Self-service e-scooters have become commonplace on the streets of Paris since they were first introduced five years ago, but irresponsible use and a rising accident toll have hardened city hall’s attitude towards the popular mode of transport. On April 2 residents in the capital will vote on whether to ban them altogether.

Walking home from a picnic on the banks of the Seine in August 2022, Justine Haley was crossing a set of traffic lights when she was hit by an e-scooter. “I didn’t see it at all and I didn’t hear it,” says the hairdresser in her 40s. “I just remember the power of the scooter hitting my leg, and I fell to the floor on my side.”

As a friend helped Justine get up, the driver who hit her stopped to ask if she was okay and, when Justine said she was, swiftly drove away. “She didn’t wait to see, and I didn’t realise how bad it was because I must have gone into shock.”

By the time she reached the far side of the road, an egg-sized lump had swollen on her calf where the wheel of the trottinette – as e-scooters are known in France – made contact and the pain was making her woozy. “I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t stand up,” she says.

An X-ray at the hospital revealed nothing was broken, but it took her two weeks to be able to walk properly and her confidence was badly shaken. “I was traumatised by it. For two or three months after that, whenever I saw a trottinette while crossing the street I was shaking. Even now I’m probably more careful about crossing the roads in Paris than before.”

‘Road safety problems’

When Paris introduced self-service e-scooter rental in 2018 it became a world leader in embracing the new mode of transport. The trottinette was billed as a green alternative to cars that matched the city’s environmental aims. Take-up was spurred by permissive regulation and the rapid expansion of bike lanes in the capital.

Just five years later, Paris residents are being asked to vote in a referendum on whether to ban the self-service e-scooters, which can be rented by the hour and picked up and dropped off anywhere.

“They’re honestly not very ecological – they get damaged and they are left lying wherever,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told national television channel France 2 in January. “We can’t contain them in public spaces and they’re causing road safety problems, especially for older and disabled people.”

Incidents like Justine’s are common. Almost 500 people were injured in the capital by micro-mobility vehicles in 2022. At the hospital, she says the doctor who treated her was “really tired of it – I could see it in his face. He said he was dealing with trottinette accidents nearly every day.”

Even so, the scooters are still hugely popular. Usage soared in the wake of the pandemic, jumping 90% from September 2021 to August 2022. Each vehicle is currently used an average of 3.5 times a day ­in Paris – the highest rate of any city in Europe.

‘It was a mess’

Safety issues date back to their bumpy introduction in 2018. “It was a mess,” says Erwann le Page, Public Policy director at Tier – one of three self-service providers (along with Lime and Dott) now licensed in Paris. “You had over 20,000 scooters and around 20 different companies operating them.”

The sudden influx of scooters – with no dedicated parking spaces and few rules around usage – caused chaos for pedestrians, cyclists and cars.

Since then, Paris has tried to regulate the issue. The fleet is now capped at 15,000 vehicles. Speed limits, fines for misuse and dedicated parking zones have been introduced.

The three providers – Tier, Lime and Dott – have also stepped in with technological innovations to enforce regulations. Geofencing, for instance, can automatically reduce vehicle speeds in certain zones and charge users for parking in undesignated areas.

With multi-passenger e-scooters now involved in one in five accidents in Paris, technologies are also in the pipeline to prevent two people riding a scooter at the same time.

The pace of improvement has been rapid and there is the potential for more, le Page says. “Our industry didn’t exist five years ago. The speed of improvements over the last five years beats 50 years of evolution of cars.”

‘A polarised debate’

But for now, problems still persist. Dangerously parked scooters are commonplace and accidents are rising year on year.

In 2022, deaths among e-scooters drivers and pedestrians hit by e-scooters increased in the capital. In France, e-scooters caused at least 27 deaths in 2022, compared with 22 in 2021 and 7 in 2020.

“The wheels don’t look very big, but that’s what hit me,” Justine says. “They are really, really heavy, and very dangerous,”

Despite the risks, city-wide bans are rare. Barcelona is among the few European cities to have introduced then prohibited self-service e-scooters altogether – a move Hidalgo now favours.

The Paris mayor has said she will abide by the result of April’s referendum, which opponents expect to go in her favour. Turnout is set to be dominated by older citizens or those with strong reasons for favouring a ban, unless providers can mobilise their mostly young users.

Although self-service e-scooters are now available in 200 towns in France – and hundreds more around the world – le Page describes Paris as a “complex” city.

It has a densely-built urban area, and there is a Parisian tendency to “have your own ways of doing things”, he says, rather than follow the rules. In the five years that e-scooters have been integrating into Paris traffic, the city’s streets have undergone extensive changes that have caused general disruption.

At the same time, he says, “there is a real polarised debate around these scooters in Paris that is not the case everywhere else.”

A ban is unlikely to end discussions over the proper place for e-scooters on the streets of the capital.

Rental models are not the only option, and sales of personal e-scooters are rising by hundreds of thousands in France each year. More than 750,000 were sold in 2022.

Compared with rental models, personal e-scooters are “wild”, says Christian Machu, secretary general of national pedestrian association, 60 Millions de Piétons. They have significantly less controls on speed limits, parking, and how many passengers are on board, and no registration plates which would allow other road users to identify vehicles involved in incidents.

He says it’s a shame that Sunday’s referendum is only on self-service models. “For us, the question is over e-scooters in general – and private e-scooters in particular. Despite everything, self-service e-scooters are somewhat regulated and they have a certain number of safety precautions [in place]. They are not our biggest worry.”