Paris appears to have taken app-rentable electric scooters to its heart, with thousands of them on the street from companies such as Lime, Jump, Wind, Tier, Bird and almost any other four-letter name you could imagine—but the love is mixed with irritation as 15,000 or more of them zip down crowded sidewalks or are left blocking the way.
Now the city is taking action, both by working on new regulations for their safe use and possible limits, and by calling the scooter companies to City Hall for a scolding. The scooter bosses were also asked to sign a voluntary “good conduct” charter.
The city’s deputy mayor for transport told Le Parisien that “If self-regulation fails, we will have to temporarily ban the service, until the LOM (the new transport law currently under consideration in the French parliament) is adopted.”
The scooters are supposed to ride in the street or bicycle lanes, not on sidewalks, are capable of 25 miles per hour and are considered too dangerous to mix with pedestrians, though they frequently do. New rules in Paris, expected to extend to the rest of the country by September, pose a €135 fine for sidewalk driving and €35 for obstructive parking.
