British friends, learn from our mistakes! Don’t let e-scooters poison your lives as they did ours. Tame the monsters before they tame you.
Paris. Fast-rewind to 2018. At first, most of us thought they were cool. Eco-friendly and fun, they were the future of big cities’ “soft mobility”, as astute marketeers had put it. Being against electric scooters was simply a historic nonsense: backward-thinking, unprogressive. In other words, sinful. We could all remember the film footage of Parisians looking elated as they stood on the first moving electrical pavement serpentining along the Seine river at the Universal Exhibition of 1900. With e-scooters, we were ahead of our times again – or so we naively and arrogantly thought.
In 2018, most of us were in favour of electric trotinettes, as we call them. At first that is, before they quickly morphed into a plague of locusts and we were left counting the dead and injured in the streets of Paris. Within six months, our feelings towards the new devices went from awe to toleration, then to seething hatred.
From a few hundred their number quickly escalated to, officially, 20,000 – more than in the entire United States, according to a study by Boston Consulting in spring 2019. In fact, according to Geo4cast, there were at least 40,000 available, creating havoc in the French capital and driving its inhabitants crazy.
A dozen international providers had chosen Paris as their Frankenstein laboratory, without, it seems, consulting the French authorities. E-scooter riders were the new asphalt cowboys: they operated in a completely unregulated territory, as if in a legal vacuum.
Parisians’ favourite activity, walking, became fraught with danger. E-scooters surged from every corner like rats – the only difference being that rats try to avoid humans. As for parking their e-scooters – what parking? They left their hellish, dockless machines right in the middle of the pavement, right in front of your nose. I felt my blood curdling at the sight of elderly people, children, young mothers with buggies and blind people having to negotiate those new obstacles scarring Paris’s avenues and boulevards. This is when we started reading in the daily newspaper Le Parisien about the sharp rise in accidents, some fatal, involving e-scooters and pedestrians, e-scooters and cars, e-scooters and cyclists, e-scooters and trees, e-scooters and dogs. And this is when many of us started shouting at each other in the streets. “Get off the pavements!”, soon followed by “C’est pas possible, merde!”, and “Anne Hidalgo, this is your fault!”
Then somebody woke up at the Paris town hall. Perhaps they realised the next elections were upon them and they should be seen to be doing something to tackle this e-plague. Popular anger was such that they finally talked about enforcing rules for e-scooters. It was about bloody time. Many Parisians like me felt like survivors, having had three near-death encounters with e-scooters.
Today, the rules are clear: the speed limit is 25km per hour, and parking should be done in designated spaces (except that there are only 2,500 such spaces planned). The minimum age to ride an e-scooter is 12, and no more than one person should mount them. The number of operators is about to be capped at three, and the number of scooters at 15,000. However, old habits die hard, and many e-scooters, whose motors have been tampered with, are often seen whizzing at more than 40km per hour. And they are still scattering the pavements, blocking everyone’s way. The threat of a €35 fine doesn’t seem very convincing.
British friends, you are warned. Embrace the e-revolution if you will, but don’t hesitate to break its neck before it breaks yours.
Agnès Poirier is a Paris-based political commentator, writer and critic
