers are closed _for outsiders_, while allowing the residents and local business traffic. This already curbs the traffic a lot and reduces also a lot the need for a second car lane - or such.
Edit: just for clarity: this model is already working (plumbers, movers and locals included).
You don't need space to have everyone's plumber visit at the same time using an 18-wheeler either. Just converting a few streets into one-way already frees up plenty of space.
In 90% of inner city streets you could just block through traffic for cars and reduce traffic to almost zero, without inconveniencing people living there.
So delivery vans and service vans get a permit to drive downtown. Possibly the same for residents (could go either way here, based on housing density and alternative transport options). But personal vehicles of non-residents are banned.
Car lanes are the least efficient use of road space in terms of number of passengers carried, but a lot of the wider roads in Paris only contain car lanes.
In a given area (say a full city block, including all roads and alleys within and bordering that block), you might want...
- Pedestrian lane
- Bike+scooter lane (any transport that's ~20mph and <500lbs loaded). That may or may not include gas scooters (50cc Vespa type).
- Auto lane
- parking lane (could be a mix of bike/car parking)
- possibly a transit lane (bus, light rail, etc)
And you don't need every one of these on every block/street - you can alternate. Or use one-way auto lanes on alternating streets to make room for the other modes of transport.
We can always reduce the amount of lanes for cars, even from 1 to 0 in very old european cities. Cars were once a novelty too, and all street lanes were engulfed by motorised modes of transportation.
If you look at many historic city centres in the Netherlands the solution is to changeover a fraction of those narrow streets into single way streets + cycle path. There is now enough evidence that more lanes does not improve traffic it is just met with more cars to match the increased capacity.
In my city it would be trivial in most roads, you would just have to remove parking on one side. Unfortunately the needs of 10 car owners living in the street are more important than the needs of everyone else...
Then ban or severely limit cars there. You can turn a 2-way street into one way one and turn the other lane into bike/e-mobility one. If not that make it 30km/h zone, allow bikes and allow other mobility devices to take the middle of the lane. Banning cars from some streets is great solution as well.
Wonderfully put, but I take objection to saying "severly limit cars" what you are actually doing is increasing the throughput so that cars can actually get anywhere. Leaving it at status quo limits cars severly by making congestion worse.
Cars are an incredibly inefficient way of transportation. You can easily fit 10x as many bikes in the same space as a car lane. By building a viable biking / scooter infrastructure you reduce the amount of cars on the road, which more than makes up for the space required by this infrastructure.
Besides, car-heavy tend to be designed quite badly. Planners have a tendency to design for the worst-case scenario, so you end up with communities which legally require a 40-foot wide street in a quiet residential area. You simply don't need that much space!
Ahahahaha. In a twisted way, you are right. Such is the entitlement and the decades of car dependency that daring to remove even a single lane (driving lane or parking) from the almighty Car traffic, be it for a bus lane or a tramway or a bike lane, sparks incredibly virulent backlash.
That depends on how many lanes they devote to cars. Most of the main roads near me have at least 2 lanes in each direction - sometimes the inner one is devoted to parking, sometimes to cars, sometimes just to busses and bikes.
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.
I’ve seen Lime have the inverse (ie non parking zones) in various US cities where you will be warned then billed (I think $50! in Venice beach) if you finish the ride.
Heck, you could probably create parking zones (with signs/paint/etc) and most people would use them. Part of the problem now is users don't know where to put the scooters.
You'd think common sense would dictate not across sidewalks, but humans prove time and again that common sense isn't very common.
I know that in Oslo they can fine the scooter companies for people parking them improperly, but you still have to have officials out looking for them and actually issuing the fines. The result here is that tourist areas have fewer problems, but they're left littering the sidewalks in residential areas.
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).
Fining within the EU is not a solved problem. In 2019, millions of international fines went uncollected because the infrastructure still was buggy. So, legally it is a solved problem, but practical enforcement is not (yet).
Border control does not (currently) detect fines and prevent people from leaving to non-EU locations.
> 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.
That's about the most aggressively entitled take I've come across to date. Rental e-scooters are bullshit convenience and entertainment devices. What's your plan for hauling groceries for a family of 3, taking kids to the doctor, or hitting the car line twice a day for pickup/dropoff? Uber? Tf they gonna show up in, a rickshaw?
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.
Sharing a helmet comes with its own set of hygene issues. I believe most of the EU cycling helmet laws are okay because they make it optional and the rider decides to wear one or not. If we'd adopt similar rules for e-scooters, limiting their speed to 25 km/h (like e-bikes) and their weight to 20 kg or so, it would be possible to ride them on bike lanes. That and designated parking spots for rental, just as the Budapest city council did. Rental e-scooters that are not parked in those spots are picked up and treated like lost objects. I'm quite sure that the rental companies have to pay a fine to recover them or have their license suspended otherwise (= banned from operating the service).
Also, e-scooters are banned from riding on sidewalks just about everywhere. That doesn't necessarily mean the rule is enforced or that collisions with pedestrians don't happen. I've almost been hit while riding a bike by an e-scooter operated by an underage child (in violation of the terms of service) that darted from an alley without right of way.
But I generally agree that it's a regulation issue and outright banning rental scooters is rather extreme. Paris did it with public consultation, so the city coulcil has their backs covered.
> So it seems to be just a regulation/enforcement problem
But it is less costly for the cities to remove the problem (ban e-scooter) that to hire people to chase bad e-scooter behavior. Especially if many users of those e-scooter are tourists who will bring back home a bad souvenir of their trip if they get fined.
> But it is less costly for the cities to remove the problem
It does not remove the problem but would simply transfer it elsewhere. In result, either people become significantly less mobile, or they get more used to cars, creating huge traffic jams and polluting cities with noise and fumes.
With scooter, one can get to any point of the city in 15 minutes max and basically for free compared to taxi. It has a huge value for the city economy, and worth the regulators' time.
> tourists who will bring back home a bad souvenir of their trip if they get fined
If you are caught for the first time, you'll just get a warning. So not an issue for a tourist.
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.
I just want to make it clear that you're talking about a very very specific thing, which has nothing to do with the daily existence of most non-Jewish-religious Israelis. I mention this cause you make it sound like this is something more than it is.
The vast majority of the Israeli population drives their car on Saturday.
Fair. I did mention that it was only in the Haredi neighborhoods, but you're right that that is not a majority activity. Public transport does shut down though, even for citizens who wouldn't otherwise care and even in areas of the country without an (ultra-)orthodox majority.
Oh yes, absolutely, that's a pretty awful state of affairs that causes a lot of issues (e.g. people who otherwise could've done without a car, are basically forced to have one if they want to get anywhere on the weekend.)
Even at random stranger cars (which I expect to be the case, you don't throw stones on cars of people you actually know, not under normal circumstances)? Ie I am a tourist and driving around and I like some older parts of town.
What is it with people generally that make them feel above others, forcing their viewpoints on everybody else as the only truth? People should generally travel far and exotic more, it changes folks for the better rather than their own micro echo chambers
What is it with people who have an absolute definition of truth, people who think truth is something that has been revealed/given to them rather something to be found by questioning the world, people who think the world outside of their community is at best misguided if not evil, what is it with them that make them so intolerant ?
The people throwing the stones could easily afford to travel outside their own neighborhood in Jerusalem, Tiberias or Tzefat though, they just choose not to because there are non-Jews there.
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 religious indoctrination is that people (including bus drivers or ferry operators) should have a rest day with their family (everybody has the same rest day). Whether it is really religious or just good sense is left to your appreciation.
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.
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 forbidden.
> 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.
> 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.
It has nothing to do with “God”. It is a show of allegiance to the tribe. Everyone knows the rule and loophole is nonsense, but they play along to display that they are still wanting the tribal affiliation even though they do not want to follow all the tribal rules, and so put in some effort to getting around them to earn their “freedom” while still being able to claim allegiance to the other tribe members.
A lot of the answers to “why” for things that are obviously simple inconveniences with no utility to the individual or expenses that seemingly benefit no one are a form of sacrifice to show loyalty to a group. In fact, the more sacrificial something is, the better the signaling. In this case, giving up some money offsets not actually sacrificing the freedom to do what you want.
> 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.
The reasoning goes like this:
- God is perfect and omniscient.
- The Jewish laws come pretty much directly from God.
- Therefore the law is perfect as written, because to assume that a mortal could ever find an error in the laws of a perfect God would be an act of the purest hubris.
- Therefore there are no unintentional loopholes, because God is perfect. Any "loopholes" were put in there on purpose by God, as Easter eggs or as rewards for those who studied diligently enough to notice them.
- Therefore any "loopholes" which stand the test of time (and with that the thorough inspection of other experts of Jewish law) are to be celebrated. They were surely found by a person with great knowledge of the Holy Book, which is to be admired.
So yes, in the Jewish perspective God would indeed go something "you got me on a technicality, well done!" when judgement day comes. I'm not sure if I agree, but I do admire the internal consistency of the belief. It does seem pretty heretical to presume you know better than the actual Bible after all, and surely an omnipotent and omniscient God is capable of writing down exactly what He means.
Not everyone in Israel is Jewish, and not all those of the Jewish ethnic group practice the religious beliefs. There are plenty of people in Israel who enjoy a good bacon sandwich for example, and there are plenty who drive their cars around on shabat. However the religious parties managed to capture the government for decades and have forbidden the national bus and trains companies to drive around Jews and non-Jews alike on Saturdays.
I'm not sure what you mean by "forbidden". It's not illegal. Is it forbidden by Jewish law? Yes. But this only applies to whoever decides to keep it. Most of the Israeli population doesn't keep Shabbat, so they have no problem driving their car around.
(Similarly Jews and Muslims may decide to keep Kosher while living in the States, that's a personal choice.)
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.
Here in Romania, THE CARS litter the urban spaces. There are cars parked everywhere: on the sidewalks, on the side of the road in parallel with those on the sidewalks, in bus stops, on all the green spaces, on no-access markings of the roads, etc.
I wish people would use more e-scooters & e-bikes. 8-10 rental e-scooters fit in the same sidewalk space a car would occupy and a car can't be moved if the owner isn't there.
> Here in Romania, THE CARS litter the urban spaces.
Cars are indeed a cancer on all urban spaces, and one which has been granted too much privileges for decades.
The Netherlands' Jokinen Plan[1] is widely used as the epitome of idiocy that we get by designing cities around cars.
But the fact is that services provided by multinationals like Lime do nothing to address this issue. People do not drop their cars for ebikes just because a multinational dropped one on the sidewalk.
Also, it's a red herring to portray services provided by multinationals like Lime as synonyms for replacing cars with alternatives. They do nothing of the sort, and it misrepresents the problem. Companies like Lime scatter crap around cities with impunity and expect the public to just suck it up. Any small business owner who did a fraction of the abusive practices of occupying the public space would be fined into bankruptcy.
> People do not drop their cars for ebikes just because a multinational dropped one on the sidewalk.
I own a car. About 2 years ago I bought a an escooter and since then I almost never used the car, even in winter (with snow and below 0°C cold).
I was hoping that car users would at least try a rental ebike/escooter, see how easy it is to ride anywhere, park anywhere, and then buy and start using their own.
It didn't happen. It seems there is some very important reason they prefer cars, despite how much it costs and how difficult it is to find a parking spot. I really don't know what that reason is. Someone please enlighten me!
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+.
The official reason is insurance, and ensuring a small trial area.
Basically, in UK law, the scooters count as motor vehicles, and therefore must have a licence, which they can't for other reasons. So, they're illegal to ride on the pavement because they're motorised, and they're illegal to ride on the road because they're uninsured and unlicensed. There are a few trial areas where companies are providing insured scooters for hire under a recognised scheme, which is what makes them legal.
This is the same reason why electric bicycles in the UK must only apply power to assist you as you pedal - they must detect when you pedal, and act as power-assisted pedalling. It's illegal to have an electric bike that gives power when you're not pedalling, because that would count as an unlicensed uninsured motor vehicle.
It's a quirk of the way that classes of vehicle are defined in UK law, and I'd rather they just sorted it out.
> So, they're illegal to ride on the pavement because they're motorised, and they're illegal to ride on the road because they're uninsured and unlicensed.
It sounds like these issues are artificial legal constructs caused by the law lagging behind where technology js, and it would be trivial to fix them.
For instance, I'm sure insurance companies would be eager to offer escooter insurance.
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.
Seems like a very British solution to me (being a nation that cares little for liberty); if the police have had enough being constantly called to deal with another 10 being stolen today I'm not surprised they'd only permit company vehicles.
After all, there's no economic value to be gained in stealing them and the insurance premiums for destruction (including simply throwing them into the Thames) is distributed across the customer base. If there are thieves stealing them for parts they'll be easier to detect (since it's not plausibly deniable to claim a company scooter is yours).
Combine that with the fact that it'd be trivial to disable all transport in the case of civil unrest, and you seem to have a winning policy for Londoners.
That they have always been banned is an accident of the way a very old law on vehicles was written.
Making an exception to that law for rentals in limited areas was seen as more controlled than allowing everything, although looking at other cities allowing only non-rental usage first might be more sensible.
In the context of UK law, e-scooters are motorised vehicles which make them illegal to use on the sidewalk. However, they don't come close to meeting the legal requirements for use on the road (no turn signals, for example) making it illegal to use there. Personal e-scooters aren't technically banned (they are available to buy), but there is no where on public property where you can legally ride them (not that it stops people). Therefore, the only way an e-scooter can be used legally is if a special provision has been made for a trial with rental scooters in select locations (Oxford being the one that I am familiar with).
From personal experience even police don’t care. Just don’t do anything too dangerous,I guess. In a way it’s better to operate in a legal gray zone because you don’t need to worry about things like licenses and insurance and fines etc.
Except the streets are still littered with them. While cycling to work a while ago, i came across one parked in the middle of a segregated bike lane, in between a fence and a lane of heavy traffic. If this is the authority maximising control, i dread to think what uncontrolled use looks like.
The rental escooters in London are terrible. You need a driving licence to use them, unlike rental ebikes. Yet they are slower than an ebike or even a regular bike. They are also really expensive. Then add to that the fact that'll they all have geofencing which (i) forces you off the less occupied bike lanes or roads in many cases (eg in/near the Royal Parks - including roads which are open to cars) and (ii) doesn't work properly so that if you're just near to a "slow" area but not on it then you end up having to push them.
This is all entirely down to government enforced regulations - honestly I'm not sure why the companies bothered putting them in at all as they must have pretty well zero repeat custom.
Meanwhile there are plenty of non rental escooters on the bike lanes which seem to work pretty well for people, despite being technically illegal.
I'm pretty sure the taxi-cab lobby groups in London are heavily influencing these stupid decisions that make e-scooters a less viable option for getting around.
I don't have much to explain why they're banned from parks which allow you to drive a range rover through them.
On the other hand, I enjoyed using them last year while in London for work. Could get to our office quicker than using public transport, it was more pleasant than stuck in hot boxes moving around and only slightly more expensive (at least in my case).
If sidewalks could be wider it wouldn't be as much of a concern. Narrow sidewalks are to accommodate car parking more often than not. I would rather see less of that in a city centre.
That you know these bikes and scooters blocking pavements is a social ill but you do not care because it is convenient for a fraction of a percent of commuters
Ah I see, thank you. I think they are a blight as well, but less of a blight than car dominance in city centres. If you can barely fit a pram past a scooter on your footpath, see the bigger picture, your footpath is tool small. You have given all your space to non-mixed road traffic or parking.
I've worked in London for near on 20 years. The people using these are not using them as an alternative to a car. If you look about in Z1 the congestion comes from poor road management and an uptick in commercial traffic.
But sure, as a plumber to come to your house on his bike. See how that goes.
The footpaths have been rougly the same around where i live for 4/500 years.
I haven't spoken about commuting at all. My core point is that car centric city centres sacrificed their space for people to cars, and that blaming scooters for the lack of space was missing the forest for the trees. The fact that you can't fit a pram past a scooter is the same reason businesses can't do alfresco dining, mothers on bicycles have to ride amongst cars, peds have to wait at crossings, walking anywhere is unpleasant and your children can't ride their bikes to school, etc etc. I am not going to pretend it hasn't happened and shift blame to everything but cars just because it's the current status quo.
Before cars your 400 year old road was mixed use, and your plumber certainly didn't turn up in a box van. When cars turned up, everything got pushed onto the sidewalk to make way for cars. It wasn't so long ago, there is no shortage of film of how cities used to be before cars.
Had a motorcycle accident. Completely pulverized. ICU for a week. Got out and was driven everywhere for a while, but when I walked these were not a substantial burden.
Note that this only applies to e-scooters operators: their licence won't be renewed. Privately owned e-scooters are still legal and allowed.
The irony is there has been a lot of efforts from the mayor and operators to regulate the e-scooters: licensing to a limited group of operators (3 afaik, instead of virtually every operator under the sun deploying scooters), designated parking spots, better communication of rules to the users, automatic speed limits in walking areas.
As a parisian that mostly walks and uses public transportation, most of my gripes with those services have been addressed by the aforementioned measures, but I guess that the early deployment chaos pissed off enough people to have them voted out.
103000 votes out of 1.38MM voters. Less than 7% of registered voters even bothered.
So we can say 6% were firmly against. <1% were supportive of e-scooters. 93% didn't care either way but were more than likely against.
I am pro micromobility but some of these companies business models is a complete disservice to public order. It's a real tragedy of the commons. The companies that could implement scooter pens would lose marketshare to the ones that don't since a scooter on any corner is more convenient than a scooter stored more than a block away.
> The companies that could implement scooter pens would lose marketshare to the ones that don't since a scooter on any corner is more convenient than a scooter stored more than a block away.
Make it a condition for operating in the city, just like being capped to 20 or 25kmh is an obligation.
Take a car parking space every x00m and make it a e-scooter parking space. That would solve a lot of the nuisance
My city did exactly that. They created scooter pens from public parking. Cars and delivery trucks would park in them regardless. The scooter parking signs and stickers disappeared. And scooter riders just parked in and around those occupied spaces.
Apparently some of the nearby businesses were upset "their" public parking was taken way. So they intentionally damaged scooter pens or parked in them. Rumored.
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 locations.
Same thing goes for (e-)bike rentals.
Paris also has a non-private bike rental service (Velib'), which uses fixed stations. You can still park the bike temporarily anywhere (eg: pop into a shop), but you have to return it to a station.
The market supremacists might pile on in the replies, but having a well-subsidised, self-service public transport system with fixed stations is much neater in a tight city than a free-for-all model.
My market-supremacist response: I wish that instead of banning them they just fixed the negative externalities: a system where anyone can report a poorly parked scooter to the city govt and the owner of the scooter receives a significant fine.
That way the market will soon be forced to find a solution to parking enforcement, or stop renting out scooters. In the former case we keep the benefits of scooters. In the latter case, we learn that they aren't actually economically viable
(Admittedly the focus in Paris seems to be more on bad driving than bad parking, which seems even easier to fix: just reduce the max speed and/or tie usage to a driver's license...)
I'll raise you on the report and propose that scooters should report themselves when badly parked. Unless incentivised, nobody would report bad parking, or it could be abused and whatnot.
Most of them already have a GPS system for fleet tracking (takes care of where it's parked), and an accelerometer would easily detect those laying on their side (plus fall detection for added marketing benefit).
With lime I think you have to take a picture when parking to show it’s parked safely.
If you fine companies for abandoning outside designated areas, what’s to stop random yobs (or competitors) moving the legally parked vehicle to a bad place then reporting it?
Government stepping in with regulations and fines is of course not "market-supremacist" :-) Or: I think you and GP actually agree that we can't "just" leave it up to the market 100% and that we also need someone to look out for the public interest (which usually means the government).
You cannot park the scooter anywhere outside of the dedicated scooter parking lots, and it is enforced by your phone's GPS. Lime (at least) is pretty strict about it. I once had to make a trip around the block to get my location "unstuck" because it located me 5m off the parking. And they even check the parkings are not overcrowded: if there are too many scooters in one, they'll prevent you from stopping the rental and tell to go find some other parking spot.
Really, it's been at least a year, maybe two, I haven't seen a lime or something else parked willy-nilly on the sidewalk or the pavement.
So yeah, in Paris, the end result is not much different from vélib, except you don't have the problem of "the thee stations around are empty and the fourth has only broken bikes".
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.
Interestingly, I use a car sharing service which has fixed stations (cars have designated parking spaces where they're picked from, and you leave your car where you found it), and I find myself multimodalling (walk or cycle) to their EV stations (they also have petrol cars).
They also have a free-for-all offering where you can pick and park anywhere within the city limits, but I've never had a use for it - I only rent a car when hauling large enough things that wouldn't fit in a bus/tramway.
They have such great utility value that I think they're worth keeping, but should be regulated more. Things like parking should be controlled, and a crackdown on misuse of the scooters. But they can be incredibly handy.
> 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 they get 12 yo from?
It was a great way to get around the city, especially in the dedicated lanes along the Seine. Not sure how it is more dangerous than biking? But, people who actually live in that city apparently hate it, so here we are.
This seems to be a scooter-tour-type thing. If you walk around the city, most of what you see is Lime, Tier and Dott, the ones the article talks about.
So those 12 years old are "entitled" to mobility how, and why would they be entitled to driving such a vehicle from a private company, for which you need to understand the concept of insurance and personal damage responsibility, at an age that wouldn't allow them to drive basically anything else than their personal bike?
Excellent vote from the people of Paris! It's too easy to take these things on the sidewalk, go 20mph and disregard the people around you. Those things also weight quite a bit, so getting hit with that may be life altering.
I've heard there are some crazy people who try to drive vehicles weighing a tonne or more in the city at as much as 40mph, and they often find their way onto the pavements too. Perhaps Paris will treat that menace with the priority it deserves.
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.
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.
No disagreement here. I personally think cars should be (mostly) removed from cities. It's incredible how much you can get done on a bike on a proper bike path + the rest 10% of cases could be handled by public transit.
I work in Paris but live in the suburbs (I wasn't asked to vote).
I use neither scooter nor bikes (I walk and use public transport).
My anecdotal experience is that those scooters (as in "trotinette" in French, not what we call "scooter" in French) where a plague, drivers are completely careless and dangerous and despite the law, they where always parked in the middle of the street at annoying places. I have no such griefs against bikes, even if they are much more numerous (I have other complaints again those, like the fact they don't respect traffic lights, but it's far from being so annoying).
The overwhelming support of Parisians to remove them is not a surprise (they would get a huge backlash if they wanted to do the same with bikes, which kind of prove the fact that they cannot be put in the same boat).
Also there is the ecology argument which Parisians are typically somewhat concerned with (those crap scooter were fragile - so they had a short life expectancy despite having a large impact to build because of the battery and electronic - and the operators had no infrastructure to charge them cleanly - which means that overall they were probably much more ecologically harmful that even cars)
Yet I see people riding bikes on sidewalks, usually on busy roads without bike lanes. Doubt the police bother ticketing them anymore than they do people riding scooters on sidewalks or without helmets. At least where I’m from.
In the U.K. out of london the vast majority of vehicles on sidewalks are cars. They are explicitly banned from driving on them except to enter adjacent property, yet nothing is ever done, and dozens are killed every year by those drivers.
There's scooters and scooters. It's a bit of a misnomer but there are electric scooters that are like a Vespa scooter ('Absolute beginners') and there are electric scooters that are the ones that your kid would ride when they're 5 or so (plank with two wheels, you stand on the plank and 'scoot' with your other leg). The e-scooter of the latter variety is what is of concern here, ~20kg + rider moving at ~20kph (sometimes faster).
The former is definitely banned from sidewalks (though they are often parked there), the other is used on sidewalks quite frequently, in spite of that not being legal. They have shitty small wheels and are pretty dangerous for both rider and pedestrians.
if 20km/h is a problem, why can't they just mandate a lower limit city-wide. Shared e-scooters are already heavily limited and regulated, physically can't go faster than 10km/h in large chunks of the city center already. Unlike cars or regular bicycles, shared e-scooters can be physically limited to any desired speed with one flip of a central switch. A total ban seems like looking for a scapegoat.
> So prohibit bikes then? I think government is more concerned about scooters competing with paid for transportation and hence reduction of revenue
If you read the article you'll see this is based on a decision by the city's residents, 90% of whom voted against keeping them around.
The article seems to refer to two main things: "reckless and drunken driving, as well as clutter on pavements".
In my Australian city (I think we were the first to legalise them) they are wildly popular but I can attest to both of these things being a huge problem. I literally just walked to grab a snack and on the way back I stepped onto the road and was nearly wiped out by a scooter coming out of nowhere - illegally riding on the road.
I have a collection of photos on my phone of scooters being left randomly around the streets, including across the footpath and even on the road in some cases.
There is an entire class of people who use these that are just completely selfish fuckwits and do not stop to consider everyone else when they abandon them wherever they finish.
I am 100% pro electric scooter. They need to have infrastructure like cars, for parking and storage and riding. My state has just announced pretty harsh laws for riders that violate them but they are not being enforced enough yet.
Except bikes have a much larger turn radius and are much more bulky than a scooter. You can zip between people with a scooter no problem, but it is tricky to do with a bike. As someone who ditched a car for a bike, I had several almost-accidents with these things and it was always down to reckless driving and trying to pull stunts on these things.
I don’t agree with it, but I understand why people ride these on the sidewalk rather than the roads. A pothole under a 700c road bike wheel will be a jarring annoyance. A pothole under a scooter wheel will knock you off into the path of an oncoming cement truck.
The weight of the devices seems immaterial when the human riding it is 50kg to 100kg. You’re getting tackled by at least 50% of a linebacker but with 0% of the body armor.
I think it wouldn't matter what surface the road was though, people don't ride the scooters on the road because cars are scary and a scooter feels like Pedestrian+, very exposed. Same feeling cyclists eventually overcome to ride on roads.
All those things apply to bikes too. It really seems like societies ability to innovate has died completely with the rise of sedentary elderly populations (contrasted with mobile young ones) blocking all change.
Speed for example does not apply. I did not seen bikes going 20mph on sidewalk with people. Ever. Bikes can go that fast, but they lack agility and acceleration so they dont do it in different places - not on side walk.
Also, it is simply not true that only elderly dislikes these services.
During the transport strike in December 2019, these e-scooters were a life saver. I rode those all over Paris (would never do the same in NYC, even though I used to bike the city) and it was great and perfectly safe. [I never used the sidewalk.] That thing even almost made it up the hill to Montmarte.
On the other hand, my cousin was struck by an irresponsible scooter (who was zipping on the sidewalk) when walking by the Seine, and had to have surgery on her foot. She absolutely hated those things and likely is more representative of how Parisians feel about them than my tourist self.
Three main reason e-scooters and even bicycles take to the sidewalks, is that they are totally unsafe sharing the road with the cars, and that there's a lack of bicycle lanes.
Once again, the absolute worst offender when it comes to safety inside towns - the car - gets spared from any responsibilities.
When I was in Paris in 2019 I tried to use their e-scooters and it was nearly impossible because angry locals had sharpie-d over every barcode so you couldn’t scan them. I’m surprised the companies haven’t left already.
Huh, that would be pretty effective I imagine, and sounds like a classic French approach to the problem, low effort, high impact.
But wouldn't the rental companies just switch to NFC-scanning? I know most of the bikes in Sweden technically have it, even though I don't think many actually use it because our QR codes aren't being defaced and it's just easier.
Blame your government for not creating adequate bike lanes or curbing car usage, instead of people just trying to get around. Nobody wants to be in each others way, it's just that most of the time cyclists have nowhere else to go.
E-scooter (my own) rider from Prague: the cycling infrastructure here ranges from okay to pretty-nice-actually, and it's slowly getting better, so that's good, but there's a LOT of drunk tourists using the rental e-scooters in the [medieval, cramped] center.
nah, it ranges from non-existent (for most of the city roads/streets) to okay, most of the roads dont have bike lane at all since all available place where they could be is taken by parking spots
also there is no point for (e)scooters in Prague considering trams, buses and subway operating everywhere for less than a 0.5USD per day for unlimited travel, which is why pretty much no locals use them, they are also pretty much impossible to use in extended city center with cobble stones
It's a shame they are being banned in many places, because they are such a great idea. It's the equivalent to a taxi, but a small fraction of the price. It's such a great utility to be able to pick one up and go directly to your destination. All the advantages of having a bike, but without most of the downsides.
People just needed to be somewhat polite and disciplined - too many ride fast on sidewalks, leave them in bad places, etc.
As often happens, something nice is ruined by a small fraction of people.
as someone who lives in a city with (imho) one of the best public transport systems, i still like to use scooters for travels where public transport either can't provide an easy way to get to the destination and/or the wait times are longer than the travel itself. usually, i just use my bike, but there are still situations where an e-scooter is just an insanely practical choice.
People are the reason we can't have nice things.
Or maybe is is the free floating idea.
I remember in Brisbane and Helsinki there were fixed stations to borrow and return bikes to/from. But it seems this tiny limitation of convenience (can't drop it wherever) breaks the concept.
Free floating is a mess. Living in China the bikes were everywhere. Masses piled outside every metro stop. In Taiwan/Taipei the system has bike docks at every metro and many other places as well. There's an app that tells you how many bikes are at each location and how many spots are left to park in. Getting a bike uses the same card as the bus, metro and train. Really easy and convenient and more orderly.
Not sure how well it would work in some places due to vandalism and such.
Some places have fixed stations downtown, and free floating outside the city core. I find that compromise works pretty well, you get to drive all the way home and park outside your house where there is room, but you don't have thousands of them all over the place downtown.
I'm more comparing own vs rent. Rental e-bikes are great as well, 90% as good as the scooters. Disadvantages of keeping your own:
1) Need to take it with you on the train/bus/car
2) Need to lock it to something secure when you leave it (especially e-bikes/scooters which are expensive)
3) Need to pick it up from the same place you left it last time.
4) Need to buy it (€1000+) and maintain it, and charge it
5) Need to store it somewhere secure when not in use
6) The parking scales really poorly: if 10 people can use a hire-bike in a day, but 1 person can use a private one, this would mean the private bikes would take 10x the amount of parking per user.
You can't take a bike easily into: a car, the subway, your flat, a shop, ...
It could also be the same reasoning as a car regarding the space: a bike for 1 person takes more space than an e-scooter for 1 person.
The real problem is not the device: it's the users. People using bikes also do stupid things, but not that often. Bikes can be very fast too, with electric assist they can go faster than cars in the city, but most "problems" seen today are with the scooters. This is a sad situation, but it's some users' fault, not the operators', not the city's, ...
One way to deal with this would be to have a license to drive a scooter or bike, so that kids (and adults) are taught some basic rules and have to follow them. But I guess this is politically hard to implement, it's easier to ban.
> You can't take a bike easily into: a car, the subway, your flat, a shop, ...
Those places are getting more restrictive though. Some shops don't allow you to park anything inside the shop because it takes up space, some subways are banning e-scooters citing safety issues regarding not having equipment ready for dealing with large battery fires and so on.
Besides, there are foldable bikes that can take up as much space as a foldable e-scooter.
Firstly you need somewhere to keep the bike, inside is great but outside space can work, though you are at risk of having it stolen.
The main advantage is having it where you need it - maybe you got the metro or the bus to work and now you want to go on somewhere else. Your bike is at home. Then you want to head to a friends house, but there is nowhere safe to leave your bike but you'd be happy to leave the rental scooter outside, then two other friends want to join you on a trip to a pub, this time you have your bike but they don't, so you cycle alone and they get a cab.
I love cycling, but scooters (rental and private) def have some advantages
No you are right and I agree many of the benefits overlap - but I know far more people in London that have tried the scooters compared to people that have tried the various hire bikes, plus know more regular scooter hirer'ers than regular bike hires. But that is just my anecdote - sure it could be wrong
You're comparing owned bike vs rented e-scooter. Try comparing rented bike with rented e-scooter or owned bike with owned e-scooter and you'll see that there isn't such a stark difference.
Not sure why you call me close minded, I never mentioned any of those "alternatives" you mention. I walk to most places I go to, as I currently live in a walkable metropolitan city in Europe.
> What exactly are the downsides of owning a bike that you don't have owning a e-scooter?
You said OWNING a bike. Now you suddenly seem to talk about rented bikes.
The argument around "rented vehicle being left anywhere" can be made for bikes. If you only argue for bikes that can be left at a station, then it's definitely worse than e-scooters. If the bike can be locked like e-scooters, without the need of an exciting station, then people will end up complaining just as much and ban them with the same reasoning.
> Not sure why you call me close minded, I never mentioned any of those "alternatives" you mention. I walk to most places I go to, as I currently live in a walkable metropolitan city in Europe.
Lol. How much and how long do you actually walk? I live in a metropolitan city in europe too (and have lived in multiple ones and travelled to many) and it can be called walkable, using the ridiculous US standards.
I love hiking and will walk long distances or, when I actually have a bike, bike longer but it's not practical in your day to day, to walk more than 2k, if you're pressed for time.
Also, if you're leaving a place in one end of the city at 2 am, when public transport options thin out, you're not going to walk 20/30km.
It's very easy to live in a well connected place and move very little and claim "I walk everywhere". It's also very selfish and lacks empathy with other realities.
But hey, it's an uphill battle to discuss things that affect real people in HN where it's all about "I'm sorted" and "The narrative says this is correct".
Rental 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 dollars just for a 2 minute scoot!) is too expensive. The rules about not taking them out of the area and locking them properly or risking a fine are all too scary.
I think these scooters would do far better if they were entirely free and appless for the first 5 minutes use. If you want to go further, scan the QR code and watch an ad and get 5 more minutes. Pay money, and get more time yet.
One of the scooter companies was doing a pass that basically gave you 60 minutes of time you had to use in 24 hours for like 11 dollars US. It was great as you could easily just hop on and off as you stopped in multiple places all day. Fixed price you basically knew how much it was going to cost. They seem to change what they're passes do a lot though.
> Friction is what prevents people using these things
No, in this case it's the outright city ban that prevents people from using them.
> The scooter companies should
Lime and dozens of others have been around for about 6 years by now, they are doing just fine* and they can probably figure out the promos if they manage not to get banned?
it's going to be even less if they get blanket-bans from cities, so what is your point? that they should give away 5 minutes of their time for free as a promo illegaly, against the new blanket ban law in Paris and become wildly successful that way?
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 streets with traffic, is limited to people with death wishes.
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.
Yes, I don't think I've ever seen somebody wearing a helmet while riding a lime scooter. I don't think there are any laws to require helmets for scooters in my city, and helmets aren't provided with the rentals, so anybody wearing a helmet while riding one is certainly a rare exception. And I've already seen a man crack his skull this way riding a lime scooter. Sad, but not surprising. It probably happens a lot. It almost makes me think we need "attractive nuisance" laws to protect young dumb adults.
I fell off one at 10km.h in my city going through a slow zone when it suddenly accelerated. I fell face first and broke my wrist. These things are lethal and it could have been a lot worse. Lesson learnt and I won’t go near one again - even with a helmet.
With 7.45% turnout, it's more of an elderly's bad joke.
Elderly and wealthy people who have been brainwashed by television and want to continue using their murderous and polluting cars and taxis.
Other people are more concerns by ecological problems and the rise in the pension age.
I live in Berlin and my main mode of transportation is the bike, since before e-scooters were a thing. Bikes are very popular here and I do not actually know a lot of people who live in the city and own a car.
E-scooter made life objectively harder for cyclists. They are abandoned in the middle of bike lanes and create danger, or in the spots were you could park your bike safely. They make every walking street worse, you are always bumping against them. And they seem to be mostly used by a young, well-off, highly entitled / inconsiderate demographic.
They do nothing to improve life in the city. They are a toy that makes life worse for almost everyone. I can't wait for them to be banned here also.
Which is pretty low for a capital of a prosperous western country (order by that column and you will see). Maybe I do actually know enough people to make a statistic.
Would I like it to be even lower? Sure.
> Please first reduce by 95% the amount of car, taxi and motorcycle and then we'll talk about scooter.
We are taking steps to reduce cars here. Let us do that AND TALK ABOUT SCOOTERS. The citizens decide what is important to them. Thanks.
> With 7.45% turnout, it's more of an elderly's bad joke. Elderly and wealthy people who have been brainwashed by television and want to continue using their murderous and polluting cars and taxis.
I don't know about Paris, but the from other cities I've seen it's probably the general poor behaviour of rental scooter hirers that's the problem. Ignoring any dangerous riding the scooters are just so poorly parked - cluttering sidewalks, falling into roads etc. I'm an occasional e-scooter hirer when a tourist and sometimes after a night out in my home town, but I'm 50/50 if they should be banned in my city.
Rental companies should take more of an effort to penalise users that park and drive poorly if they want to continue operating.
I'd vote for e scooters if most people didn't behave like toddlers
Not a day goes by without me having to remove 1-3 e scooters from my building sidewalk, which isn't even a public street, otherwise eldrely people or people with strollers can't pass through anymore
There is a growing ecological problem with e-scooters ending up under water, especially in city rivers. If the ride sharing companies was liable for this and had to pay commercial divers to pick them up, the result would be identical to a ban of rental e-scooters.
We used to have a similar problem with people dumping cars, but those are now very traceable and owners will get heavily fined if they leave a car in the water.
In Paris each years 90 persons are not "nearly mown down" by rental escooters but killed by cars, taxis and motorcycle. Plus thousands of people killed by toxic gases from cars, taxis and motorbikes.
This poses a false dichotomy where you're either riding a car, or littering the streets with rental e-scooters. In practice, this isn't the case. It's fairly well documented e-scooters aren't replacing car rides, but pedestrian traffic.
Air pollution is responsible for more than 5,000 deaths each year in Paris according to a study published on Wednesday. Published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal, it calculated premature deaths linked to PM2.5 fine particle pollution and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in 1,000 European cities. The French capital appears to be one of the cities where automobile pollution kills the most.
As to the sibling: air pollution != "toxic gases from cars, taxis and motorbikes". Your linked article says "road traffic, industry, airports, ports, but also wood and coal heating".
Furthermore, the lancet paper only estimates, they didn't measure anything. The linked article presents an hypothesis as if it was proved. It was not.
Air polution != "toxic gases from cars, taxis and motorbikes". That's only subset. Cities were dirty holes (including bad air) centuries before invention of cars.
Continuing, they didn't measure anything. They estimated.
I agree, I don't know where other people live or if they go out at all in a major city, but scooters ride dangerously fast on sidewalks, in parks, even on the road alongside cars.
I completely understand it's due to the lack of alternative riding infrastructure (ideally they would ride on bicycle lanes, but not everywhere is like The Netherlands), but you wouldn't ride a bike on a sidewalk, and riding on the road is very dangerous on these scooters.
So yeah they're either a menace to pedestriands because they don't drive safely on pedestrian areas, or they're a menace to cars because they're very unstable on the roads and put themselves in danger, least of all because most people who ride them don't really know road legislation.
Where there is proper infrastructure this works relatively okay. Where there is no infrastructure scooters take the pedastrian way as roads are dangerous.
Copenhagen banned rental scooters from the city centre.
For some reason, people were finishing their ride and leaving the scooter in the bike lane, across the sidewalk, across a pedestrian crossing etc.
The rental companies were intentionally blocking the sidewalk in the city centre, arranging the scooters in neat lines overnight. Presumably for visibility/advertising.
All this happens to a much lesser extent with the SV-style ebike rental companies, though it's still not unusual to see those parked badly.
It happens rarely with the manual bike rental company. I think they make you photograph the parked bike when you finish, so they are almost always in a bike rack.
For Isabelle Vanbrabant, any regulations are too late. The pianist at Paris’s famed opera was coming home from work last month and walking across a square near Les Halles when a rider on an electric scooter came up from behind, knocking her over and continuing on his way.
She fell on her right arm, suffering multiple fractures. She yelled for the rider to return, which he then did, and to call for help. However, her prognosis is uncertain.
I don't doubt that there are plenty of examples of people being hit by scooters, and there's definitely even more examples of people being hit by cars.
But I mean whenever people are giving their anecdotal evidence as to why they don't want scooters it's always because they were "almost" hit, I'd never read a comment from someone who was actually hit and almost is very subjective.
When considering something like this we should really be looking at the data, rather than yelling about people who were almost hit
I've certainly almost been hit by scooters on the pavement, annoying but not scary since I'm reasonably fit, a hit probably wouldn't cause me that much of an injury (with luck). But if you're old and fragile, that's a broken hip and 6-9 months immobile when you've not much time left, that could reasonably scare the crap out of you and make you scared to go outside. "Almost hit" has consequences too.
Great, lets now move to ban them from other EU capitals.
Its an issue in Berlin, so many youths ride these scooters recklessly on footpaths, hurting pedestrians or worse.
'E-scooters have safety risks, let's encourage people back into 2-ton fossil-fuel-burning cars instead!'
If we want a future of EVs, we need to figure out how to include personal light EVs, not just very expensive full-size-car replacements for the wealthy.
> 'E-scooters have safety risks, let's encourage people back into 2-ton fossil-fuel-burning cars instead!'
You somehow believe that the only options on the table for personal transport is either "2-ton fossil-fuel-burning cars" or the miraculous selfless service sold by a couple of multinationals.
It must be hard to intentionally ignore all the public transportation services in all shapes and forms, like railway, bus services, metro, trams, ride share, and even municipal bike sharing services,
and also ignore other personal transportation modes such as motorcycles, bikes and personal scooters
and also ignore e-car sharing services
and also ignore ride share services like taxicabs and etrikes.
For you, the only choice is either a gas-guzzler or the glorious service provided by a multinational.
Most scooter-haters don't differentiate between personally owned scooters and rental scooters, and personally-owned scooters (likely to be better maintained, more sensibly driven, and not abandoned in the street) will get caught up in the bans.
Companies like Lime are criticised for their abusive and antisocial business practices of dumping crap on the public space without any concern, criteria or care, and pretend everyone around them to just suck up the externalities to validate their business model.
No one cares if you ride your whatever on roads or bike lanes. People care when you dump your crap all over the place and get them in the way of everything. You'd hear the exact same complains if instead of escooters you dumped washing machines.
The 'Bicycles are fine but e-scooters are awful' argument comes up a lot, but doesn't make much sense. E-bikes are often ignored or just effectively invisible.
(I'll agree that rental scooter services have unique problems, but we shouldn't allow personally-owned scooters to be banned along with them)
The big question on whether e-scooters are great or awful really depends on what they're replacing. Bikes? Then they're awful. But cars? Then they're fantastic. But which is it?
In Amsterdam, my impression is that fat-tired e-bikes have become the standard replacement for mopeds, which I think is an improvement.
Nothing compared to what a world of full-size EVs will produce when they start piling up on scrapheaps in more significant numbers. (Ideally we need recycling solutions for both)
But moving people around on 20kg electric scooters has got to be a lot more efficient than doing it in 2000kg electric cars.
I've lived in a couple of large cities where scooters and bikes shared the same space. I see little to no advantage over bikes, and scooters are way more dangerous.
The main advantage imo is you can bring them on trains and in elevators much easier than bikes. And for the rental ones, you don't have to worry about bringing anything or having to secure it on the other end.
The fact is, I see countless people using electric scooters every day, I can’t think of a single instance seeing a folding bike in person, despite them existing for a whole lot longer.
When were you there last? I hear the city has almost completely transformed itself when it comes to bicycle infrastructure in the last two to three years.
In in Paris right now and unfortunately it's still pretty bad. I'm sure there's certain arrondissements that have good access, but it's not the whole city, and riding on the road is so dangerous I only ever see delivery drivers do it.
Can't wait to get back to Tokyo, where even moms feel safe riding on main roads.
I beg to differ. I've been biking in Paris regularly for the past 10 years. It has always been a great experience. And it is getting better year after year.
This. The last 10 years have seen so many improvements:
- Around the Seine, Rivoli, or left-bank, 3 streets went from almost-highway to cycling friendly shared road.
- Many 2 lanes streets got reduced to 1-lane + 1 protected bicycle lane.
- many large "roundabouts" offer a safer path.
The right bank clearly lags behind the left bank, but it's getting better every year.
European cities are clamping down on shared scooters quite a bit, but in different ways. Vienna for instance is now asking for a lot more geo fencing, if there is a specific drop-off location within 100 meters a ride cannot be ended unless it's parked on such a drop-off location. Companies are also forced to report scooter locations in real-time to the city government for monitoring and enforce speed restrictions based on map data.
I'm super curious if this will end the availability of the scooters as the cost of this is probably quite a bit higher now.
Something vaguely similar happened in Berlin: They banned parking rental 50cc scooters on the pavement, they have to be parked on the street, competing for parking with cars.
To me this is a terrible rule, completely out of touch. Scooters improve the city as they are electric, small, and less dangerous to others. I have a car and in the summer I often pay a few euros to rent those electric 50cc scooters because they are really nice. However, one of the major benefits is that you can park anywhere.
There is a designated strip on the pedestrian walkway where it used to be allowed to park them, currently its only allowed for bicycles. There is more than enough room there and as its on the side it bothers no one. So banning them from there is not necessary.
The real problem we have is not even about these specific 50cc scooters but about the smaller ones that are mentioned here. Which have not been affected by this ban. The real problem is that some bad people, maybe its the tourists, literally park them in the very middle of the walkway, blocking people and being terribly annoying. And for this, the solution would be harsh punishments. Eg. when someone parks their scooter this way they have to pay a massive fine or get banned or whatever. Maybe users could report them and get a bounty.
So, while there is a real problem, the politicians, where I live, made this terrible decision. And when I came home, exhausted from work, there was actually parking right in front of my doorstep, but it was blocked by two rental scooters.
The 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.
These are rental e-scooters. It's not like a scooter shared between friends with no profit motive involved.
> because cities don't provide good alternatives
Strong counter-point. In my city there is a decent amount of bike parking. Yet I've often seen scooters not parked at a nearby bike parking area, even though there's space.
I got very angry with a guy last summer who left his rental e-scooter in the middle of the park pathway next to me, when available bike parking was about 30 feet away. Anyone with a stroller or walker would have had to go on the grass to get around it.
And e-scooter parking seems to take up more width than bicycles. I've seen people park their (non-shared/non-rental) bikes at the edge of the sidewalk, either against a building wall, or against a sign.
They often leave a lot of space between the rental e-scooter and the wall, because people get off a scooter with feet on both sides of the scooter, and because it's too bulky to scooch over to the side, thus blocking more of the sidewalk.
Certainly cars take of an undue amount of space. But that doesn't mean you can assert that cities like Paris only have car parking as the alternative, when they also have bike parking, and have been active in switching away from cars.
Yes, I get sad when I read most comments here. The way people have been indoctrinated with car-culture is just astounding. E scooters are like a drop in the ocean compared to the damage caused by cars: the space they occupy, the pollution they cause (mostly noise pollution). Cars have killed city-life and people are blind to it.
The difference is e scooters kill the pavement, the last refuge for people who aren't driving. Even if it's illegal to ride there, people do because they don't feel safe riding a slow e scooter on the road.
I think the main issue is use private companies of common shared space. Its not certain that a private companies has the right to use public communal spaces.
Secondary issue physics.
A person riding an electric scooter is a danger to other pedestrians especially vulnerable are children and eldery.
Kinectic energy calculation
KE = 0.5 × m × v²
Let's calculate the kinetic energy for each speed:
5 km/h (1.39 m/s):
KE = 0.5 × 70 kg × (1.39 m/s)² ≈ 67.5 J (joules)
10 km/h (2.78 m/s):
KE = 0.5 × 70 kg × (2.78 m/s)² ≈ 270 J
20 km/h (5.56 m/s):
KE = 0.5 × 70 kg × (5.56 m/s)² ≈ 1080 J
Chat gpt explaining the above impact energy
"67 joules:
This amount of energy is roughly equivalent to the energy required to lift a 6.8 kg (15 lbs) weight one meter off the ground. Imagine dropping a 6.8 kg object from a height of 1 meter; the impact would be relatively small and generally tolerable.
270 joules:
This energy is comparable to lifting a 27.5 kg (about 60 lbs) weight one meter off the ground. Picture dropping a 27.5 kg object from a height of 1 meter; the impact would be more significant and might cause some discomfort or minor injury.
1000 joules:
This amount of energy is similar to lifting a 102 kg (about 225 lbs) weight one meter off the ground. Imagine dropping a 102 kg object from a height of 1 meter; the impact would be substantial and has a higher risk of causing pain or injury"
Third issue is blocking of pedastrian spaces, this is a danger to visually impared. A form of littering.
I hope this becomes EU-wide. Every season it seems like there's a new generation that discovers and abuses them to no end, endangering everybody around.
Maybe there's other ways of improving the service without outright banning it. I would be surprised if there has not been a lot of innovations that caused a lot of accidents and endangered a lot of people that have been properly regulated and improved without just saying "this is a menace, let's ban it!". I personaly have enjoyed riding around on scooters along many cities in Europe including my own and would support improvements if stats really show they are very dangerous (couldn't find very supportive data for that at least in my city), but I still believe it would be very shortsighted if the solution is just "ban them" because some people don't like this change.
As someone who regularly uses them I would be very sad if they were banned. It is a very convienient mode of transport and can often cut journey times in half for me compared to public transport. I also ride a bike but I don't always have it with me, or want to lock up my bike somewhere overnight and risk having it stolen.
I think it would be unfair to punish responsable users because of a few bad apples. Half of the people leaving them in the sidewalk aren't even the users themselves, but frustrated vigilantes who see them as a symbol of capitalism gone wrong and who want to vandalise them.
Maybe some actual enforcement of cycling rules is needed, but outright banning is draconian and unnecesarry.
Nah, I live in Barcelona where it's very hot and humid and there are a lot of hills.
This makes bikes not really usable in much of the city due to the hills and the alternatives to e-scooters are petrol scooters or motorbikes which cause much more noise and pollution.
We were not meant to go more than 3 mph and live in tiny 300 person communities. The sooner we ban ALL these dangerous non-walking forms of transportation (and stop the insanity that is mobility scooters being able to go over 5mph!) the better.
I like that they exist, but I think there are way too many companies competing.
I would rather see the EU:
1. require that they cooperate on one app to use to rent them, and require that all scooters in any EU city work with that app
2. require the use of helmets
3. require designated parking areas (this could maybe be a city by city choice I guess)
I fully expect that if such rules were enforced, many of the companies would likely just choose to move their operation elsewhere. I'm fine with this, dumping scooters on the streets because there are no laws saying they can't is a vile approach to business.
I think those ideas are great for increasing usage, safety and public orderly. Although I would disagree that this should be something dealt at the EU level.
It would definitely be great for all EU cities to work within the same framework and allow me to use a single app between cities, but I do not think EU should be meddling with such regulations. In my opinion, this should be left for each country (even each city/municipality) to decide.
Citizens of countries and even the cities themselves - as most cities do not have e-scooters - should be able to have a say on how to run their respective territories without the EU imposing regulations left and right.
Cars have a dedicated space. Most cities don't have a dedicated bicycle infrastructure, or at least not enough and not well connected, so scooters are forced to share pedestrian paths. And, again, people treat them like somebody-else's property and misbehave, for which there are no consequences.
Yea, but we're used to that danger. In fact, we're trained to deal with that danger from being a few years old. E-scooters are a new danger that while far less dangerous is far more annoying because we're not used to it.
Cars take up more physical space, require public infrastructure that takes up significant taxpayer funding, tie up policing resources that take taxpayer funding, pollute noxious gas and sound that actively damage my health, contribute to global warming, and they are a lethal risk to others not just an "ouch you broke my leg by hitting into me" risk. There is no comparison.
I visited Paris last year and had a very cute midnight scooter ride with my girlfriend down the Seine. It was like out of a movie. But the ride costed like $17 each, it would have been cheaper to just get an Uber directly back to our hotel. And I no doubt caused some french drivers/pedestrians some grief because I had no idea where I was going most of the time. So frankly I get it.
But this makes me ask the question: who uses these? Looking at my own behavior I never touch them in the city I live in. They would be far too expensive to rely on for commuting or predictable use. And I'm not usually traveling alone in my own city, so the economics of splitting an Uber are way better. Plus I have my own bike here for shorter distances. Very limited use cases. Is the entire industry sustained on the usage of tourists riding for the sheer novelty of it in a new place? If that's the case it makes sense why they get such a bad reputation.
> But this makes me ask the question: who uses these? Looking at my own behavior I never touch them in the city I live in. They would be far too expensive to rely on for commuting or predictable use.
Shared e-bike/e-scooter are the most convenient solution to the last mile (there's very little alternative, actually).
The last mile problem is very concrete, especially if it's a routine two-way trip; without e-transport, it's 30/40 minutes total for each trip (on foot or bus, the latter also being nondeterministic), versus 10 minutes of ebike/escooter (quite deterministic). It's a lot of time saved.
Time-wise, Uber sits midway between bus and e-transport (there's waiting time, depending on the location), but it's considerably more expensive - in my city, e-transport costs around 0.25$ per minute, which is convenient.
Having said that, I do support either very strict regulation or straigh-out ban of e-scooters. It seems to be a teenage thing (adults hardly use them), and it's typically used very recklessly. Additionally, I prefer shared e-bikes anyway, because they're faster and more comfortable on poorly paved roads.
Without any form of e-transport, the only alternative is to bring one's own bike/e-scooter on public transport, which is possible in some cities (where the metro is large and not busy), but not so practical and limited to metro and tram.
In Berlin, it's mostly youth having fun, tourists being touristy, or people with enough money that they could either rent a bicycle or purchase one, but find it cool, don't want to sweat, or share public transport with others.
Same here in San Francisco, I took a Lime scooter to go home about 2 miles and the ride cost me $16, whereas the Lyft bike I took to go out cost me a flat $3.50. Not to mention the scooter ride was terribly bumpy and much slower than the bike.
YMMV - here in Munich I have experience with both e-scooters and the "leading" bicycle-sharing solution (MVG Rad). E-scooters are about 2x more expensive, but also considerably more reliable. With the bicycles I regularly have to call the support hotline because the bike won't unlock or the return doesn't work correctly, also on many bikes the gear-shift is partly broken, the saddle is adjusted wrong (not the height, which you can adjust yourself, but the angle, which can make longer rides very uncomfortable) etc. Some of these can be fixed with better maintenance or better design of the bikes, but others are due to scooters being technically simpler and easier to use (they already have a big battery that has to be charged anyway, so not unlocking because of low battery is less likely, plus they are regularly picked up, charged/serviced and then put back, which is much harder with a full-blown bicycle, they don't need a gear shift or a saddle etc.).
The vote wasn't very well known so only 8% of parisians voted.
In addition is was only open to the resident of Paris itself, all the people working in Paris but commuting from the suburbs couldn't vote.
Basically less than 200 000 people voted, for a city of 2 millions inhabitants and 7 millions if we include the commuters. And I'm not even talking about visitors.
I 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.
The simple problem with them is that too many people don't ride them on the road and instead act unpredictably on the pavement.
If people drove cars on the pavement whenever they felt like it was a shortcut it would be absolute madness.
IME, cyclists _occasionally_ detour onto the pavement in order to get around an obstruction e.g. pass some slow moving cars at a bottleneck. Almost always they cycle reasonably slowly and give a ton of space to others.
Where I am, invariably there's some sort of hood rat flying up and down the pavement at max speed the whole length of their journey not giving a toss about the people around them. I see this more often than I see people actually using the things responsibly in the road.
Some people just have, well, really bad manners, and if there's enough of them then we can't have nice things.
Something vaguely similar happened in Berlin: They banned parking rental 50cc scooters on the pavement, they have to be parked on the street, competing for parking with cars.
To me this is a terrible rule, completely out of touch. Scooters improve the city as they are electric, small, and less dangerous to others. I have a car and in the summer I often pay a few euros to rent those electric 50cc scooters because they are really nice. However, one of the major benefits is that you can park anywhere.
There is a designated strip on the pedestrian walkway where it used to be allowed to park them, currently its only allowed for bicycles. There is more than enough room there and as its on the side it bothers no one. So banning them from there is not necessary.
The real problem we have is not even about these specific 50cc scooters but about the smaller ones that are mentioned here. Which have not been affected by this ban. The real problem is that some bad people, maybe its the tourists, literally park them in the very middle of the walkway, blocking people and being terribly annoying. And for this, the solution would be harsh punishments. Eg. when someone parks their scooter this way they have to pay a massive fine or get banned or whatever. Maybe users could report them and get a bounty.
So, while there is a real problem, the politicians, where I live, made this terrible decision. And when I came home, exhausted from work, there was actually parking right in front of my doorstep, but it was blocked by two rental scooters.
These scooters are all but sustainable. They’re just a sick byproduct of VC-fueled startups that will potentially never turn a profit. To me they’re just like a meth sore of late stage urban capitalism.
I’m confident that money getting more expensive with higher interest rates will have the positive effect of clearing the field from a lot of this BS that provides absolutely no added value to urban life in most cities.
Also, here in Berlin these things are insanely expensive for what they offer. We’re talking about prices comparable to a carsharing car ride for the same stretch. If anything, carsharing is actually cheaper sometimes. (Yes, I know that’s also a problematic VC-fueled hallucination, especially here in Berlin).
I haven't seen this take in the thread yet, but I support the ban because the kick-scooter form factor is inherently more dangerous than the alternatives.
There are several ways they are more dangerous than a bicycle: Smaller wheels means a smaller obstacle brings the rider to a dead stop- once you hit something that is at the height of the axle of the wheel, it's the same as hitting a brick wall.
That's compounded by the fact that such falls use the scooter as a lever to smash the rider's face into the pavement. It's a very rare bicycle accident that throws the rider's head/face directly into the pavement- which means that bicycle helmets aren't designed to protect the face! So even the most common form of protection is much less effective for scooter riders.
The electric scooter is much closer in safety profile to the electric unicycle, but the electric unicycles feel dangerous to riders, so people give them respect. The scooter seems like a child's toy, so people overlook the danger.
I think electric personal mobility vehicles are such a missed opportunity in terms of climate / traffic reduction. Certainly in the UK the fact that they started by being basically illegal for years and means they are, for the most part, ridden by people who don't give a shit or people who's parents don't give a shit.
Well, I agree that bicycles are one of the biggest sources of competition for e-scooters. As a regular cyclist, I haven't noticed any times where I'd need an e-scooter personally.
But theoretically:
1. Something easy to fold and carry on the bus/train can make it easier to use public transport in sparsely populated areas - if you could replace a 20 minute walk to the bus stop with a 10 minute scooter ride. Folding bikes, cool though they are, tend to be on the large side, and kind of expensive.
2. For apartment-dwellers in high-crime areas, it's easier to carry a scooter inside than a bicycle.
3. E-scooters could be more accessible to old people, overweight people, and people who don't want to sweat. Of course, that's not the demographics I generally see using them so make of that what you will. And e-scooters seem to be cheaper than e-bikes.
Is this a big enough market for e-scooters to thrive? I'm not sure.
I’m not a fan of escooters, but the main advantage i see is that once folded they can easily be carried up to the office and put under a desk. And similarly they take very little space in a small flat if you don’t have a garage. Not really the case for a bike, even folding ones
People who can't ride a bike or don't want to. The ability to integrate well with public transport like trains and underground.
Also, without investing hours of research into the subject, I'm fairly sure we can agree that the ecological difference between a bike and a e-scooter are small enough not to mater.
I don’t think illegality filtered for people who don’t give a shit. I think it filtered for risk-takers. It’s risky to one’s safety to ride a personal powered vehicle on city streets. I think the median rider is less worried about safety compared to either the pedestrians or the cars.
The whole argument about "they clog the streets" and annoy me is absolutely contrary to the actual incentives to cheaper and more ecological transport.
It's a very NIMBY type of thinking.
Hey, Citizen, if you don't have the means to buy, store and charge your own and occasionally would need one to deal with the craziness and unreliability of public transport, we are going to make it harder on you.
Many countries in Europe keep punishing people who don't own cars or other vehicles while pretending they care about the environment. They do the same with bikes or e-bikes.
See also the insane cost of train tickets Vs flights.
If govs were honest about the environment they would create incentives (positive, not punitive) to foment good forms of transport with good quality of life.
Instead, it's a very classist system.
HN will probably not get this due to the demo that either owns cars in the US or is on a more privileged class in Europe and likely also owns vehicles and property.
> The whole argument about "they clog the streets" and annoy me is absolutely contrary to the actual incentives to cheaper and more ecological transport.
Bullshit. These e-scooter sharing services operate on cities already covered by all sorts of public transportation services, including municipal e-bike services.
The key difference is that municipal services address and avoid the problem of abusive occupation of public space by employing networks of pickup/dropoff spots.
> Hey, Citizen, if you don't have the means to buy, store and charge your own and occasionally would need one to deal with the craziness and unreliability of public transport, we are going to make it harder on you.
Bullshit. These escooter sharing services operate in cities where public transportation is highly subsidized and monthly fees are mostly symbolic, with some cities being even totally free.
Also, a cursory search for escooters shows that there are scooters in the market for 120kg/13km autonomy for less than 300€, and they can be charged by simply plugging them onto any regular electrical socket.
> Many countries in Europe keep punishing people who don't own cars or other vehicles while pretending they care about the environment. They do the same with bikes or e-bikes.
You have zero insight or basis on reality to support any of your personal assertions. You've managed to be entirely wrong in each and any assertion you made.
> Bullshit. These e-scooter sharing services operate on cities already covered by all sorts of public transportation services, including municipal e-bike services.
Bullshit. Specially at night.
> The key difference is that municipal services address and avoid the problem of abusive occupation of public space by employing networks of pickup/dropoff spots
Bingo! Thanks for making the point for me. You want to ban e-bikes/bikes that can be left freely like e scooters can. It's not the scooters but the parking that bothers you and though you pretend to be for bikes you aren't. NIMBY and disingenuous and I'm done with pretending you're anything but.
These stations won't feature in less affluent neighbourhoods, these stations won't be as many, these stations won't be as convenient. You're screwing the usefulness because YOU don't use it.
> Bullshit. These escooter sharing services operate in cities where public transportation is highly subsidized and monthly fees are mostly symbolic, with some cities being even totally free
Bullshit generalization. Paris isn't like that. London isn't like that. Madrid isn't like that. Dublin (which has no e scooter rental but does bike rental) isn't like that.
Every thing you say exposes you further.
> Also, a cursory search for escooters shows that there are scooters in the market for 120kg/13km autonomy for less than 300€, and they can be charged by simply plugging them onto any regular electrical socket.
Which a) implies you have a place to store it (privileged NIMBY) and b) implies it covers the same need of being somewhere and renting it on the spot (such as at night after an event, where you couldn't take a scooter or bike and leave it there).
> You have zero insight or basis on reality to support any of your personal assertions. You've managed to be entirely wrong in each and any assertion you made.
I've actually supported with specifics what I said while you have been a rude disingenuous actor who uses political generalizations.
You're a great example of what I talk about. HN always pretended to be polite and encourage discourse but when someone from reality came in an exposed a narrative, morally corrupt people like you would come down with the entitled arrogance and rudeness that can only be gained of not having to face reality.
You cannot dump your crap on the street and expect that to be ok.
If you can't just park your car on any random sidewalk or dump your bike in the middle of the street, what leads you believe that it's ok for a multinational to dump their crap all over a city?
Construction companies have to file for permits and pay all kinds of fees to temporarily park a trash bin on the sidewalk. People have to pay fees to get the trash company to take care of furniture you want to throw out, and you still can't just leave it on the sidewalk. What leads you to believe that it's ok to dump all sorts of crap on a sidewalk, specially when they are mainly used for joyrides?
Meanwhile, there are countless solutions for personal mobility that have been around for ages. Hell, is a bicycle an alien concept? Let's not fool ourselves into believing that a multinational's abusive business model is the only way anyone can move from point A to B.
European countries are in aggregate extremely pro bike/pedestrian.
The scooter issue is particularly in focus, because in big cities the competition to become the main player has created a ton of competing companies trying to place their scooters all over the place. I don't mind it myself - I use them in the summer. But I have had to literally step over, or move around a pile of scooters on more than one occasion.
My rant is really ON base but it reflects a demographic very different from the one in HN and will get downvoted as always when something goes against a narrative. It's very easy to parrot the typical points.
> European countries are in aggregate extremely pro bike/pedestrian
Lol. This is just an ignorant talking point from someone who compares everything to the US. It's like saying healthcare is good (and generalizing as if every country in Europe belonged to a monolith) just because healthcare in the US sucks.
The reality is that having options like these empowers people who don't belong to the tier that owns cars and has sheds or places to store their e-vehicles.
In many cities, these non car options keep getting worse and more expensive and everything seems geared to those who have more money and privilege and people just have to 'take it'.
But hell, let's call it a rant, simplify the issue and outright ban stuff so that people who don't benefit from something can feel more comfortable.
With that logic, Let's ban motorcycles. I don't like their noise and don't have one. They're definitely unsafe and cause accidents. Oh, but we're not going to that.
So there's bad etiquette around scooter placement and you ban it. The same thing can happen with free parking e-bikes. Why can't you find a solution that doesn't ban e-scooters?
You just admitted use them "on occasion" so they're not really useful to you, so you're fine with removing them from others that actually might take advantage.
It's the thing I keep pointing out. People from certain positions screwing over others because they're inconvenienced instead of requesting the gov to do better if they want better order or something.
It's all rather classist but it happens with everything.
Lesson for people: have more money, have cars, live in suburbs, have spaces where you can store your vehicles. Or get screwed by decreasing quality of public transport.
I think with perhaps less scooters and a more formal parking system akin to bike rental lockstands, the escooters could've continued to work in Paris. Problem was the place was littered with them, often piled up like fallen dominos on pavements blocking the walking path.
They were really navigating a city that size.
I always wonder what's going on in the mind of someone who leaves their scooter to block the sidewalk. Besides the obvious example of blind people having to navigate this obstacle course the same goes for the elderly, people in wheelchairs and so on. And these scooters are the things that block the sidewalk even in a city with plenty of bikes (such as Amsterdam) because there is no sense of responsibility associated with their use. When you're done you just need to get rid of it as though it is a disposable rather than a vehicle.
Yeah but often those designated areas are very large, allowing people to block the walkways and them all piled up, when they fall over isn't visually appealing. (Yes, people get upset over silly things). Like actual bike stands, something to keep them upright and away from the walking paths would've been helpful.
I remember the first time I visited LA, seeing them piled up on sidewalks and blocking foot traffic was so bizarre. Not to mention people whizzing past me on sidewalks. It was very detrimental to the walking experience.
It is a good thing I was in Paris recently and those things are littering sidewalks (sometimes by piles of dozens all mangled), and people are driving them recklessly. Really a big annoyance.
Same everywhere. It's the kind of business it'd never have occurred to me to start because I'd have assumed "e-waste littering, at scale" was illegal, but as often happens I guess the "at scale" part somehow made it OK.
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?
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.
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.
They already had regulations that meant that they had to be parked in specific areas or fine the person who left it somewhere they shouldn't.
But that didn't stop someone uninvolved in renting one walking by, picking one up and moving it.
Nothing stopped people just riding along the paths at top speed hitting people or randomly darting into traffic. Soon as you entered any pedestrian square you had to be on the constant lookout for being smashed into by a scooter. Anything near the Louvre was particularly bad.
Living in a major city which also has a buzz about banning scooters and scooters being banned in some more posh neighborhoods already, I have problem with this.
The problem is obviously not the existence of scooters but how people would pile them up or ride them carelessly on sidewalks. IMHO, the solution would be to create infrastructure and usage rules. Seize the scooters from those who do not comply. Eventually, either the scooters would stop causing problems or they will no longer exist.
The issue is that the Lime-like business model of scattering around e-scooters is fundamentally broken. They don't operate between pickup/dropoff spots nor can that be enforced. They intentionally expect these scooters to be dropped off in random places by riders. It's economically unfeasible to have employees constantly move around cities to gather them, and they'd have to license and pay for the occupation of public space to have dedicated dropoff/pickup spots.
The only shot at profitability of e-scooter sharing services depends on their ability to abuse public space without cost and dump all externalities on the communities they operate.
Can't say I'm surprised or disappointed by this. I tried a Lime in Paris in 2019 and it was a hair-raising experience. I'm accustomed to bicycling in city traffic but my overwhelming feeling on the Lime was "one slight mistake by me or a car driver and I'll instantly be dead." It seemed ridiculously dangerous compared to a bicycle.
The danger factor plus all the dead Limes I saw in the Seine made the whole idea appear unsustainable.
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.
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.
So far in Nuremberg, the main problem is that even if their users don’t park them directly in the sidewalk, they’ll still occasionally fall over into the sidewalk, which is anywhere from annoying to dangerous for able-bodied pedestrians and stroller pushers, and a serious barrier to people using mobility aids - think wheelchairs and walkers.
Also, many of them are hard to roll a few meters to get them out of the way - no, I’m not trying to steal your scooter, I’m trying to prevent an accident.
They were an absolute plague in Lisbon a few years ago.
Good for Paris. I hope that gives Nuremberg and my adjacent suburb courage to act.
Cities must upgrade as well in order for this to work out. Must be a transition period but without public measures to implement the urban mobility this won’t work.
More victim blaming from car obsesses culture. Problems with e-scooters come from them being forced to narrow and unusable infrastructure. Allow them on the road, let them park in places cars park and it will be better. As usual it's easier to ban people trying to avoid driving a 2-ton smelly and dangerous metal box everywhere instead of actually solving the problem.
So this website says 14 years is the minimum age. Honest question, how is a 14-year-old safer in Parisian traffic on an e-bike than a scooter? You can easily go on sidewalks with bikes, too, if you are so inclined, and falling off into the traffic or hitting someone doesn't seem any less problematic?
I live in Paris and my observation is that 14yo don't use the e-bikes (or the cheaper non-electric bikes) as much. It's probably just less fun and also one criticism is that they use it in pairs (well look at the photo in the article) which I guess is less ideal with bikes in a urban settings.
Twitter is all about how it's old people who went and voted (7% turnout). Well, their loss.
Personally I didn't have an opinion so I didn't vote :)
The weight distribution in a scooter is all at the base. People have life changing foot and shin injuries from being impacted. People usually don’t cycle as quick consistently through cities, pressing a button on a scooter gets you to over 20km/h in moments.
first, rental scooters in Paris are very commonly geofenced and restricted <10km/h in dangerous areas (or automatically completely disabled in some areas)
second, regarding this:
> People usually don’t cycle as quick consistently through cities, pressing a button on a scooter
there are at least 8000 electric bicycles for rent scattered throughout Paris, how in the world is pressing a button on an electrical bicycle any different from pressing a button on a scooter? And I highly doubt your claim that people are e-biking any slower than scooters, too.
> how in the world is pressing a button on an electrical bicycle any different from pressing a button on a scooter?
I don't know about the US, but in Europe, light regulation only apply to electric bikes that provide pedal assistance, i.e. there is no propulsion if you don't start peddling (and as soon as you stop peddling). Ebikes that provide propulsion from just pressing a button would be regulated like mopeds (mandatory registration, insurance, helmet) because they're considered more dangerous.
I'm not going to get into the debate on e-bikes. I think there needs to be stricter legislation or oversight on those too, given the amount of close calls I've had in my city with them also (particularly the illegal "uncapped" ones, or the one's that have number plates and should not even be in the cycle lanes as they are legally scooters).
That said, 10km/h into someone's ankles with the weight distribution at that level is going to shatter your legs.
My city has both rental scooters and rental ebikes. While I see tens of people using the rental scooters, I've literally never seen the rental ebikes used. Not sure why, people just seem to prefer the form factor of scooters. Maybe they expect it to be less effort than pedal assist bikes.
Even around the small towns here I've had more than a few instances of black-wearing people flying between cars at night on these things. Your only defense is to have a dash cam to defend yourself when the inevitable happens I guess.
I'm of two minds regarding e-scooters: on one hand they are undeniably practical and I use them a lot, on the other hand many users obviously have zero experience using them or similar vehicles, so put themselves and others into dangerous situations, and many of them are parked on sidewalks so they are annoyingly in the way.
But, besides all that, I think this is a "First they came for the e-scooters" situation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...). Most people don't care about e-scooters because they don't use them. I wonder how a vote to ban bicycles woult turn out - most people don't ride bicycles either?
These are just a menacee. At least people (mostly) ride bicycles on the road and bike lanes not sidewalks. Scooters are often left to litter sidewalks and most of them are too narrow to share with pedestrians safely.
the one city i have seen e scooters work perfectly is Tallinn. after hating them in berlin, it took some getting used to, but it takes a certain balance of smooth and wide enough sidewalks/ streets, limit of pedestrian and car density, commonly accepted rules like parking spots and maybe some mentality. you see way more scooters than bicycles here and it seems to be the standard transportation mode after cars. even children mostly have little (non e) scooters instead of little bicycles.
I loath the rentals. But love the personally owned. I think if you own it, you take care of it. You want to be trusted with it. And you don't leave it in the river.
Absolutely. Unbelievable, that the property of other's doesn't count for a lot of people, so it's handled without care. If you own it, you take care of it.
So, one step to mitigate the voters results could be renting the scooters for long time with monthly fees. But then, you don't need the apps anymore. So,the whole idea is dead for Paris.
Its also one of the most sketchy and dangerous. If you hop on an escooter, you're not going to find a homeless dude there jerking off, there's no vomit anywhere, noone will assault your wife and you're not getting stabbed nor mugged. Can't say the same about the Paris metro.
I'm sure what you describe happens, but I've used the Paris metro everyday for years and never had any of those things happen to me, nor have I witnessed it happening to others.
Though this is certainly their right and I agree with the decision, I think this was sort of overplayed.
What I personally would have liked to see is a "deposit" tax of $10- or some amount included in each rental. Then, if scooters are brought back to specific areas, determined by the city, the person who brings it back gets back their $10.
I'm confident an appropriate deposit tax would've satisfied both parties and perhaps gave passerbys an incentive to pick them up.
While petty criminals probably steal and scrap them, turning it into some sort of enterprise seems like it would not be worth the ease of being caught.
I can't remember the blog but I read somewhere (IIRC) a e-scooter needs about 45 days to break even. So if 1 scooter can survive 2 months on the street it's a net profit.
Also, these things are ubiquitous enough that there is no demand and the internal parts are customized so that you can't break it down for resale. Early rideshare models were rebadged Ninebot and Xiaomi scooters. And you could replace the motherboard. They learned their lesson and almost everything is bespoke.
TfL seems to be focused on ensuring the devices are safe, rather than ensuring the devices are used safely.
The operators were chosen after an open and competitive process to assess their ability to meet strict safety requirements and high operating standards. (For example, the scooter batteries can be monitored to ensure they meet fire safety regulations.)
Also, AIUI this is a trial, and people might not buy their own scooters if they knew their right to use them was only temporary. So it would be a difficult test to run. Also: data.
Not really bizarre. You can regulate rental companies and insist on certain safety requirements, max speed etc but as soon as you let everyone ride their own, it's all out the window and the Police have enough to do without arguing about whether your scooter is going 3mph over the speed limit.
There is also the "taxi" argument that it is better to have 5000 shared scooters than 50000 private ones but I don't know whether one is really better, I guess scooters are designed to take inside at your work/home so maybe not as bad.
These cause some minor problems for parisians, and are used by a small minority of people so obviously any kind of referendums will overwhelmingly be against it. Especially since there is no "I don't care" option.
I'm a strong adherent of electric transportation, having recently upgraded from an electric moped to an electric motorbike.
I've also used these rental scooters all over my city (Vienna, Austria) to get around and I find them very convenient when, in a pinch, the excellent public transportation doesn't work out.
That said, I think there is a major modification required to these devices that will radically decrease the accidents: they need to make a sound.
Seriously, riding an electric vehicle is one of the most pleasant, enjoyable experiences around - but getting hit by one is easily one of the worst surprises imaginable. Every week, I count the number of people I could've hit full-force with my electric motorbike, if I hadn't been paying EXTRA attention to the street - on average I have one to three near-misses every week. I don't blame the pedestrian - after all, I'm keeping EXTRA attention for them, since I know my weakness: I am silent as heck in a city full of pedestrians whose survival skills have been honed on hearing whats around the corner.
Those days are over. We need speedo-synthesizers now. I've half-considered writing one myself (synthesizers are my thing) but I'm pretty sure its something that needs to be so reliable that it has to be built into the OS.
I wish Apple would address this. It'd be so much safer on the roads if we had great sound design alerting pedestrians to the hooning idiot coming around the corner. And thats the issue with these electric scooters - too often they are being operated by idiots. And yes, I class anyone riding a scooter without at least a bike helmet on, to be a full idiot.
tl;dr - Scooter companies need to start hiring sound-designers to keep ignorant pedestrians on the pavement before they get demolished by the silent, excellent transportation options hitting the scene ..
I was quite surprised by the strength of opinion on this one, but now I see the numbers it makes more sense. Those that hated the public scooters turned out, but nobody loved them enough to turn out and vote in support.
As they say, History is made by those that turn up (or somesuch).
Democracy sucks if no one is exercising their democratic minimum duty; to vote.
This will lead to smaller groups being able to mobilise easier for their agenda.
Also happens one level up in Germany or Australia - lack of volunteers for judiciary committee or duties opens the door for right wing or other nutters that are organised and push into these openings.
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 so they'd often end up cluttering areas until the company came around and picked them up.
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.
That said, if Paris doesn't have the ability to make and enforce such mandates, then a ban on nuisance business makes sense to me.
> 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"
Sometimes what is being voted on is unclear. Names/monickers are often misleading. The description text of bills can seem contradictory to the advertising about them.
This is all before we get into gerrymandering and other patterns to shape voting outcomes.
> what is being voted on is unclear. Names/monickers are often misleading. The description text of bills can seem contradictory to the advertising about them.
Which is why direct democracy rarely works. And again, if someone is dissuaded from voting on the basis of how a bill sounds versus taking the time to learn what it is, I’m still chalking that up as a feature. Gerrymandering is a problem, but not an excuse for apathy—not every issue, local to national, is gerrymandered.
There is a difference between "not eligible to vote" which is arguably anti-democratic, and "chose not to vote" which is arguably democratic. Would making voting at elections compulsory make them more democratic?
If there were dedicated lanes and parking specifically for e-scooters, like we do with cars, it'd be pretty safe. I don't favor such a thing (separate lanes and parking individually for motorcycle, for bikes, for ebikes, for skateboards, for unicycles, etc), so my point isn't to advocate for it here, but I do think keeping this in mind changes the way you frame the safety issue.
E-Scooters are a public menace. They're way to fast for the sidewalk, dangerous on the road, litter the sidewalks and cause people to trip, and are almost always ridden unsafely, with no safety equipment at all. Get these death traps off the streets.
So that's a whole other debate (and I disagree), but even if you're right, getting rid of cars would be a gradual, multi-decade project. It's just not possible to get around modern American cities without cars. You can't just abandon the city. These cities represent trillions of dollars of investment.
Otoh, you could ban e-scooters tomorrow and after dramatically improving various urban areas, the biggest effect would be a few scooter companies going bankrupt.
I don't actually want to get rid of cars, I was just pointing out how ridiculous your argument sounds.
I want people to have options, and for large cities to promote less environmentally destructive modes of transportation that are also more accessible and take up less space. Yeah, maybe you see people leaving scooters on the sidewalks; I see shared use of public infrastructure that doesn't have to have large amounts of space dedicated for 'parking'
Too many American city centers aren’t really set up for non-car usage, so even if cars went away, people would need to walk pretty big distances to get to where they’re going. Modern American cities need to be fundamentally redesigned to support a car free or reduced system.
> Otoh, you could ban e-scooters tomorrow and after dramatically improving various urban areas, the biggest effect would be a few scooter companies going bankrupt.
There are probably already people who depend on them to get to work - and those people are probably far more marginalised and vulnerable than car drivers.
It's so convenient having to lift them up and throw them out of the way all the time! /s
And while everybody must pay for parking or public soil occupation… apparently these companies are exempt and can completely fill a sidewalk for free (of course people then have to walk on the bike lane).
I used to not care but the rental scooters really are a nuisance. Apparently deploying their kickstands is literally the hardest thing in life. The ones in motion don't bother me, and most of the people in Berkeley that ride e-scooters own theirs so they buy the lighter ones and carry them indoors, but the rental ones are much larger and heavier and their stands simply don't work.
I think the issue is that people walking by knock them over, moreso than the kickstands not working.
If you live in Berkeley (and many other cities), there's an added backdrop of anger at "big tech" that many non-tech workers have, so many people will kick or knock them over (I've seen this). I've also heard of people taking these (and bikeshare bikes) and throwing them in the ocean/lake/etc.
So are cars. They kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. They are incompatible with spaces that are occupied/moved through by humans, dangerous on the road, and consume half the city's livable space through business and residential parking lots. They poison our air, and they damage our hearing.
They also cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to buy and operate, and require untold billions of dollars to be spent on building and maintaining an endless sprawl of road infrastructure.
-----
... Maybe if we consider the benefits, as opposed to only the drawbacks, scooters might look a bit better than you paint them to be?
They should be ridden on the roads imo. They are as fast as an average bike rider, if it's not safe, then the roads need to be adjusted to make it safe.
Now Paris needs to ban electric vehicles. The same story. They started it, the will ban it. After a few building will be burnt beyond repair, of course
Why not just ban parking them in underground garages instead? Some LPG powered cars do have such a restriction in some EU states. Gas powered vehicles catch fire and burn as well. I've seen countless burning cars during the last heatwave.
The reason to ban LPG cars from underground garages is that propane is heavier than air, and in case of a leak the gas has nowhere to go (other than drainage, which sort of highlights the problem).
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 ... ?