The phenomenon, revealed Tuesday by "Le Parisien", has taken an unsuspected scale in a few days. Since the deconfinement and the sunny days, groups of young people have taken the bad habit of hurtling down the wide sidewalks of the “most beautiful avenue in the world”, at full speed, in the evening, on electric scooters.
Dangerous and frightening rodeos for passers-by, sometimes carried out under the influence of laughing gas, which made the rounds of social networks and were quick to react to the police and political authorities.
New operations in the coming days
This Friday, the Paris Police Prefecture announced that it had proceeded the day before with 43 verbalizations following rodeos on the Champs-Elysées. 33 of these reports targeted users of scooters for traffic on the sidewalk, 4 for unauthorized wearing of headphones, 3 for traffic with a passenger, to which are added two bikes and a scooter fined for traffic on the sidewalk. These are 4th class tickets, ie 135 euros (90 euros if you pay immediately).
The prefecture ensures to remain "present and vigilant on this phenomenon". New police operations in this sector are not excluded in the coming evenings.
Rodeos on the # ChampsElysées: 43 verbalizations including 33 scooters yesterday. @ Prefpolice remains present and vigilant on this #SafetyRoute phenomenon. pic.twitter.com/P5lnKVPeWK
- Police Prefecture (@prefpolice) July 24, 2020The rental companies curb the speed on the Champs
The subject was also discussed at the Paris Council. A wish was proposed by the LR mayor of the 8th arrondissement, Jeanne d'Hauteserre. And, this Friday, the police chief Didier Lallement also raised the subject in front of the elected officials.
Questioned, the operators of self-service electric scooters indicate that they are working on a system of clamping machines at 8 km / h (instead of 20 km / h) in the Champs-Elysées sector.
Thanks to the geolocation of scooters, the maximum speed can be lowered in a very specific geographical area. The operator Dott announced Thursday that it would implement this limitation every weekend of the summer, from this Friday 10 p.m. until Monday 6 a.m., in the entire Champs-Elysées sector.
“This limitation, which is fairly easy to implement, is already in force in certain areas of central Paris and in Lyon. We informed the town hall on Wednesday that we were going to apply it on the Champs-Elysées, ”said a spokesperson for Dott.
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Lime, which has the largest fleet of scooters in the capital, is preparing to do the same. "Our technical teams are working on it and it should be effective very quickly," says a spokesperson for Lime.
Bird bans identified perpetrators
Bird, another major operator in Paris, has started to identify rodeo writers to permanently ban them from his app. “Research is still ongoing, but many are delinquents who use false profiles sometimes with stolen bank card numbers,” notes a Bird leader. Geolocated clamping is an option under study, but it has not yet been deployed on the Champs-Elysées.
Bird should also soon leave the capital because he was not selected in the call for applications from the City of Paris, which grants three operators the right to each operate 5,000 scooters, as of September. . The three winners are the American Lime, the Franco-Dutch Dott and the German TIER.
