Paris bans e-scooters in bid to make streets safer

Parisians voted Sunday to banish electric scooters from the French capital’s streets.

“For or against self-service electric scooters in Paris?” read the mini-referendum posed by City Hall.

Scooters lost, with 90% of those who voted opting to banish them. Just 8% of those eligible to vote did so, reported BBC News.

The city will let three scooter companies’ contracts lapse when they come up for renewal in August. The businesses said they transported nearly 2 million people throughout the city last year.

The ban passed despite get-out-the-vote efforts by the those operators. The companies, Dott, Lime and TIER, conducted social media campaigns via Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, sometimes paying influencers to entice their main demographic, the 71% of Parisian users who are under age 35, to vote.

They even offered a free round-trip ride to users who entered the words “Je vote” — French for “I vote” — into their app. Nonetheless, just 103,000 of the 1.38 million people eligible to vote hit the polls, BBC News reported, and more than 91,300 of them voted no.

The scooters have become ubiquitous on Paris streets and are a mainstay for women and LGBTQ+ riders who feel safer on them than other forms of travel late at night, said Lime public policy director Garance Lefèvre.

“Paris has been the pioneer in terms of welcoming shared micro-mobility,” said Lefèvre. “Paris would really be an outlier if it decided to put an end to the service.”

On both sides of the Atlantic, the devices have caused concern on two fronts — street safety and battery volatility.

There have been crashes, at least one of them fatal, in Paris. In New York City, the battery-powered mini-vehicles have sparked a spate of recent fires, as well as being involved in accidents. The fire department has urged more action against the scooters after batteries sparked 22 fires, resulting in at least one death, in the first six weeks of this year alone.

With News Wire Services