Paris's vote to ban e-scooters is a referendum on Silicon Valley

Whichever side you're on, it's bigger than two wheels and a battery

Photo by Vlad B on Unsplash

In the end it wasn’t even close.

After months of speculation over whether Parisians would ban shared electric scooters in a rare public referendum, they did so with an overwhelming 90% of the vote on Sunday. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has promised to “follow through” on the verdict, with rental trottinettes to be banned in the city from September 1. Privately owned scooters will still be permitted.

The scooter companies are, predictably, not happy. They pointed to low turnout (about 103,000 people, or 7.5% of registered Paris voters), long lines and relatively few polling stations (203 compared to 899 in the previous presidential election), and the vote coinciding with the Paris marathon (congrats to Abeje Ayana and Helah Kiprop on their wins) as signs of political maneuvering by city opponents. Russell Murphy, a Lime spokesperson, said in a statement that Paris is “an outlier” among global cities in banning e-scooters rather than working with firms to regulate them.

There are 15,000 rental e-scooters in Paris, provided in equal measure by Lime, Tier, and Dott. San Francisco-based Lime and the two European players (Tier hails from Berlin and Dott is a Dutch-French startup) beat out 13 other applicants in July 2020 in a competitive tender to operate scooter services in the French capital. The tender results were seen as a major win for Lime and a pointed snub of U.S. competitor Bird Global Inc., which had at one point planned to make Paris its “second home” and hire up to 1,000 people there. As Dott remarked on securing its permit, Paris was “widely considered the most attractive e-scooter market worldwide.”

Paris was an early nesting ground for e-scooters. Bird set up its first international market there in summer 2018. In classic 2010s startup fashion, Bird did this without permission, setting the stage for a contentious relationship between scooter startups and city officials. The tension increased as operators flocked to Paris, flooding streets and iconic cityscapes with their devices. By June 2019, there were an estimated 20,000 scooters in Paris, with that number only rising. Hidalgo had had enough. “This can’t go on any more,” she declared that summer, as she announced a slew of restrictions. It was the beginning of the end for e-scooters in Paris.

There are two ways to look at what happened in Paris on Sunday. The first is that a mayor hostile to e-scooters and everything they represent (progress, innovation, green transit, the tech community) cleverly set up a public vote that allowed a minority of Parisians to ban the service rather than have to do it herself. The second is that scooter startups replicated the Uber playbook of launching first and asking permission later and it blew up in their face. Uber proved that playbook works if your product has universal appeal, tremendous public support, and backing from powerful political allies and billions of venture-capital dollars. If Sunday’s referendum made one thing clear, it’s that shared scooters are no ride-hail.

To have and have not

Ever since Paris planned a vote on the fate of shared e-scooters, the gap between scooter lovers and scooters haters has broadened into a chasm. I say this partly to note that there are, at least in my experience, very few scooter neutrals. There are people who believe scooters are the best thing since Jesus broke bread and people who believe they are a modern biblical plague. There’s hardly anyone who just doesn’t care.

The scooter-haves argue shared e-scooters are an important part of our transition to more sustainable urban transport: that they are popular among local residents and young people, help to get urbanites out of cars for short journeys (>3 km), and are more affordable than other modes of transit. The short-lived, off-the-shelf hardware of the early days has been replaced with durable fleets designed for heavy ridership, significantly reducing the carbon footprint. On scooter-related accidents, they point out that most involve collisions with much larger motor vehicles like cars and trucks—but because our society normalizes car crashes, it’s scooters and their riders who are often blamed.

The scooter have-nots also tend to believe in sustainable urban transport, but they don’t think rental scooters should be part of it. They see a gender equity gap among riders and note that for every car trip a scooter replaces, it usually substitutes more journeys by bike, foot, and public transit, as multiple studies have shown. Scooter hardware has improved, but we still don’t have a great picture of the emissions from this mode, especially when you take lifecycle, maintenance, charging ops, and other factors into account. Scooter companies like to call their service “emissions-free” but we know that isn’t true—almost everything has a footprint, it’s just a matter of where. Accidents, meanwhile, have provided easy fodder for branding scooters unsafe. Hidalgo often cited the three deaths and 459 injuries linked to e-scooters in Paris in 2022, up from one fatality and 353 injuries in 2021. “We can’t contain them in public spaces and they’re causing road safety problems, especially for older and disabled people,” she has told local news.

But the biggest complaint by far of the scooter have-nots isn’t any of this. It’s clutter.

Clutter is the perpetual thorn in the side of any scooter hater, the reason why there are so many of them and hardly any scooter neutrals. Because even the casual observer, with no particular opinion on micromobility or lightweight electric vehicles, has noticed how scooters tend to wind up in alleyways, up trees, at the bottom of lakes and rivers, and most commonly of all, in the middle of the pavement. The free-floating ‘dockless’ nature of shared e-scooters was designed to be a selling point, but also became a curse by teaching the public to associate e-scooters with clutter, disorder, and nuisance.

Don’t just take it from me. Research commissioned by Lime and published earlier this year found that urban dwellers tend to judge whether an e-scooter is parked ‘correctly’ not by the actual rules but based on aesthetics and tidiness. When scooters were parked tidily, such as in neat rows on the side of the pavement or alongside bike racks, people in both Washington D.C. and Auckland, New Zealand, felt they were parked correctly. When scooters looked messy, such as strewn about at different angles or lying on their sides, people were more likely to say they were parked improperly, even if the scooters were parked correctly per local rules.

When shown the “messy” scenario, 75% of survey respondents said scooters were parked noncompliantly, compared to 85-90% who said they were parked correctly in the “tidy” option. Both scenarios are allowed per local regulations; the only difference is in how they appear. Image from Klein, Brown, and Thigpen (2023).

Which of these e-scooters is parked correctly?

Clutter is a problem scooter operators have yet to solve. In recent years they’ve experimented with different parking interventions, from geo-fencing (making it so scooters can only be left in certain areas), to working with cities to install parking corrals, to adding built-in locking mechanisms to scooters so that they can be locked to bike racks and other street furniture. Clutter is also not a problem unique to e-scooters. Abandoned, damaged, and oversupplied bikes were one of the things that transformed Chinese bike-share startup Ofo from a billion-dollar darling to a semi-toxic brand associated with bicycle graveyards. Clutter is also very much a problem for shared e-bike operators. On my walk home from my volunteer shift earlier today, I dodged no less than four e-bikes from various operators that were lying on their sides or upright but protruding into a narrow part of the sidewalk.

Paris is famously a beautiful city of beautiful things, so it makes sense that Parisians may have been particularly averse to having their city and its iconic sights overtaken by tens of thousands of electric scooters. If public perception is 75-90% aesthetic, then operators did themselves no favors by deploying scooters en masse without first getting buy-in from the city or coming up with better strategies to keep streets and sidewalks looking clean and tidy. Instead, the clutter can was perpetually kicked down the road. Clutter was blamed on vandals and bad actors. It was trivialized by companies as the obsession of an anti-progress, anti-scooter coalition who failed to see the bigger picture, when anyone who worked in the public realm and outside the Silicon Valley bubble could see that the problem of clutter was the bigger picture.

The Uber fallacy

This brings me back to the original sin of shared scooter startups—believing they were the next Uber. It’s easy enough to see how it happened. Scooter startups were built with ride-hail DNA. Many of their first employees came from companies like Uber, and many of their investors had either bet on ride-hail previously or determined not to miss out the second time around. Bird, founded in 2017 by Uber and Lyft alum Travis VanderZanden, became the fastest startup to reach a $1 billion valuation. Within two years of Bird’s launch, investors had poured more than $2 billion into micromobility startups worldwide, with most of that going to shared e-scooters.

As Uber took off in the mid-2010s, lots of Uber-for-X imitators sprang up. There was Uber for laundry, Uber for planes, Uber for lawns, Uber for pets. The Uber-but-fors believed you could replicate Uber’s success by picking a routine service and selling it at a premium price with a workforce of gig employees. The other thing many of these companies learned from Uber was that it was better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. Uber famously defied taxi regulations in almost every city it launched in, then strong-armed local politicians into changing the rules to suit its business model. Uber epitomized that popular Silicon Valleyism, “move fast and break things.”

This strategy worked for Uber for very specific reasons. First, Uber was obviously a superior product to taxis, and pushing ahead despite local rules gave people the chance to figure that out and take its side. Second, Uber had a lot of money and political firepower. Remember when it hired former Obama adviser David Plouffe to lead its “campaign” against “Big Taxi”? That kind of political firepower. And it worked! Within two years of Plouffe joining Uber, dozens of U.S. states passed legislation that legitimized the ride-hail model and phased out stuff Uber didn’t like, such as drivers having to get finger-printed for their background checks. Uber was incredibly good at harnessing the support of its users, most of whom it could reach through a simple push notification, to pressure local and state politicians into clearing regulatory obstacles from its path.

The Uber playbook was never as effective in Europe, which has a lower tolerance than the U.S. for corporate shenanigans. But by the time e-scooters came around, it was less effective period. Cities learned the hard way from Uber to be suspicious of startups and their promises. They tired of being pushed around and seeing their streets and public realms co-opted by tech founders and venture capitalists. So when startups led by Bird started dumping scooters on their streets, they were quick to respond. They created data-sharing rules, issued operating fees, and capped device and operator numbers. They set up tenders to force companies to apply for the right to do business and stay accountable to municipal rules.

Bird, the company that has the most Uber DNA and was most aggressive early on, has fared worst in this tighter regulatory climate. Bird was the first operator to arrive in Paris, and notably lost its bid to continue operating in the 2020 Paris tender. In 2021, Bird was also kicked out of its hometown and first-ever market of Santa Monica, where it alerted the mayor to its abrupt launch in 2018 with a LinkedIn message. Bird has continued to lose permits and exit markets over the past year. It was bought out in December by independent Canadian firm Bird Canada, which is seeking to turn the troubled business around.

Uber was and remains a master of public opinion. See: New York. See: Prop 22. This is a testament both to a highly talented policy team and to the near-universal popularity of Uber’s service. Uber has survived scandals, lawsuits, politics, protests, and internal corporate turmoil because at the end of the day, people really like being able to hail a cab from an app on their phone.

The same simply isn’t true for shared e-scooters. Some people like them and others don’t. People who might otherwise be neutral are dissuaded by mess and clutter. Politicians who might have been compelled by the case for green transit—Hidalgo, after all, campaigned on turning Paris into a cycle paradise—have been antagonized by Silicon Valley’s disdain for rules and tendency to brand any pushback as anti-tech and anti-progress.

It’s true not many voters turned out in Sunday’s election. It’s also true that the total number of votes in favor of keeping scooters in Paris—11,256, according to city data—was 25% less than the total number of scooters in Paris. That’s a wild statistic, one that can’t be explained away by polling site availability and the marathon. Uber knew how to pick its battles. It avoided the ones it couldn’t win, and rallied its legions of drivers and riders to win the ones it could. Scooter companies, by contrast, have proved time and time again that they don’t have this particular brand of savvy. They learned some things from Uber, but the learning was incomplete, and so they played out a model in Paris that never had much chance of success.

This is what Paris said no to on Sunday: not just e-scooters, but that very Silicon Valley way of doing business.