Low turnout elections are antidemocratic by nature. I'd venture there are many more e-scooter users in Paris than voters in this referendum.
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.
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"
This is a feature. Democracy is government by the people. Not by their whimsy. If it isn’t worth the inconvenience of voting, that might be a sign.
This is all before we get into gerrymandering and other patterns to shape voting outcomes.
It’s not always about apathy.
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.