Paris Votes To Ban Rental E-scooters - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  While 90% of the voters expressed against, the turnout only represented 7.5% of the Parisian registered voters. Local vote like these have no legal value (which might explain the low participation), but Mayor Hidalgo had previously announced her decisions would abide to the result.

  • Re:

    Yeah this stuff should never go to referendums. The council/govt should instead have put in the work required to (a) quantify what actual harms these things were causing and (b) attempt to come up with regulations that mitigate those harms. Your average voter cannot weigh up how many people might be benefitting from these things (cheaper/faster commute to work etc) vs the harm they might be causing. Many will just vote no if they once had some young hooligan blast past them in a traffic jam. It's stupid to

• People banned them because they were worried about having to look around for people on scooters - however there are still a lot of people who own scooters and use them in the city, and those are still OK as far as I can tell.

  So I'm not sure this will make life that much better for the average person who voted for the ban.

  That said I'm indifferent to cities allowing them or not, though in a few places I have found them handy. I prefer a bike but rental facilities for those do take up more space and cost mor

  • Re:

    Actually E-scooters don't have any such facilities at all, which is both part of their appeal, and a huge reason for the problems they cause.

    When done with them, you can just leave them wherever your are, meaning no walk from the closest facility to your actual destination.

    But that also means that the less considerate users will just literally leave them in the middle of the side-walk without any regards whatsoever for the other users of the sidewalk... some of which might just take them and toss them int

  • Re:

    I guess that's a cultural difference between Paris and most of the major cities in the USA. People here who can't stand the scooters are generally of that opinion because the scooters sitting around waiting for a customer are an eyesore and become an ecological hazard when vandals throw them into lakes. [slate.com]

    The only sort of scooters I regularly see adults riding in my neck of the woods are ICE-powered Chinese TaoTao scooters and their various clones. Those are actually street legal, but they still manage to be

• John Wick should have used one for his trip around the arc de triomph. That would have demonstrated their safety

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    It would have been better for him to negotiate through the pick-pockets on the Metro.

• Non-rental scooters aren't affected. Since they're allowing 12-year-old "drivers", that means a lot of untrained riders are out there on rentals... but also on non-rentals.

  Seems like they are fixing part of a problem, and claiming victory.

  • Re:

    On the contrary, it fixes almost all of the problem. The problem is not so much the scooters, it's the people that rent them. Because they don't see the scooters at as their property they don't treat them with the same caution and respect.

    I say good riddance.

  • Re:

    I think the rental ones were more perceived as dangerous because (allegedly) young people don't care because it's not theirs -- they can have another one at next street corner if previous one broke, and daddy won't scold them, won't threaten to take it away from them, won't even know. Also, rentals end up everywhere in a mess.

• I don't live in a city with these scooters around, so I don't care one way or another. However, I suspect that if you put it to a vote, then residents of tourist heavy cities would probably ban anything to do with tourists. You might even see them ban tourists altogether.

• I've got a feeling this is one of those cases where a change is made that may have moved the mode of transport rather than increased powered transportation, with mixed results. But because it's extremely visible, people may be focusing on it and not noticing the overall affects.

  To put it another way, if it reduced car traffic by 1% (maybe because it cut a chunk out of rental car traffic), but over all increased powered transportation road traffic by 10%, it's going to be hard to tell whether it was actua

• Safety isn't a concern here. They just don't want their streets cluttered with a bunch of e-scooters at every corner. It takes away from the beautiful views they have from sidewalk bistros of the street fires and mounting trash piles.

• Whenever modes of transport are in conflict with one another on shared infrastructure it becomes a problem. Drivers hate cyclists on the road. Pedestrians hate cyclists on the footpath. There is a clear winner here ultimately with most cyclists cycling on the road or having a part of the road dedicated for cycling paths.

  Along come e-scooters. Where do they go? The things are basically too dangerous to share traffic with cars (unless suicide is your thing), and too dangerous to share traffic with pedestrians

• They leave these damn things in the middle of the sidewalk (they're not supposed to be on the sidewalk anyway) and can't even be bothered to return them to the designated parking zones. For wheelchair-bound people it's becoming a real problem. Start fining the operators and the rental companies every time this happens -- shouldn't be too hard as each one is GPS tracked and tied to someone's personal account. Also as they're motorized vehicles that are supposed to use the road they should be subject to th