Paris mulls e-scooter ban in global test for micromobility industry

Many people miss the larger point that the scooter troubles have brought to light: this is a preview to what a post-ownership society would look like. It quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons when everyone uses public resources (rentable scooters and the space to park them) with little regard to the larger impact of their collective actions due to the absence of consequences for antisocial behavior.

In the vision of autonomous vehicles is a built-in assumption that people won’t actually need to own one themselves and companies will provide “taxi service” for some fee thus eliminating the need for the end-user to actually own one as they can always call for a ride. How quickly will these vehicles become dirty, unusable, vandalized, or otherwise ruined because a subset of occupants don’t give a shit about stuff that doesn’t belong to them and there is no consequence for wrecking?

Scarcity does make people value their things because they’ve already invested in it and most people would rather not have to continue to fork over money to replace items that suffered a premature end due to user neglect or mistreatment.

I feel very ambivalent about scooters. On one hand I hope they do actually take some cars off the road, on the other, I think they’re mostly used by people who would otherwise take the bus, bike or even walk instead.

And in the meantime the scooters are dumped everywhere around town: on sidewalks, in cycle lanes, in the parks and forests, thrown into the lake at the north end of the town. It’s always extra dispiriting to find them discarded in the undergrowth out in the countryside - presumably at the very end of their range. One time I found a scooter that someone had either intentionally or accidentally left so that it fell over and smashed a ground floor window.

I’ve personally seen so many accidents and near-misses, including some too-young kids who must’ve hacked a scooter and crashed it into a parked car, a colleague who fell head-over the bars after a drinking binge and cut up his face, a friend who broke an arm, and a young woman who was walking across a plaza in town while reading her phone and tripped over a scooter that someone had just thrown down there and landed smack on her face.

Also the strange behavior of people riding who seem not to consider they’re bound by the rules of any other transport system - cars, bikes or walkers - and simply sail unconcernedly across junctions with red lights, or in the midst of walkers on the sidewalk.

I’d love to see them work better - I hate cars way more - but the anarchic spirit of their introduction hasn’t been the best for everyone living in the city.

Here in Berlin, these things are everywhere as well. More or less the same companies as in Paris.

I think Germans are more upset about how messy these things are than about the safety aspect. People just leave them wherever and occasionally some bored people do silly things with them like creating a huge pile of them or tossing them in canals, etc. They are not very stable and that means that even if they are parked properly, they can still fall over. Or people just kick them over. But mostly, stuff like this is a minor nuisance. Berlin is covered in graffiti; there's lots of vandalism, etc.. This just adds to that. I don't mind the chaos generally.

You also see people using them creatively. I regularly see people transporting furniture or even Christmas trees (last year) on these things for example. Or multiple people sharing a scooter. I find this hilarious. And there is a fair bit of abuse involving drunk people, kids doing stunts with them, etc.

But mostly, you just see people using them as intended. Berlin is a big place. You can walk for hours without leaving the inner city. Rush hour traffic is very congested and these things are perfect for getting around.

I kind of dislike using scooters myself; mostly because I don't like the lack of stability and danger level. But e-bikes are great and almost as easy to find. Most deadly accidents here in Berlin involve cars though. Stupidly and pointlessly large SUVs and trucks driven irresponsibly are usually involved. Right hand turns involving trucks crushing cyclists are very common here.

So in Chicago we have the infuriating practice of "dibs". People leave out all manner of large objects in street parking spaces they've dug out when we get lots of snow. You know what the city does every few weeks? Streets & Sanitation workers drive around and collect up all these abandoned chairs, couches, cones, etc because it's discarded stuff in a public space.

Why not do the same with e-scooters? If they aren't properly out of the public right of way and secured they should be collected up and treated as abandoned. Eventually scooter rental companies will need to start charging people significant fees for not properly parking scooters when they are finished with them.

I'm in favor of people learning how to use e-scooters correctly because they are a great mode of transportation in cities. We've all just become so accustomed to the impacts of cars that we don't complain any more. (Pollution, noise, collisions, fatalities, space required for parking .. all far worse than any annoyances caused by scooters.)

Just like anything new people need time to adjust and learn how to have scooters exist sanely in a community.

-- used to be escooter hell in Seoul - the government passed a law requiring the apps to make sure the user has valid driver license to unlock scooter - since then - considerably less insane --

I'm curious how Lime is calculating their safety numbers. I have family in medicine, and they absolutely refuse to ride scooters due to the injuries and fatalities they see in the ER. They basically see it as the equivalent of riding a motorcycle without a helmet. And since the vast majority of scooter riders are young adults, they see devastating injuries that will ruin people's lives for decades, if they live that long.

Obviously all forms of transportation have risk, but the current environment where hardly any scooter riders wear helmets, and where they are used in tight urban areas competing with cars, cyclists and pedestrians, often with little clarity of where scooters should drive or right-of-way rules, is a recipe for high devastating accident rates.

The scooters here in Paris are competing with a large numbers of bikes, cars and motorized scooters and feel more dangerous than the others vehicles.

There's also the common doubling-up of people, and you occasionally have to add taking selfies into the mix.

There's a lot of other options for shared mobility and they all seem way safer. I don't think that's universally true for a all cities, but certainly for Paris.

(Not a Parisian, but currently enjoying a week here)

Don’t understand this. Paris has the best e-scooter model in the world. Designated parking zones, geofenced speed limits, proper bike/scooter infrastructure. I and my French friends love them and use them frequently.

Apart from the business model and mobility benefits, those scooters are just plain dangerous. They are absolutely fun to drive, and easy to drive swiftly.

But your body mass is so high off the ground on a very small base, with VERY small wheels. Riding on a bird I hit a small pothole (it looked like a very slight puddle) and catapulted off onto the sidewalk. The physics are undeniable.

Personally I'd like to see the same model with bicycles, even if they are electric.

And for the love of public space: force all competing brands to share vehicles, drop-off zones and handlers.

Paris goes the same way Prague did in 2016, but with Segways. The problem is not in vehicle, but in the fact, that users were ignoring rules (you are supposed to drive on a road with cars or bicycle path) and were driving on pedestrian walk, causing collisions and injuries.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/20/two-wheels-bad...

Just yesterday I witnessed a pretty gruesome scooter accident right in front of me on the sidewalk in Berlin. The young woman was just riding down the sidewalk bike lane, nothing at all out of the ordinary, and the scooter just slipped right out from under her on some slippery wet leaves. She went headlong into a tree and was left with a bloody nose on the ground. Her friends stayed with her until the ambulance came.

I was happy I did not relive it in my dreams last night.

e-scooters in paris used to be an absolute mess: scooters everywhere on the sidewalk, people driving very fast etc. But IMHO it seriously improved in the past years, now if you drive a scooter on some specific zone you're pretty limited (something like 5-10km/h depending on the zone) AND you need to park at specific location. I hope that then don't ban it, because they're a life saver when it's late at night and metro is off.

The more general problem is, what do we do with powered vehicles that have too much speed, and thus kinetic energy, to share space with pedestrians, but not enough protection to share space with automobiles?

Bike lanes help. In congested areas, we may end up with slow scooter/slow bicycle/low speed e-bike lanes with low speed limits. Anything faster needs a motorcycle license, turn signals, mirrors, and more rider protection.

As a cyclist commuter, I've reached the point where I advocate requiring a license to operate any sort of motorized equipment in public roads. Too often I'll encounter close unannounced passes on the right, salmoning, or just general complete baffoonery on the part of e-bike or scooter riders on the road. Silly stuff always used to happen before with skateboards or bicycles, but in general if you're out there using your own body power to move yourself around you're going to be less casual. With the advent of ubiquitous cheap lithium legs, I'm seeing more casual road users show up in greater numbers, only they are armed with motorized vehicles that can travel much faster than their operators know how to manage safely and responsibly.

I'd happily submit to training and licensing requirements for my bicycle if it means everyone else on the road with me, especially motorized vehicle operators, also have to go through the same process.

Every other day or so I encounter this dark-green-colored e-waste strewn all over sidewalks, foot and bicycle paths just standing in the way being annoying and a hazard to any passersby on said paths. In some places in my city the footpath is blocked ~50-100% in its width by these things forcing foot traffic to evade onto the bicycle path, endangering both types of traffic.

Seriously, one of the (seemingly) more popular "parking" spots for singular ones of these scooters I've found in my city is on an un-/dimly lit foot- and bicycle path at night, cosplaying as a tripping hazard.

Fuck these scooters and the dangerous morons who ride and just leave them everywhere.

One issue discussed a lot here which I think is not mentioned in the article (I read it really quickly) is that those are not really helping the environnement. Those e-scooters have ridiculous lifetime (creating trash and pollution to build new ones) and also they (used to?) give money to anyone who would charge the scooter (so they don't have to hire someone to do it). The result that some people were doing it for a living, using a truck containing a diesel generator to go charge all the scooter in the city, which probably made the overall carbon footprint of using scooter even worse than a car...

These things are a blight. Riders aren’t responsible when riding or parking them, and the companies aren’t efficient about clean up. The owners effectively forced Paris to make room by virtue of dumping them around the city. (How was that even legal?) Eventually there were hideous piles of them blocking parking and traffic, so the city made designated parking for them. It’s marginally better. Good riddance.

Renting these within the city centre was banned in Copenhagen a few years ago.

You can still own one yourself, or rent one outside the centre and drive all the way through.

But it immediately stopped all the clutter. Now it's just rental bicycles — somehow, every tourist on a normal bike manages to lock it appropriately in a bike rack, but paint an e-bike Lime green and people just drop them wherever they feel like it.

I love these things. They really nicely complement urban mobility, on short distances and for connections where bus, tram and underground have a poor connection (e.g. low takt, or need to connect or poor grid i.e. long walking distance)

I've happily used them in several cities already.

and I'm optimistic that we'll find more intelligent solutions to the rookie user problem than banning them for all others.

Here in Montreal we have a bike rental service (Bixi). You have to return the bike to one of the many bike stations otherwise the meter keeps running. I have never seen a bixi abandonned in the middle of the sidewalk. Instead of banning those scooters, maybe they should simply force the companies to provide designated parking spots and force the users to use them.