Paris votes to ban e-scooters, will other cities follow suit?

Paris says 'Au-Revoir' to e-scooters!

Elecrtic scooters have become increasingly popular in cities across the world, including cities in Saudi Arabia.

With numerous companies such as Lime, Careem and Gazal now offering easily accessible e-scooters for easy, quick and relatively cheap movement around our big cities, these zippy forms of transport have become increasingly common place used by many.

But, are they becoming more of a public hinderance than anything else?

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The e-scooter-sharing market encompasses services that offer temporary electric motorised scooter rentals, generally in city centre areas. Within this model, e-scooters are typically owned by providers and can be individually booked by customers at any time via a mobile application. To access these services, customers must create accounts with the e-scooter-sharing provider and can subsequently make reservations for the scooters, usually through a smartphone app.

In 2022, the global e-scooter market was estimated to be worth approximately $33.18 billion USD.

However, after a public vote in April, the results were announced this week and Paris declared these e-scooters more of a public nuisance than helpful.

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Even though more than 400,000 locals and tourists regularly use these e-scooters, the French capital has become the first European city to ban the two-wheeled hop-on-hop-off vehicles.

Parisians were asked to vote either in support of, or against the rental of e-scooters in the city. And, the result of the poll was a resounding 'nay'.

Companies popular in France such as Lime, Dott and Tier must remove their scooters from the streets of Paris by a relatively quick September 1 deadline.

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This means retrieving a staggering 14,000 e-scooters from the city centre streets in less than one week.

Although France's capital city is notoriously congested, Parisians and tourists alike will no longer be able to use e-scooters - it was confirmed that a brand new and expanded fleet of ebikes will be introduced ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games.

It was hoped that there would be a reprieve on this vote as voter turn out was low, with just one in ten turning out to vote in this referendum. Other major French cities such as Lyon and Marseille will maintain their e-scooters fleets.

According to Statista, the user rate of e-scooters across the Kingdom is set to reach over 227,500 by 2027, with an annual growth rate of 5.72% per anum from 2023-2027.

Would you be for or against removing e-scooters from use?