No more 20 kilometers per hour.
Anxious to restore the good cohabitation between users and pedestrians, the operators of self-service electric scooters Dott, Tier and Lime have decided to reprogram their scooters to prevent them from riding above 10 km / hour in nearly 700 zones of the capital.
What also restrain any pleasure, even kill the craze for these machines?
We wanted to test these “diminished” scooters on an arbitrarily chosen route.
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False start
11:20 am Departure from the Royal Palace. As usual, we find an electric scooter immediately. There even seems to be a little more than usual. Has the limit to 10 km / hour ever dissuaded more than one? This is what we will see. The app asks us as usual to scan the QR code of the scooter - the one we took is operated by the operator Dott - to unlock it. But a little novelty: the map available in the application now indicates different zones at reduced speed. The surroundings of the Louvre and the Tuileries gardens, the first part of our itinerary, are part of it. To take advantage of the few minutes of freedom that are offered to us before entering the "
slow zone".
», We decide to start at full speed, that is to say at 20 km per hour.
Arrived at the height of the Arc du Carrousel - the screen of the scooter then indicated 19 km / hour -, the machine brakes on its own, gradually increasing to a speed of 11 km / h, which it will maintain a brief moment before to cap at 10 kilometers per hour.
The deceleration is very smooth, a good thing because we were afraid of being thrown from the scooter after braking too hard.
The rest of the crossing of the gardens is done at this new maximum authorized speed.
It's slow and several joggers insult us to overtake us.
The Escape
11:30 am, arrival at the Concorde and exit from the “
slow zone
”. We would like to let go of the horses to better forget the “
Tuileries
”
phase,
but the traffic does not lend itself to this. Too bad, we take it upon ourselves, hoping to be able to “take
revenge
” in the next section. But in the gardens along Avenue Georges Clemenceau, rebelote, the scooter reaches a ceiling below 10 km / h. Fortunately, the sidewalks of the avenue are not concerned. We take advantage of it by going all the way. It's exhilarating, especially after being forced to pace barely faster than walking.
After the Champs-Élysées roundabout, we decide to change the mount, to check that all the operators have given themselves the same constraints.
Two minutes later, we are on Lime for the rest of our journey.
The rise of the Champs-Élysées is done at a good pace, in a final sprint like the Tour de France.
We slalom between tourists and we even afford the luxury of overtaking two other scooters.
Intoxicating.
At 11:40 am, it is the arrival at the Arc de Triomphe.
Twenty minutes of travel, for a little more than three euros, against twelve minutes by metro, for a little less than two euros.
Compared to an underground ride, the views were obviously sublime.
For the rest, we will leave it to the readers to judge the best means of transport.
