The citizens of Paris voted overwhelmingly to ban electric scooters from the streets of the French capital in a “mini-referendum.”
Around 15,000 rental e-scooters could disappear from central Paris by the end of August, by the time the city’s contracts with three operators of these small vehicles expire.
The question the City Council posed to voters in its city-wide mini-referendum on Sunday was: “For or against self-service scooters in Paris?”
The result was overwhelmingly clear: The council said on its website that some 103,000 people voted, with 89 percent rejecting electric scooters and just 11 percent supporting them.
But overall turnout was low, with voting open to all of Paris’ 1.38 million registered voters.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo hailed the vote as a success and reiterated her promise to respect the result of the consultative referendum.
The “very clear message from the voters now becomes our guide,” he said. “With my team, we will follow up on his decision as he promised.”
Scattered across Paris, easy to locate and rent with a downloadable app, and relatively cheap, scooters are a hit with tourists who love their speed and accessible freedom.
In the five years since their introduction, following in the footsteps of car sharing and bike sharing, e-scooters have also gained a following among some Parisians who don’t want or can’t afford their own vehicle but like the option of escaping the subway and others. public transport.
Yet many Parisians complain that e-scooters are an eyesore and a threat to traffic, and micro-vehicles have been involved in hundreds of accidents.
The citizens of that city argued that they were more prone to accidents on the roads; some have alleged that those who used the scooters “constantly rub pedestrians on the sidewalks”, while they go at the maximum possible speed and some organized citizens took refuge in the 408 accidents that were registered in 2022, in which three people died and 459 were injured.
In addition, several have reported accidents related to the batteries of these small vehicles; it should be remembered that the battery of an electric bicycle caused a massive fire that devastated a grocery store located in the Bronx, leaving seven people injured, barely a month ago.
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11 people have died and 251 have been injured in fires caused by e-bike batteries in NYC since 2021