How Paris, One Of The World’s Largest Scooter Rental Markets, Came To Ban Them

It was blip in the long, bumptious history of urban micro-travel, but it was a watershed moment nevertheless: Working pretty much around the clock on August 30-31, the trucks from Lime, Tier and Dott — the three remaining “free-floating electric scooter” (FFES) operators in Paris — rolled through Montmartre, the Marais, Pigalle, Chateau Rouge, St. Germain and districts both more and less fashionable to corral their combined total of 15,000 pieces of rental stock strewn in classic toss-the-thing, devil-may-care mangles, as pictured above. September 1 was the deadline, decreed by the April referendum in which Parisians rose to vote on the future of the rental versions of the things. The vox populi was very nearly unanimous: The full-on ban of rental scooters earned an astonishing eighty-nine percent of the votes.

C’est la vie: Poof, ghosted. There would be fewer cheeky hipsters zipping down the sidewalks of the City of Light upending themselves or others, helmet-free, while ignoring traffic rules, as the first person to die via e-scooter in Paris ignominiously did in 2019. The French have an apt diminutive for the e-scooter, la trottinette, as in, the little trotter. Those who owned a trottinette could keep them, and it’s arguable that the ban will only encourage more of the local rental riders to buy one. But the transient, non-resident, largely touristic market was iced.

Scooters first arrived in Paris in the early Teens, as they did pretty much everywhere else, and the pandemic’s arrival boosted the local use by leaps and bounds, as Parisians themselves avoided mass transit. But that first 2019 death ignited the increasingly ferocious national debate about this form of micro-travel in France. Political battle lines took shape, as in the wars to regulate Airbnb. The most populous, most touristically desirable and thus most affected city was Paris, where longtime Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s government quickly discovered that there was no body of law governing the things, no licenses required, no corporate accountability or possibility of identifying the renters who engaged in e-powered mayhem.

Between 2019-2022, that would change. Mayor Hidalgo’s government tightened the city’s grip on the operators, capped the fleet at 15,000, and forced an increasingly deep data-driven view of their customers. By 2023, if an ordinance violation or an accident occurred with an e-scooter, the city authorities could access the identity of the specific renter at the time of that event.

The second person to die by e-scooter in Paris was, predictably, a pedestrian, struck by a scooter ridden by two suburban off-duty nurses, both drunk on a purportedly jolly night out in town, in 2o21. The enormous irony that two nurses were the authors of the incident only fanned the flames of municipal distrust and ire. Last year, there were three deaths from a total of 400-plus electric-mobility vehicles, which resulted in 459 people being injured, according to the Paris police. (The police stats do not make a distinction between those injuries and/or accidents that were the result of rental vehicles.)

Adding momentum to the overwhelming majority of Parisians’ votes in the April referendum is, also, this general, growing defensive attitude in Europe’s more desirable tourist destinations: Much like the beleaguered residents of Venice, who are fighting tooth and nail to save their city from the cruise-line form of what’s come to be called ‘overtourism,’ Parisians are quite protective of their neighborhood streetscapes.

For instance: The charming, tourist-heavy Montmarte neighborhood lies 427 feet, or 131 meters up its eponymous hill. The hundreds of steps up that hill are steep. What Parisians are saying with the scooter ban is, if a tourist wants to come visit the basilica of Sacré-Cœur or the cafes around the iconic church, he or she is welcome. But those are pleasures that will have to be earned the old-fashioned way. There will be no more zipping up that hill on a rented scooter.