Paris will become the first European capital to ban rented electric scooters on Friday, as the city hall vowed to “calm down” the streets, reports The Guardian.
Five years after Paris became the first city in Europe to open up to the “free-floating” shared e-scooter market in 2018, the last of the city’s 15,000 e-scooters were loaded into vans on Thursday afternoon, marking the end of an era.
The five-year rental e-scooter experiment in Paris, where scooters could be left anywhere and picked up by mobile app, saw very high usage – often by under-35s and students — but had been fraught with controversy.
For years, politicians had warned of safety concerns, stress to pedestrians and city streets being clogged up by parked scooters toppled into heaps, as well as questions over how much of a positive impact the scooters actually had on the environment.
In 2020, after complaints of anarchic use of e-scooters and Paris becoming a dangerous “jungle”, the city introduced the strictest regulations in the world, limiting the number of operators and automatically tracking and limiting speeds. But that wasn’t enough to calm the row.
In April, the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, called a referendum on the scooters, with almost 90% of people voting to ban them. It was celebrated as a win for direct democracy by the city hall, even though turnout was just 7.5%.