Parisians have voted to ban for-hire electric scooters in a landmark referendum on shared transport.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the vote to remove roughly 15,000 e-scooters from the French capital sent a “very clear message” to the industry.
Figures from City Hall show that 89 per cent of voters rejected e-scooters, though turnout was less than 10 per cent of the city’s registered voters.
“We regret that Parisians will lose a shared and green transport option” a spokesperson for the electric scooter provider Dott told The Independent.
“The result of this vote will have a direct impact on the travel of 400,000 people per month, 71 per cent of whom are 18-35 year old residents. It is a step back for sustainable transport in Paris ahead of the 2024 Olympics.”
Ms Hidalgo hailed the vote as a success and repeated her vow to respect the outcome of the consultative referendum. The voters’ “very clear message now becomes our guide”, she said. “With my team, we’ll follow up on their decision as I had pledged.”
Scattered around Paris, easy to locate and hire with a downloadable app and relatively cheap, the scooters are popular with both tourists and some residents.
In the five years since their introduction, however, many Parisians have complained that e-scooters are an eyesore and a traffic menace, and the micro-vehicles have been involved in hundreds of accidents.
“I preferred to vote against, because in Paris it’s a mess,” said 47-year-old railway worker Ibrahim Beutchoutak. “The way it’s organised, the danger that it creates in Paris, the visual pollution, it’s not good.”
General physician Audrey Cordier, 38, said: “In my work, we see a lot of road accidents caused by scooters, so we really see the negative effects.”
Some voters said they would have rather had tighter regulations than an outright ban.
“I voted for [the scooters] because I’m against the rather binary choice we’re given in this referendum. I don’t want scooters to do whatever they want on pavements, but banning them is not the priority,” Pierre Waeckerle, 35, said.
Ms Hidalgo and some of her deputies campaigned to banish the “free floating” rental flotilla – so called because scooters are picked up and dropped off around town at their renters’ whim – on safety, public nuisance and environmental cost-benefit grounds before the capital hosts the Olympic Games next year.
E-scooter operators in Paris like Lime and Tier had launched ad campaigns on social media in an effort to encourage users to vote in the referendum.
The services will end at the expiration of the permits issued to providers, which are valid until 1 September.
Additional reporting from agencies.
