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Paris will say adieu to electric scooters (Lime, Tier and Dott skid)

1 year ago babelfish

Paris will say adieu to electric scooters (Lime, Tier and Dott skid)

In Paris there was a referendum on rental electric scooters and almost 90% of voters said they were against it. Mayor Anne Hidalgo will therefore be the first in Europe to ban them. Facts, comments and criticisms (by Lime, Tier and Dott)

After the summer, rental e-scooters will disappear in Paris. The will of the people expressed itself in this regard. In fact, a consultative referendum was held yesterday in which almost 90% of Parisians voted for their abolition.

The mayor of the French capital, the socialist Anne Hidalgo, who had also spoken out against it, had promised that she would respect the result of the consultation.

THE REFERENDUM

"It is a referendum that turns into a plebiscite", writes Le Monde commenting on the results of the vote: yesterday 89.03% of Parisians voted against electric scooters for hire.

Despite the indisputable result, Le Parisien notes that only 1.3 million people who had registered on the electoral lists before March 3 could have cast their vote in the 21 polling stations opened for the occasion, but in the end only 103,084 voted of them.

Therefore, less than 8% of registered voters went to the polls and only those against were interested in expressing their opinion.

THE LOCATION OF HIDALGO

Although the first citizen had openly declared that she was against electric scooters – since their use causes too much anarchy and too many accidents – she said she was "surprised" by this massive refusal.

In an interview released last January, Hidalgo declared that he had nothing against citizen-owned scooters but that rental scooters represent a "real problem", that "it is not environmentally friendly" and the "employees of these companies are not adequately protected”.

WHO AND WHY IS AGAINST SCOOTERS

From the testimonies collected by Le Figaro we learn that the audience of opponents is quite varied. They range from adults who want to protect the elderly, who in some cases even say they are terrified of those who whiz around the street with scooters so much as to avoid going out, to the younger ones who declare themselves indignant at the lack of respect and incivility of those who use them and abandon them badly in any corner of the city or worse in the Seine.

POLLUTION AND ACCIDENTS

Since their arrival in the capital in 2018, electric scooters have split public opinion. Some, for example, writes Les Échos , consider them too polluting. According to a study conducted in Paris and cited in the article, they emit 60 grams of CO2 per kilometre, less than a car or bus, but more than the subway.

Another study addresses the issue of security. In fact, it emerged that 26% of users have already had an accident, 9% of which turned out to be serious.

THE ANSWER OF LIME, DR AND TIER

But neither the free ride offered on the day of the vote nor the influencers enlisted by Lime, Tier and Dott were enough for the operators to win favor.

In fact, according to Le Figaro , the three companies, although considering yesterday's vote "not very representative", have "acknowledged" it and confirmed that their service will not be renewed from 1 September.

THE CRITICISM

However, before the referendum they had wanted to share some criticisms of the conditions under which the consultation would take place. "It would have been interesting to integrate online voting – said Erwann Le Page, director of Public Affairs of Tier – in Paris 80% of our users are under 45 years old, clearly they are the most digitized and young people between 18 and 24 years old they are also the furthest from civilian life”.

For Hadi Karam, director general of Lime France, the opportunity to vote should have been given to a wider audience as scooters are often used in outlying areas to reach public transport that connects to the centre. Matthieu Faure, Director of Communications and Public Affairs of Dott, criticized instead both the choice of the day, since the Paris marathon was underway, and the decision to open only one polling station per arrondissement.

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES FOR OPERATORS

As Les Échos reports, for the three operators “Paris is a big market”. “Losing Paris would be a bad sign, it represents about 15-20% of our business,” Faure said of Dr.

Bfmtv and HuffPost speak of more than 800 jobs threatened by the result of the vote.

WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW

As this is a consultative referendum, the decision rests with the local administration and since Hidalgo had declared that he would respect the result of the vote, Paris will become the first European capital to ban electric scooters.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia-on-demand/parigi-dira-adieu-ai-monopattini-elettrici/ on Mon, 03 Apr 2023 09:22:09 +0000.