Parisians are voting for their first referendum in a decade this weekend, a referendum that will City-wide ban on e-scooters. It seems like the capital of France has bigger fish to fry right away? You then! But hey, everyone’s work still needs to be done in the midst of massive, sometimes violent, protests that last for weeks.
Paris was an early adopter of e-scooters, which resulted in the city being made available to everyone for free, making residents uncomfortable with this fast and flexible form of transportation, Wired explain:
Lime, a US escooter company that went to Paris in the summer of 2018, blamed a change of attitude towards politics. The city’s early tram adoption was chaotic and crowded. By 2019, there were at least 10 companies operating in the city without any regulation. That prompted the city government to take action in 2020, kicking seven operators out of Paris and imposing a limit of 5,000 electric vehicles on each of the remaining companies.
Lime was one of three survivors of the destruction. Xavier Mirailles, the company’s director of public relations in France, says that the changes have brought order to Paris. “Since that day of 2020, we have been in a nice place in the city,” he said as he drank orange juice in a cafe in District 9. “We have had a good relationship, with the partners. regular meetings.”
That changed with the election of David Belliard of the Green Party, the new deputy mayor now in charge of transportation, he said, in late 2020. With Belliard in office, scooter companies said. The relationship deteriorated and their meetings stopped. “We have to do quarterly service reviews with all the operators and this hasn’t happened in over a year,” said Mirailles. Belliard, who said in January that he supports the ban, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Why is an environmentally conscious deputy mayor in a famous city ready to completely ban cars Don’t want to cut down on car trips in the city by using supposedly eco-friendly transportation?
As it turns out, e-scooters are not as eco-friendly as they once appeared. Scooters live hard lives on these streets, being jostled, dumped or thrown around by disinterested users and business owners sick of seeing messy early designs on the streets. Pavement. Irresponsible scooter riders have also caused fatal crashes on the pavements in Paris or seriously injured themselves or others through falls or collisions. In Europe with a lot of pedestrians, collisions and bad behavior on scooters is a much more visible problem than in these states.
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But scooters certainly have their supporters, particularly from younger Parisians, who prefer the cheap mode of transit to expensive taxis or dangerous and often delayed public transit. They also feel messaging is being skewed in such a way as to lead voters on Sunday straight into a ban.
