France to ban electric scooters from pavements in September
rte.ie
rte.ie
Currently, approx. 7/8 of public space is used by cars. Most of the time they're stuck in traffic or 'dead capital' while in parking mode. Furthermore, where I live, the price to park a car is ~10 times cheaper than to rent (per sqm) and highly subsidized by tax payers.
I wonder why we do protect our workers but pedestrians and cyclists/scooters just don't matter. Have you ever seen a working environment where an object with 2-40tons is allowed to freely move next to a person at a speed of 50km/h and more? I'm glad we do have rules in working enviromnents. It would be great to see the same on roads as well.
I'm all for 'shared roads' with a speed limit reduced to 20km/h which makes it unnecessary for cars to overtake scooters/cyclists. We wouldn't have to build new infrastructure but could simply use the existing one. I could imagine we could even remove most of our traffic lights replaced by roundabouts.
In the long run I hope to see less cars overall and people switching to smaller means of transportation. Moving 2 tons to buy a 500g loaf of bread is just insane.
1. People don't obey speed limits
2. In the US at least, there are people who aren't very wealthy living outside of cities.
They may commute 20+ miles into the office. Their retirement may depend on their house retaining its value.
Drastically reducing throughput of streets is nice for people who are only traveling a mile or two, but it hurts long-distance commuters.
One option is to build large car parks on the outskirts of cities close to the highways and with good access to public transport.
This way people living outside the city center can still use their cars to get to the city, but can bike/escooter/walk or take the subway/bus/tram to get to work.
Even in Marseille, a city with terrible public transport, there are some of these, with new ones in construction or planning stages.
Parking is free or heavily discounted if you have a transit pass.
I believe this could work well in major US cities with a dense downtown area.
The area next to rail/metro stations is the most valuable place to put higher-density housing. Surrounding the stations with giant surface parking lots is a horrendous waste of space.
Also in Cambridge, there’s a thing called “park and ride”. I have no idea how common park and ride in the USA, but Wikipedia says it exists. Summary of the idea [1]: out-of-town car park with a good public transport link to where commuters need to go.
Unfortunately, people whose retirement depends on their house retaining its value are probably screwed regardless — what happens when self driving, self-charging, solar covered RVs/mobile TinyHomes/seasteads can be mass produced (including interiors) by the sort of robots currently used for cars? Material costs for those should only come to about $35k, most of which is the battery, which doesn’t need to be as large as the one in a commuter vehicle like a Tesla.
[1] implementations vary in quality.
Yes there is some obscure remote car parking. It takes 6-12 months to get through the queue of getting a spot (or more, depends). While waiting you have no idea how long till you get a place. They are almost as expensive as renting a private parking spot in the center. Then there is public transport - there is some, but far from ideal, and very far from motivating commuters to use this system, since it adds so much overhead that they prefer driving straight to the center of the town, even in densest traffic hours.
The message from city government cannot be more clear - we ticked a checkbox, but in reality we couldn't care less. City I am most familiar with this issue - Geneva.
Just park your car at a P&R just outside the city and use a scooter / public transportation for the last mile.
Because people don’t obey speed limits, the roads must be physically redesigned. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
Urban streets should be limited to 15–20 miles/hour. Any faster and cars are grossly unsafe for everyone else on the road.
On my street the average speed is something like 40 mph (despite a speed limit of 25 mph), and some cars drive 55 mph. At that speed cars can’t react in time to avoid obstacles in the road, and if a pedestrian (e.g. young kid) or cyclist gets hit by a car, they are almost certain to die. And yet this is perceived by Americans as perfectly normal and acceptable.
2. Can be solved with park & ride. Just make sure that the park & ride is significantly cheaper than driving/parking in the city.
Some cities have already started to ban cars from their centers.
I have been living in the US for one year. The omnipresence of cars is really bothering me.
Moving from point A to B without using a car is way more of a chore compared to Paris.
I don't believe I will spend all my life here, and I hope that my next destination will be car free.
There are these gorgeous beaches and then all these ugly cars parked in endless lines right next to it.
True but so does the other large European cities I have lived in / visited. Heck, even the smaller (compared to Paris) French city I studied in has a better public transportation system than SF.
>When you leave your current city, consider another city that once hosted the Olympics recently
That sounds like a good rule of thumb, thanks, I will keep it in mind :) Although I don't think there is a real cause/effect relation for Paris. The city has had a good public transport system for a very long time. It probably helps that it is a very touristic city, but even non touristic places have a good subway support (although some lines really need to be modernized).
And to be clear, I don't have a pro-Paris bias. Some other cities like Berlin seem to be way more pro-active in the direction of a car free city.
Big enough also to takes prams/buggies/bicycles/luggage/large shopping items, so that people can also get to do many of the normal things they would do with their day and still use public transport.
A bus averaging 20mph running 24/7/365 puts 175,000 miles on it yearly. Ignoring fuel costs, that's a lot of wear & tear on the moving parts. How many passenger miles per day do you need to get out of the bus for it to be economical?
It’s likely the electric drivetrains in modern buses will last longer than their diesel predecessors, while reducing maintenance costs.
I haven’t seen anything like Beijing or Manila since moving to LA and then Seattle, America has first world traffic problems only.
- Near-perfect safety would reduce the need for structural safety. That could cut size and weight drastically
- Coordination might allow more efficient use of roads, obviating the need for multiple lanes, allowing cars to travel bumper-to-bumper, drastically increase throughput on intersections
Most European and Asian (specifically Japanese) cities have very good connectivity from the outskirts into the city centers.
Granted, it can be complicated and time consuming to connect from outskirt to outskirt. This is no reason, however, to throw away well working public systems of connectivity for some pipe dream, which still uses much too much resources for the density of a city.
Absolutely.
> I wonder why we do protect our workers but pedestrians and cyclists/scooters just don't matter. Have you ever seen a working environment where an object with 2-40tons is allowed to freely move next to a person at a speed of 50km/h and more? I'm glad we do have rules in working enviromnents. It would be great to see the same on roads as well.
There are plenty of jobs where such things happen - even something as 'simple' as working with trains, factory jobs etc.
Let's not get paranoid - death rates from traffic accidents in countries with civilized driving culture(mostly Europe, but not everywhere in there) is about 0.05-0.1%. It also includes car->car collisions and car->object collisions - so pedestrian deaths are even lower.
Separation of lanes(pedestrian vs motorized vs bicycles/electric scooters) should be even higher I agree. I really like overpasses for pedestrian crossings - but they introduce plenty of extra costs and problems(mostly for disabled and/or old people).
> I'm all for 'shared roads' with a speed limit reduced to 20km/h which makes it unnecessary for cars to overtake scooters/cyclists. We wouldn't have to build new infrastructure but could simply use the existing one. I could imagine we could even remove most of our traffic lights replaced by roundabouts.
Outside of specific residential zones(where speed limit is already usually between 20-30 km/h(depending on country) and pedestrians already have a right of way) this is insane.
Economically, convenience wise and paradigm wise.
Such system exists because there is a need for fast transportation - it is tied into very complex economical system. If you want to get rid of it - what do you replace it with? If you replace it in your area, will it give advantage to businesses in there? Do majority people living in such areas want to have that speed limit?
> In the long run I hope to see less cars overall and people switching to smaller means of transportation. Moving 2 tons to buy a 500g loaf of bread is just insane.
People usually buy quite more things than just a single loaf of bread. I personally walk to stores, because i can't transport as much goods as car can, so i spend less money.
There are better ways to waste less resources than limiting speed to 20km/h. Electric cars, good public transportation system(it is a nightmare to use in rush hours over here)
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37200/umfrage...
Such a great way to put it
People value convenience over abstract congruity.
Nicely put! ;)
If more people could afford to live in town it would alleviate a lot of in town traffic. So until we can take city planning, at least the veto and coercion part, away from local politicians, not much is going to be done. I am not saying cities should have no say, what I am saying is that independent boards should be established to stop political graft which is the biggest inhibitor.
As usual, France is really good at introducing laws that don't bring anything new instead of simply enforcing the current ones. I've seen seven different companies providing free floating scooters in Paris, and plenty of them are used by complete idiots. There have been several deaths already. The mayor could easily ban all these startups if she really cared about the law and public safety. Riders who own their own scooter seem to be a bit more responsible, and those are the ones that should be targeted by new laws.
There's no practical way to enforce the sidewalk law. We know that's true because laws regarding cars are often ignored as well.
The usual French way is to have law that makes almost everything illegal but with laws that are never enforced in practice.
And when you want to make something really illegal, you pass 10 laws on the same topic to be really sure one of them is enforced in practice.
Cite? I couldn't find any news stories about electric scooter (not mopeds) deaths in France, and this page suggests they are exceedingly rare.
https://m.ranker.com/list/worst-electric-scooter-accidents-a...
http://www.leparisien.fr/societe/les-accidents-de-trottinett...
And we obviously expect injuries (and deaths) to rise with increased usage. The pertinent question is whether the injury/death rate per km (or whatever) is high compared to similar forms of transport.
However, people do not know the law, so an explicit ban by a mayor is better than status quo.
Now in exchange, go forth and create more dedicated (and preferably protected) lanes for bikes (electric or otherwise), electric scooters, skateboards, and other light personal vehicles.
In 2001 Dean Kamen said Segway would "cause cities to be redesigned". I think he was only off by a couple decades and a slight variation on the vehicles' form factor.
a) most cities have few, if any protected bike lanes (or equivalent)
b) scooter riders experience more danger from cars in the road than pedestrians do from scooters on the sidewalk (just think if you'd rather be hit by a scooter while walking or by a car while scooter-ing)
Thus, forcing scooters off the sidewalk is a net negative for safety, is it not?
I'd agree with you if 1 scooter = 1 less car, that would be awesome. But it's pretty obvious when you visit Paris that it's not the case though, scooters are mainly used teenagers and tourists, who wouldn't use car in the first place.
Electric bikes and scooters really change the game, you no longer have to be in great shape or sweaty in order to avoid taking a car to your destination. Really, safety is the main concern many people have.
The only issue with riding scooters on the road is a lot of the roads in the centre-north area of Paris are cobbled, but you can just slow down.
I don’t find anything remotely controversial about banning a powered vehicle capable of ~30 km/h from pavements.
<3 Paris!
30km/h?!
Here in Sweden they forced the company to bring the top speed down to 20km/h for rental scooters.
Of course many have bought their own since the fad started dying down. And those are sometimes capable of illegal speeds up to 40km/h. Impossible for police to tell, and also a waste of time seeing as there are more pressing issues.
How's that? Here in Holland there's quite an industry making scooters faster, but the police regularly set up funnels where they test the maximum speed of the scooters they catch. From what I hear some people even install hidden buttons to limit the top speed whenever they're checked (which I suppose is not too difficult to figure out now the police knows).
Made me wonder.
And it was everywhere. In Tokyo, where it's crowded. In Odawara, where it's less so.
EDIT: You know what I think? This is the same thing as the panic around kids playing outside. The notion of 'danger' is overplayed in the West.
Imagine saying "you can't ride on the pavement, you have to ride on the street!"
You and I would be scratching our heads, thinking the street is paved.
Aha! I just noticed a clue: "pavements". That is a word that almost doesn't exist in English. It's like "sands" or "waters". Those are actual words, but it's pretty rare to see them.
It's perfectly ordinary in British English. In British English although the road is usually paved the use of pavement in that sense is a jargon word applying to a particular trade (road building or mending) whereas pavement in general means what American English calls a sidewalk.
Also paving in British English generally brings to mind paving slabs not tarmac even though most pavements are of course tarmac. And tarmac is also mostly British English for asphalt.
"Two great peoples divided by a common language..."
Traffic in Paris is rather chaotic though (it's actually nice to see quite a few cyclists despite this chaos). I'd be concerned about rider safety.
> She said parking in such a way as to obstruct traffic or pedestrians will mean a 35-euro fine -- but the Paris city council has pledged to build parking spots for 2,500 scooters.
No they don't, some assholes push them and make them fall on purpose, I have seen it done many times here in Paris. Those idiot vigilantes seem to hope that by wreaking havoc they will increase the negative perception of the population against the scooters and their riders.
Overall there's a huge need for traffic rules enforcement in Paris, for everyone. Pedestrians complain about cyclists/scooters, cyclists complain about motorcycles, motorcycles complain about cars, cars complain about pedestrian and bikes, all in good reason.
I've lived in Japan before and cyclists aren't allowed to ride on the sidewalk sure to danger to pedestrians but this happens way too often anyways due to lack of enforcement. Unexpectedly some of the worst offenders are middle aged housewife types. Agreed that in pedestrian heavy cities like Tokyo or Paris you really need to look out for their safety.
In the Netherlands those scooters are allowed on the pavement if their max speed is 5kph but this is a grey area if the law. Otherwise they need a "specialized electronic moped" type approval and can either be classified as a bike (max 18kph), a low speed moped (same place on the road as a bike, max 25kph outside, 20 inside cities, requires driving licence and insurance) or moped (helmet, required to go in the car lanes in cities, max 45 kph, requires driving licence and insurance).
A rental company came by my office a while back to promote people into buying one. They completely ignored the obvious safety concerns people had as it is far les easy to stay up with smaller wheels but still compared it to biking. We will see where this is going but I would not go fast on one without proper body protection especially if they go > 20 kph.
Wrong. The law is quite clear on this. They are not allowed on public roads, unless they are RDW-approved. Those that are approved (like the Segway) are considered mopeds, require a moped-licence and the minimum age of 16, and are consequently forbidden from using the pavement.
Cf.: https://www.vraaghetdepolitie.nl/verkeer/overig-verkeer/mag-...
https://www.gov.sg/news/content/are-e-scooters-allowed-on-ro...
For me it would be as simple as this:
- Make it illegal to ride a scooter on the sidewalks with an immediate on the spot fine of 100e.
- Make it illegal for scooter companies to operate the park anywhere model. They must work with the city to install stations. The city could even offer a standard model where operators can use the city-run recharging stations.
- Get rid of the majority of city center parking and aggressively install more central bike lanes, allowing future mobility solutions (e-scooters, e-skateboards etc.) more transit ways.
Riding a bike on the pavement is legal for children under the age of 12 iirc. For adults it's a no go.
The USA is one of the very few places on earth where you can both prosecute and marry five year olds. (Not in every state, of course.)
Like a grumpy old guy, on a bench, envying the still living for his life wasted, hating on the new joys and the joy of the new.