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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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'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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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'
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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)
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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 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.
570 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadIf 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.
This is a lie. I don't even need to go look anything up to call 90% turnout a lie.
Actual number was probably 7%.
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.
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)
https://www.childinthecity.org/2021/09/01/streets-to-schools...
https://old.reddit.com/r/EnculerLesVoitures/comments/11chtfh...
I'm optimistic they'll keep following the Dutch model. You've seen the pictures of Amsterdam in the 70's, after all.
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.
Also, it is simply not true that only elderly dislikes these services.
Neither of this applies to the scooter riders and it shows.
Didn't think so.
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.
2) Having a choice in what bike you want to ride
Ah, are we extending the "no one needs an x" to personal bicycles now? What's next, shared spoons?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September in meatspace.
Myspace went the other way around: spray paint was invented first.
I would rather see the EU:
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.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.
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.
https://archive.ph/Pz4uj
https://www.velib-metropole.fr/en/service
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 :)
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.
That said, 10km/h into someone's ankles with the weight distribution at that level is going to shatter your legs.
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.
it makes sense in a way
of course, carelessness is a problem but that also happens with so-called Boris bikes (Livingstone bikes)
no. They are returned to docking stations. Other schemes litter the pavement
I live near the DLR and I see vandalised, abandoned Boris bikes on the regular
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 don't have much to explain why they're banned from parks which allow you to drive a range rover through them.
That means some required safety features, mandatory insurance, minimum driver age and rules about what part of the road you can use.
It seems to work quite well in practice, however, I question the economic viability of the business model.
In my ~80k inhabitants, touristy city I see them rarely used and the few times I took one they seemed quite expensive.
Bird already left the again.
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.
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.
Their USP is they can be left anywhere.
https://i.imgur.com/s59Bvf3.png
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.
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.
https://i.imgur.com/8piPcuf.jpg
These schemes provide value to the user because they can be wilfully discarded anywhere.
You pic shows them towards a corner kerb with space behind.
https://i.imgur.com/oeQjcJS.png
They don’t always block the pavement.
They deliver far more to the city than they inconvenience. I say this as someone who has to push a stroller around.
I've been pushing someone in a wheel chair for about a year now. Trust me. This is no trivial matter
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.
Could you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what Homebrew has to do with rental scooters...
Poster is implying that startups like bird and lime are dead or dying.
This is basically just "Fs in chat for rental scooters"
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.
Well but it is. Restricting/Eliminating cars in city centers especially would do wonders to promote them as places that people want to live in.
Banning new modes of transportation is really just going to reinforce the existing car-centric design of cities though.
That’s just in your opinion though. Scooters are super convenient if you’re not just an old fuddy dud afraid of new things.
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 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'
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.
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?
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.
I don't live in Paris, but this random website that seems to offer scooter rentals say 12 years old: https://rentngo.fr/en/home/
Kids find a way. I live in Canberra, Australia. We have a couple of competing e-scooter hire companies. They're pretty good.
There are always kids on them.
funny considering the govt is the most expensive business model out there.
Assuming they were paying (which often they weren't) these alternatives are all cheaper.
It's a tough problem, because the alternative is requiring ID validation for every online service you use, which is the wrong path too.
Can't wait to get back to Tokyo, where even moms feel safe riding on main roads.
Not everyone has showers at work.
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.
These promotions can be paid by businesses who want traffic, but also help the company redistribute the scooters back to gaps in coverage.
The promotions should again be appless and authless. 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?
* https://www.li.me/blog/lime-becomes-the-first-shared-electri...
Obviously there is now the 'ewe' factor of putting on a helmet covered with someone elses hair lice...
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)
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
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.
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.
Edit: just for clarity: this model is already working (plumbers, movers and locals included).
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.
Most cities do not have a car lane sized lane to spare.
If you want to live downtown and own a car, you can rent a parking space in a garage.
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!
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.
BINGO!
Haven't parked your scooter in the designated area? -10 Euros fee on your credit card.
Driving recklessly on the scooter? -30 Euros fee.
You'd think common sense would dictate not across sidewalks, but humans prove time and again that common sense isn't very common.
Border control does not (currently) detect fines and prevent people from leaving to non-EU locations.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.?
[1]: https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/03/01/opinion-seattles-...
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.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-city-of-atlanta-banned-e-sc...
About Paris, this is a ban on rental e-scooter.
Like a folding bike.
Clearly scooters have won.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
1. There is questionable quality and reliability. They always feel worse than a mid-range private ownership model.
2. Ownership is cheaper for regular users.
3. Parked vehicles litter sidewalks, making the city less pleasant for pedestrians, bicyclist, and even people actively riding an e-scooter.
4. You need a cell phone to interact with them. Maybe I'm a luddite, but I think this is bad for society.
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.
[1] https://gothamist.com/news/how-else-could-nyc-use-its-12-cen...
So if you take someone's parking spot, they just have to destroy a dozen scooters to get it back?
Can do!
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.