Paris—the most touristed city in the world—has pioneered many urban policies, rolling out the world’s first city-run bike-sharing program nearly 16 years ago, attracting global praise for its prolific bike lanes.
Now it’s about to add this: The first city to ban electric scooters.
In a citywide referendum on Sunday, just 7.46% of 1.3 million registered voters opted overwhelmingly to ban the 15,000 rental scooters licensed to operate on Paris streets.
Asked to choose ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to scooters, 89.3% voted no—a result that Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo hailed on Monday as “a great victory for local democracy.”
But was it also a victory for political maneuvering?
That’s the charge from the three companies with licenses for 5,000 rental scooters each in Paris: San Francisco operator Lime, Amsterdam’s Dott, and Berlin-based Tier Mobility SE.
In interviews with Fortune on Monday, all three said they believed Paris officials deliberately designed a referendum that seemed guaranteed to result in a ban.
A political issue
“It became a political issue. We saw it all the way along,” Dott’s global public-relations head Rob Haycocks told Fortune on Monday by phone from London. The vote, he says, was “heavily skewed towards older age groups.”
That view is shared by French Minister of Transportation Clément Beaune, a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron, and contender to succeed Hidalgo as mayor. He severely criticized the referendum, saying Paris held no public hearings, and that the blanket yes-no choice excluded many alternatives.
Scooter companies say they believe the referendum was rigged against them.
The vote, they point out, was held the day of the Paris Marathon, in which 35,000 runners, including many young Parisians, participated; there were only 21 voting stations, compared with thousands in last year’s presidential election; no online voting was allowed; the cut-off date to register to vote was on March 3. In addition, only those with French or European Union citizenship were permitted to vote, ruling out many Paris tax-payers.
“American companies with money”
“Turnout was abysmally low,” a Lime spokesperson told Fortune in an email on Monday. That, he says, was “a result of how the city designed the structure of the vote.”
Philippe Carrant, 62, a wine broker, told Fortune on Monday that he voted ‘yes’ in Sunday’s referendum, but noticed that most voters at the central Paris polling station were older than him.
He says that fact, together with the nearly 90% ‘no’ result, suggested a problem. “It is like a vote in Russia, not in a democracy,” he says. “There was no debate.”
In Carrant’s mind, the vote suggested a reflexive tendency among many French to reject what appears elitist or foreign. “There’s a lot of anger against the scooters,” he says. “People somehow see it as a way of life from American companies with money, something for bo-bos,” he says, using slang for “bourgeois bohemians.”
The companies’ licenses expire on August 31, and Hidalgo, who has favored a ban, told reporters on Monday that the scooters would be gone from September 1.
The three companies seem unconcerned about other cities following Paris’s ban, saying e-scooter rentals are expanding elsewhere, including in other French cities, like Grenoble and Lyon. “The decision of Paris goes against the global trend,” Tier spokesman Florian Anders said in an email from Berlin. “Paris has isolated itself from the rest of the world.”
Bike lanes and car-free roads
Paris’s mayor has made green transportation the cornerstone of her tenure, closing off key arteries to car traffic, and opening hundreds of miles of bike lanes. Hidalgo was reelected in 2020 to a second six-year term, in coalition with the increasingly popular Greens.
But city officials have long expressed a preference for bicycles, in particular the city-run Vélib, which Paris launched in 2007, years ahead of New York, London, and other cities. In 2020, during an interview with Hidalgo, I mentioned I had circled City Hall for a long while on an electric scooter, looking for a legal parking spot. “You should have taken a Vélib,” she shot back.
Paris’s Deputy Mayor for mobility, Green politician David Belliard, has also expressed his opposition to scooters, describing them to France’s Journal du Dimanche paper before the referendum as “the phenomenon of an urban jungle,” with an accident rate far higher than bicycles.
“A super laboratory”
That contradicts a study the city commissioned from consultancy firm 6T.
In it, 26% of electric-scooter users said they’d suffered an accident while riding them—compared with 51% of Vélib riders.
“Will the next step be to ban Vélib?” asked French Greens politician Karima Delli, who chairs the European Parliament’s transportation committee.
“Paris is a super laboratory,” she told Journal du Dimanche last month, adding that scooters are “an efficient way to put an end to cars.”
In fact, Vélibs face increasing competition. Lime, Uber, Dott, and Tier rolled out electric bikes in Paris in 2018; unlike Vélib, they do not require locking stations. The city says Vélib’s 19,000 bikes has about 390,000 users—roughly equal to the rental e-scooters.
Lime, Tier, and Dott could challenge Paris’s scooter ban in court, but might be reluctant to do so, given their ongoing business in the city.
“Lime operates more e-bikes in Paris than it does e-scooters,” the company’s spokesperson said in an email on Monday. In February, Lime announced it had become the first e-scooter company to post full-year profitability, with a 33% increase in users in 2022.
