Tags:
Journalism of Courage
In a hotly debated referendum, Parisians on Sunday (April 2) voted to ban rental electric scooters from the streets of their city. While a total of 89 per cent of voters favoured the proposed ban, 11 per cent opposed it, according to DW. However, only 7 per cent of the 1.3 million eligible voters turned out for the referendum.
Speaking to the media after the result was declared, Paris’ Mayor Anne Hidalgo said, “Parisians have massively expressed themselves against keeping shared e-scooters”. She added, “They have given us a very clear roadmap, and we are going to abide by their decision.”
The city will completely do away with these battery-powered devices by September 1, 2023 — the day by which the contract that allows three companies, Dott, Tier and Lime, to operate around 15,000 e-scooters in Paris will come to an end.
The ban comes after months of intense debate on the subject as the number of accidents involving e-scooters or trottinette has continued to rise in the past few years.
Why has Paris banned e-scooters?
Paris became one of the first cities in Europe to adopt e-scooters when it introduced them in 2018. Seen as a green alternative to cars, these micro-vehicles can be left anywhere by users and picked up with the help of mobile apps. However, trottinette soon ran into trouble as many Parisians complained that they are “an eyesore and a traffic menace”, The Independent reported.
The backlash against e-scooters further escalated as they gained immense popularity among tourists. Critics allege that people are recklessly riding the battery-powered vehicles, flouting traffic rules and causing severe accidents.
This forced the local administration to come up with stringent regulations such as making designated parking zones, limiting the top speed and restricting the number of operators. But these measures didn’t lessen the growing aversion towards e-scooters among Parisians as the number of accidents involving them kept rising. DW recently reported that Paris registered 459 accidents involving e-scooters or similar vehicles in 2022, three of them were fatal.
Meanwhile, operators such as Dott, Tier and Lime disputed these allegations and claimed that “more accidents come from bikes and privately owned scooters, not their rental ones, in part because rental scooters’ top speed is limited at 12 miles an hour, and they automatically slow to less than 10 miles per hour in crowded streets.,” The Wall Street Journal said in a report.
Experts also debate if the micro-vehicles are environmentally friendly at all. A 2020 BBC report pointed out that although e-scooters are “emission-free at the point of use, the process of manufacturing, moving and managing them results in greenhouse gas emissions – which increase if they have a short lifespan.”
Ultimately, in January, Mayor Hidalgo announced a referendum on banning e-scooters from the streets of Paris. According to reports, more than 103,000 of the city’s 1.38 million registered voters cast their ballots and an overwhelming majority of them favoured banishing the micro-vehicles from Paris.
