> What is replaced is a subway, bus, bike, or walking trip. Perhaps on some rare occasions a taxi/Uber. Apart from that last rare occasion, all other alternatives are MORE eco-friendly than the e-scooters.

I firmly believe that people running the scooter rental companies know that they can only succeed by destroying public transit. A survey in Norway showed that over half of the trips on rental scooters replaced public transit, and less than 10% replaced trips in private cars.

The detrimental affects on public transit, the relatively high injury rates, the disregard the riders have for the blind and handicapped who have to navigate around the scooters being left in the middle of the sidewalk, and just the sense of urban blight from them being left everywhere all add up to enough reason to ban the things.

> survey in Norway showed that over half of the trips on rental scooters replaced public transit, and less than 10% replaced trips in private cars

I’d be careful about extrapolating these results across cities. In most American cities, for example, I’m going to replace an e-scooter with an Uber.

Most of the modern world has common public transport, the US is a weird edge case.

You clearly haven't explored the modern world then. Or may have visited 3-5 cities and think you have seen it all. Some non-US metro areas where I found public transport to be inadequate based on my travels in the last 3-4 months - Toronto, Vancouver, Bangalore, Mumbai.

I've been to over 20 countries, many of which I'd consider modern world. I would have been to > 80 cities.

I spent months in both Vancouver and Torono without a car, and both have perfectly workable public transport systems, with Toronto's being a bit better. Both are better than every US city I've been to, and scooters replace neither.

India is a third world country with a pretty low standard of living. I haven't been to Bangalore or Mumbai, but I can't imagine them being relevant to this discussion.

> both have perfectly workable public transport systems

Only if you confine yourself to downtowns. Which is why I said metro areas.

> India is a third world country

It is a third world country with lots of modern parts. If you don't think Mumbai or Bangalore or modern cities, that just means you have a very different definition of what modern means.

You seems to have missed the context of this comment chain. We were discussing cities. I have no idea what a "metro" or "downtown" is.

> I’d be careful about extrapolating these results across cities. In most American cities, for example, I’m going to replace an e-scooter with an Uber.

I also never said modern cities, I said "the modern world", of which India would generally not be considered part of. I may have defined that poorly though, my bad.

> I firmly believe that people running the scooter rental companies know that they can only succeed by destroying public transit.

This is irrelevant for cities with dense metro network like Paris. Rental scooter and bikes are just complementing the public transit offer. They also allow to have a lower load in the public transit, which is a benefit in place where the public transit is already overloaded at rush hours.

I imagine you must feel the same way, but 20x stronger, about cars, right? Everything you said is even worse, only we've become accustomed to it and treat it as natural (one knocked over scooter? outrageous. 4 lanes of traffic and 2 of parking? par on course).

> that over half of the trips on rental scooters replaced public transit, and less than 10% replaced trips in private cars.

But did it improve travel time?

> Now a last misconception is that this ban is bad because people will revert to cars. No they won't. In the first place, people riding rental e-scooters do not replace a car trip by a rental e-scooter trip

This is a hard one to qualify completely. There is a lot of statistical evidence that infers that greater usage of e-Scooters and e-Bikes decreases car traffic. That may not be the case in Paris (and I can definitely see that being true) but it does go against everything we know statistically.

There are other points though, "last mile" is a difficult problem, it's not solved with bicycles (they are too onerous to take on public transport, and they are a huge target of theft), it's not solved with rental bicycles either (they are usually very few and far between).

Last-mile is most likely solved with personal e-scooters as they are much more acceptable to take on public transport and can be taken inside so they are a lot less steal-able. The problem with this is that personal e-scooters are significantly less regulated than the "all-seeing-eye" rental ones which impose restrictions on speed (20kph in Sweden, personal vehicles can be modified to go 30kph, legal maximum is 25kph and personal e-scooters all go this speed -- with no slow zones anywhere)

That one is specifically for Paris as seen by a Parisian. I would not argue that's the case globally, and there are certainly studies showing otherwise in other contexts.

Usage of e-scooter and e-bikes decreases car traffic yes. But does banning rental e-scooter (not personal e-scooters, and not e-bikes) lead to an increase in car traffic? In Paris, I argue that no it won't, or if it does it will be negligible.

> There are other points though, "last mile" is a difficult problem

That's not true in Paris. Paris has very good public transportation. There are bus and subway stations everywhere. It's not the case outside of Paris intra-muros, but here I'm specifically talking about Paris intra-muros, because the ban only apply to that location.

> it's not solved with rental bicycles either (they are usually very few and far between).

That's not true in Paris. The city rental bicycles are omnipresent and cheap. Even though I own a good bike, I use those as well, in cases I don't want to take my own bike. And there are other rental e-bikes (by the same company that do rental e-scooters)

In general, personal e-scooters are considered fine. Their owners don't behave nearly as bad as rental e-scooters.

The speed limit, as far as I know, is the same for any e-bike/e-scooter: 25km/h. Otherwise it's in a different class (same as a moped) and is no longer allowed on bike lanes (which doesn't prevent people from doing so, but so far they are few and far between).

> There are other points though, "last mile" is a difficult problem

"Last mile" is literally solved with two legs and some shoes. A mile is walked in 15-30 minutes, and if you can scooter you can walk. The actually mobility-challenged can be provided vehicles if necessary.

I mean, it's not, because if the options are too time consuming too uncertain and/or too inconvenient people will move further away and buy a car (then expect that everywhere they go to have open roads and 12sqm of open space wherever they decide to stop).

To break down what you're suggesting, imagine 20-25 minutes walk to the train station, 10 minutes waiting for the train (you want to be early if it's an infrequent train!), 30 minutes on a train, 20-25 minutes walk on the other side.

For what looks like a quick walk and a "comfortable" 30 minute train journey you're suddenly realising that a lot of your day has gone. Somewhere in the region of 1hr20m - 1.5hrs~ has gone to your "30 minute" commute, and that's twice a day.

You could reduce both walks, and instead: bike or scooter (which are roughly three times faster on average) that journey collapses from 1h20m (in the best case) to under an hour for the worst case... (6-8.5 mins or so for each last-mile instead of 20-25)

And I mean, do this twice a day?... For a month?

That's 16 hours saved.

Last mile is not solved by ignoring it and telling people they have legs, that logic is what boomers use to tell us we're all living wrong for having a lifestyle that isn't revolving around servitude and living to work..

The problem down that argument, is if we go by time alone, the car wins almost every time (there are a few cities with certain commutes that are faster by transit, but not many, even WITH traffic jams).

not really.

theres a sweet zone.

almost no journeys inside the city of malmo are faster with a car if you include parking too, nearly all are faster with a bicycle — and its not even close most of the time

What you describe is not your typical trip inside Paris. That would better describe a suburb to Paris trip, for which 1h to 2h is indeed normal.

A typical Paris trip is 2 minutes walk to a station (at most 5 min if you are slow), then 30 to 45 minutes subway, then 2 more minutes walk to your destination. There are subway station roughly 2 minutes from anywhere in Paris, and you can go from anywhere to anywhere else in about 30 to 45 minutes. During rush hour, subways are every 2/3 minutes on most lines. The highest time you have to wait is 10 minutes during "dead" hours when going somewhere there is a fork.

It will take about the same time by bike or scooter. But if you choose to take a car? At least the same time, and it can easily be double or triple the time depending on traffic. Then you have to park, which is expensive.

Note that for suburbs to Paris trips, very few people take scooters, because then you have to carry it in the suburb train. Most people will either take a bus to the train station, or take their car and park at the train station (not drive to Paris, that would take double the time).

Now again, I'm only describing what I know about Paris and its suburbs. It's a very different situation in other places (since I'm pretty sure the scenario you're describing is one you lived)

to be perfectly fair, I haven't spent a lot of time in Paris, but I have lived in London and I feel like what I said doesnt apply so strongly to London, or at least the centre of london- it is still common to live over 10 minutes from a station in London- but commuter trains are frequent in the north.

When I have been to Paris it has been how I described, but to he fair Ubisoft studios could be located in hard to reach places for cost reasons.

When travelling to the hotel it was a 35 minute walk because google maps said it would be faster to walk, and travelling to the Eiffel tower (actually, it was to a dock near the eiffel tower but I forgot the name) it took 20 minutes to get to the metro station and 5-6 minutes to get to the dock.

So at least for trips like those its difficult to say they couldn't be served better.

It is really hard to get a "feel" for a city as a tourist, because almost by definition you're going to be in the "central/old" area or traveling to the central area from a cheap hotel on the outskirts somewhere, and those are optimized for tourist activity.

I also found walking in Rome and Paris to be as fast as transit, but I'm not going to even begin to pretend the vast majority of "average" Romans or Parisians live within the 'old city'.

It also helps that almost by definition the 'old cities' in Europe are very old and quite compact. Once you start trying to get to the "central business district" instead of the "city center" it gets more American-esque, but still doable.

As a tourist in Paris I found scooters really convenient to get around the city. But I also hated them for their aesthetics as they would be littered everywhere and knocked over.

I definitely saw so many dangerous driving behaviours. I think tourists using scooters aren't treating these like useful day to day transport vehicles but as a way to have fun. For a lot of people it's their first time on a scooter. I saw people zooming through red lights into oncoming traffic. Others tried to jump the curb. It's kind of like giving a kid a toy for the first time.

If you look at accident statistics, they are indeed dangerous. My friend broke his arm while riding one, and he's far from a careless rider, so I found some statistics, which made me realize that maybe we shouldn't let people ride these around town willy-nilly:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

> There are a lot of speculations and hypothesis from people who don't live in Paris and try to apply their experience in a different city to Paris, so allow me to offer the experience (obviously I'm biased) of someone living there.

So you're saying, compared to other cities, Paris' problem is parisians? And e-scooter don't work because parisians can't be bothered to be civil?

As we say in France, the problem with Paris are the Parisians.

> The real reason is that anytime you see someone egregiously disregarding rules in a way that endanger others, it's more often than not a rental e-scooter, with rental e-bikes coming behind. They are perceived as dangerous, plain and simple. And it's not a lack of cycling infrastructure. While it's not up to Netherlands-level of bike-friendliness yet, it's quite good lately overall.

Parisian too, but with reality in mind. We should first reduced by 95% the amount of cars and ban taxis :

Cars, Taxis and Motorcycle killed thousands of people in Paris due to there toxic gases. https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/transports/a-paris-la-pollut...

More than 95% of people killed on the road are due to Cars, Taxis, Trucks or Motorcycle. https://www.drieat.ile-de-france.developpement-durable.gouv....

More than 95% of serious injuries are caused by Cars, Taxis, Trucks or Motorcycle. https://www.onisr.securite-routiere.gouv.fr/sites/default/fi...

50% of the streets are congested with cars and car parking. https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2016/11/30/a-pa...

> Parisian too, but with reality in mind. We should first reduced by 95% the amount of cars and ban taxis

Oh I agree with that, but we can do both!

First link => that's an ongoing project with Crit'air restrictions. Link is 2 years old, Crit'Air 4 have been banned since then (though enforcement is low). And newer cars emit a lot less of pollution.

Second link => that's Ile-de-France and not Paris. That's why I was careful to specify Paris. Ile-de-France as whole is a lot more sprawling, so there is less alternatives to cars. Skimming it, it seems to support your argument even for Paris though, but I have a hard time to find the exact percentage. I'd be curious what's the actual number for Paris only nowadays.

Third link => that's for France as a whole. I did not skim it.

Fourth link => that's from 2016. I'm pretty sure it has evolved a bit since then. Numerous cycle lanes have been created since then, and parking/car lanes removed. Though that's still an ongoing project. I'd be really curious about updated numbers.