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Paris to ban electric scooters from being left on pavements

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has had enough of the thousands of electric scooters being left on pavements around the French capital. She has also announced other measures in a bid to better regulate the vehicles.

Published: 6 June 2019 15:51 CEST
Paris to ban electric scooters from being left on pavements
Photo: AFP

The mayor has also ordered a speed limit cut after a worrying rise in the number of accidents involving electric scooters, known as trottinettes electriques in French.

An estimated 20,000 scooters operated by several companies have flooded the French capital since their introduction last year, a number projected to surge to 40,000 by the end of this year.`

In March Paris banned the vehicles from being used on footpaths in a bid to protect pedestrians but now Mayor Anne Hidalgo doesn't even want the vehicles parked on the pavements or in parks for that matter.

A joint decree taken out with the city's police will be published on July 1st to enforce the ban.  

This follows complaints from residents who are fed up with the scooters blocking the narrow footpaths. The vehicles, which are often left in groups of fours and fives, regularly topple over and leave streets looking like scrap heaps.

From now on Hidalgo insists the scooters must be parked on roads in designated parking bays reserved for bikes or mopeds. The City Hall also plans to create another 2,500 parking places for the “free floating” vehicles, which will be well marked.

The mayor also wants to reduce the total number of e-scooters in use on the capital's roads as well as the number of rental operators.

She will also order operators to cut the maximum speed the vehicles can travel at.

“I am asking the operators to limit the speed to 20km/h around the city and to 8km/h in pedestrianised streets,” said Hidalgo.

The current maximum speed is set at 25km/h although the scooters provided by Uber (Jump) already have a 20/km/h limit.

There has been a huge rise in the number of accidents involving the e-scooters with some riders left with horrific injuries after colliding with cars, motorbikes on pedestrians.

Questions are being asked over whether users need to take out special insurance given that some providers do not include it in the rental scheme.

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Member comments

  1. Bravo but it seems to be just talk. Who will enforce the law and issue the fines to those who do not respect the laws. The operators must know who was the last person to use the scooter which should be passed to the authorities in the case of these being abandoned on a pavement or in the road.

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Paris considers ban on electric scooters after pedestrian’s death

Paris has threatened to ban e-scooters if their operators don't enforce speed limits and other rules after a pedestrian was knocked down and killed by two riders who fled the scene.

Published: 30 June 2021 14:06 CEST
Paris considers ban on electric scooters after pedestrian's death
Photo: Ludovic MARIN / AFP.

Some 15,000 devices are available for rental across the city, where they are supposed to travel no faster than 20 km/h with one rider only, and only on streets or bike paths.

Critics say those rules are hardly enforced, and abandoned scooters are often seen scattered on sidewalks and squares.

“Either the situation improves significantly and scooters find their place in public areas without causing problems, in particular for pedestrians, or we are studying getting rid of them completely,” deputy mayor David Belliard, in charge of transportation, told AFP late on Tuesday.

“Other cities have done it,” he said, citing the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux as well as New York and Barcelona.

On Saturday, police charged a nurse with aggravated manslaughter over a fatal collision earlier this month with a 32-year-old Italian woman living in Paris, who was standing on the banks of the Seine talking with friends when she was hit.

The rider and a passenger on the same scooter fled the scene and were found after a 10-day search.

The woman’s death, which brings to at least three the number of people fatally hit by e-scooters in Paris since 2019, revived the debate over allowing the devices on the city’s streets.

Belliard said he had summoned executives from the three e-scooter operators, Lime, Dott and Tier, telling them he had received “lots of negative feedback about scooters on sidewalks, the sense of insecurity, and scooters abandoned in the streets.”

Their contracts, which add nearly €1 million a year to the city’s coffers, run through October 2022, when they risk not being renewed, Belliard said.

He added that starting on Wednesday, operators must ensure that scooter speeds do not exceed 10 km/h in several “slow zones” in central Paris, including the popular Republique and Bastille squares, where the city has recently added large pedestrian zones.

Operators are able to install speed brakes that come on automatically if the scooter enters slow zones, which are programmed into the GPS units.

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