Paris banned the rental of electric scooters: what awaits Russia

The French capital is saying goodbye to an era: there are only a few days left before the three pillars of Parisian kicksharing – Dott, Lime and Tier – completely curtail their activities in the city. This is the result of last spring’s urban referendum, during which 89% of the voters (though representing only 7% of the inhabitants of Paris) decided that the per-minute rental of electric scooters in the city is not the place.

Formally, the referendum was deliberative, but Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a long-time opponent of kicksharing, happily recognized its results and made a decision accordingly. Now renting a scooter at a price of 22 euro cents per minute (note that prices are slightly lower in Moscow) will not be available, and 15,000 scooters and a number of employees of the three companies will look for other work. The opportunity to work during the summer was a kind of courtesy from the city authorities – it is the warmest season of the year that usually generates the most profit due to the long daylight hours and the large number of tourists in Paris.

“Paris is an exception in this regard,” one of the outgoing kickshare services noted, pointing to more cosmopolitan cities like Brussels where the kickshare market is thriving. At the same time, the French capital was among the first cities in the world where the per-minute rental of electric scooters began to develop. Since 2019, however, 189% growth has exceeded the capacity of the urban environment to “digest” new road users. In an address regarding the closure of services, Ann Hidalgo noted that electric scooters have caused an increase in the level of tension in the urban community.

SIM has become a similar bone of contention in large Russian cities, and for about the same reasons as in France. The ease of renting impersonal electric scooters provokes (especially the owners of “fake” accounts) dangerous driving and boorish “parking” of devices. The additions to the traffic rules, which were released in Russia this spring and oblige SIM owners to a lot, have not yet played their due role – unlike vehicles with numbers, the inevitability of punishment for violators is not ensured.

In Moscow, from January to July 2023, there were 338 accidents with electric scooters. One person died in them and 356 were injured. At the same time, according to statistics for the first 9 months of 2022, only 4% of such accidents occurred on pedestrian zones or sidewalks, but they are becoming the most resonant. For comparison, bicycles got into an accident 249 times, 250 people were injured, three died.

Often (and largely due to the tense atmosphere around the topic), incidents with electric scooters become a prologue to fights and even attempts to lynch the culprit: for example, on the Bolshoi Ustyinsky Bridge on August 28, the scooter who knocked down the girl was beaten by her companions, throwing the vehicle into Moscow – river.

“I wouldn’t do that, but I understand them,” says Anna, the mother of a 6-year-old boy who was hit by an electric scooter. “After all, according to the law, it is almost impossible to punish such a person, camera records are not provided without a determination of the driver’s guilt, and he is not found guilty without cameras.

As a result, since the problem remains acute, a bill was submitted to the State Duma giving municipalities the right to prohibit kicksharing on their territory or limit the speed of SIM based on the results of the will of residents.

This step is almost a clear “aggression” against kicksharing operators. Commenting on the initiative, a representative of one of the domestic operators of this service emphasized that the accident rate in recent months, according to internal telemetry statistics, has been decreasing, and the dialogue with the administrations of settlements is ongoing.

“The proposed initiatives are more likely to harm the transport scenario for the use of scooters, and the new mode of transport will be incapacitated within the restrictions, or these restrictions may still affect something,” the operator’s representative said. In particular, the company stressed that they are working productively with the administration of the districts of St. Petersburg, in particular, regarding the new “slow zones” established at the request of residents.

Recall that similar work is being done in Moscow: in agreement with the mayor’s office, kicksharing operators introduce “slow zones” in parks, as well as where too fast SIMs interfere with pedestrians. In particular, one of such zones was the neighborhood of the Patriarch’s Ponds, the activity of the inhabitants of which in terms of combating busy traffic and evening entertainment has been known for many years.

Thus, new regulatory acts make it possible to restrict (prohibit or introduce “slow zones”) the work of kicksharing. But besides it, there are personal, owned by the owners, SIM. It seems that precisely in order to prevent the “private owners” from having decisive advantages over the rental operators, other restrictive measures are also proposed – affecting everyone at once. So, in August, the capital’s transport workers announced that scooters and even bicycles abandoned “at random” would be evacuated to a special parking lot.

The criterion for the correct parking of rental scooters is simple: they can only be left at the appropriate racks marked in the rental services. But personal SIMs and bicycles (except for wheelchairs) “should also not interfere with other road users,” the department said.

The evacuation algorithm will be the same as with cars. And this is interesting, because, according to representatives of Deptrans, “only the owners or their representatives will be able to pick up equipment from special parking lots, providing documents for the ownership of each vehicle.” But if the documents confirming the ownership of a motor vehicle are understandable – a certificate of registration or a PTS of the established form – then such documents have not been invented for bicycles and electric scooters.

– It is possible to prove ownership of property, in accordance with the Civil Code, by proving the fact of its acquisition, – lawyer Alexei Golubev notes. – In other words, if a scooter or a bicycle was recently bought in a store, you can present its passport with the serial number, as well as a receipt for the purchase. As a rule, no one has documents about the possession of used SIMs or bicycles, which means that the ownership will have to be proved in court, using the testimony of witnesses, photographs and other evidence.

A guarantee that a parked bike or scooter does not violate the rules and does not interfere with anyone can only be given by the fact of parking on a special rack. Such racks continue to be installed by the city – for example, parking lots for a total of 24 units of “transport” have recently appeared near the stations of the new MCD-3. Anything beyond that is done at your own risk. So it turns out that it will be more reliable to take a rental scooter – put it on the official rack and you are not afraid of evacuation.

And will we end up “like in Paris”? Considering that in the first 6 months of this year, the profit of only one federal kicksharing operator amounted to 4.4 billion rubles, this very profitable business will probably not leave the country just like that. Try to negotiate first.