Paris mayor could ban rental e-scooters, according to report 

The Mayor of Paris is seriously considering ending the city’s e-scooter rental schemes, according to reports in French media. 

Earlier this year news emerged that councillors in Paris were pushing to end the current shared scooter schemes in the city, run by three major providers, due to safety concerns. 

The final decision will fall to city mayor Anne Hidalgo,  and a recent report in L’Informe suggests the mayor could support the ban. 

In response to the safety concerns, the three micromobility operators in Paris – Lime, Dott and Tier – proposed a series of stringent new safety measures, which would make Paris “the city with the strictest scooter regulation in the world, according to Lime’s public affairs director Garance Lefevre. 

These measures include user age verification, vehicle registration plates, bans for repeat offenders, and financing of adapted e-scooters for disabled users. 

According to one source from L’Informe: “At this stage, we are seeing that the regulatory proposals made by the operators are not convincing.”  

The contract for Paris’ three micromobility operators is currently scheduled to expire on 23rd March, 2023. 

Paris currently has 15,000 rental electric scooters in operation.

Shared e-scooters were initially introduced in 2018, but authorities later reduced the number of schemes in operation following complaints from citizens, resulting in only three operators being allowed to run scooters in the city. 

The full list of safety proposals from Lime, Dott and Tier are: 

• User age verification: already established and will cover 100% of the fleet from Monday 28 November
• Vehicle registration plates: increasing rider accountability through easier reporting of highway code violations
• Banning offenders: Removing users who repeatedly violate the highway code
• Funding an experiment using camera technology to detect highway code violations
• Testing sidewalk detection technology to prevent sidewalk riding
• Education campaign produced by all three operators to raise awareness of highway code laws and responsible use
• Creation of a ‘micro-mobility observatory’ to produce independent data on uses and accidents, to be shared with city authorities
• Using technology to prevent overfilled parking spots and doubling the number of patrollers to move vehicles from full spaces. 
• Financing infrastructure which benefits e-scooter users by increasing the fee paid to the City of Paris
• Price incentives to encourage users to choose walking over very short trips
• Financing long-term rental of adapted e-scooters for disabled users in collaboration with OMNI