Scooter for rent in Paris.
At least they have a metro as an alternative (Photo: Lime)
Paris will be the first major city in Europe to ban the use of electric scooters.
In a referendum among the city's residents initiated by Mayor Ann Hidalgo, almost 90% voted in favor of stopping the use of electric tools.
Despite the clear majority, the number of participants in the referendum was small: only 103 thousand voters out of 1.38 residents registered in the electoral register in the city.
91.3 thousand people voted against the continued use of scooters.
The referendum was decided following residents' complaints about the dangerous riding of the scooter riders, including at 25 km/h on sidewalks, when in Paris even 12-year-old boys were legally allowed to rent the tools. There were also many complaints about scooters thrown on sidewalks and in parks throughout the city, a phenomenon that is not It was stopped even after the municipality imposed a fine of 35 euros on it.
In 2021, an Italian tourist (31) was killed after being hit by two scooter riders, suffered a blow to the head and suffered a cardiac arrest.
An electric scooter hunter in Paris retrieves a scooter from the river.
October 26, 2019. (Photo: Reuters)
The scooter rentals in Paris, Lime, Dott and Tier, which also operate in Israel, encouraged their customers to vote in the referendum and even offered free rides yesterday, but it seems that the customers did not show up at the polling stations.
This is partly because the tools became popular among tourists, which added to the resistance of the city's residents to their use.
Electric scooters entered Israel in the last decade, when the Ministry of Transportation belatedly completes legislation that regulates their use.
In Tel Aviv, where the scooter companies operate about 10,000 vehicles for rent, thousands of riders and pedestrians are injured in accidents each year, hundreds of them hospitalized.
The trips in rented vehicles make up about a third of the trips in the electric vehicles, and precisely the rented vehicles are limited in speed in certain places in the city, a limitation that cannot be imposed on the private vehicles.
The Municipality of Tel Aviv encourages the use of vehicles as a substitute for a private car, when, unlike Paris, Israel does not yet have a widespread subway, and the operation of the first line of the light rail in the center, which will operate as a metro in the part that runs through the city, has been repeatedly postponed. The rented vehicles make tens of thousands of trips a day, and bring the riders to their destination much faster than the bus lines.
On the other hand, as in Paris, many of the users of the electric tools do not live in the city, but visitors from other cities who come to it for work, studies, and recreation, some of them tourists.
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Hundreds of electric scooter riders are hospitalized in Tel Aviv every year.
In the video: a female rider was killed by a truck
In the video: An electric scooter rider was killed by a truck in Tel Aviv (Photo: Yossi Bar Lev/ People of the Silence)
The decision of the Parisians is already turning the question of activation into one of the points of contention in the upcoming municipal elections.
Tzipi Brand, who is running for mayor, said in response that "Unlike the mayor of Paris, in Huldai's democracy there is no place for a referendum, nor is there a safe space for pedestrians on the sidewalks. With a quarter of the residents of Paris, we are flooded with almost 10,000 scooters in the city, compared to 15,000 there. It's time to put this in order. Paris voted - no to scooters. Now it's Tel Aviv-Jaffa's turn to let its residents take back the safety of the sidewalks."
In Jerusalem, for example, Mayor Moshe Leon refuses to allow scooter rental companies to operate, arguing that the city still doesn't have enough bike lanes.
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