How Electric Scooter fleets in Paris are planning to “self-regulate”

Interestingly electric scooter companies have asked for some regulation as they themselves understand that the market needs to mature through regulation to keep the riders safe and not cause competitive issues to the current sharing services and players.

Well, that regulation hasn’t happened and a while ago Paris – a city that’s already full of escooters from three fleets – is now seeing “self-regulation” suggested by those three players who got together to avoid the mutual fear of getting banned.

We at Langfeite are always interested in these developments as we can manufacture fleets but also because rules set for shared scooters are likely to be adopted for all personal escooters as well, so let’s take a look at what those 11 self-introduced rules were.

11 Self-introduced regulations from Lime, Dott and Tier in Paris. (Source: The Local)

1. Extending age verification tools to the entirety of the city’s scooter fleet by Monday, November 28th.
   
2. Adding vehicle registration plates to all scooters to increase rider accountability. This would facilitate better enforcement of traffic and highway code violations, according to the companies. through easier reporting of highway code violations
   
3. Banning offenders – this would constitute removing users who repeatedly violate the highway code.
   
4. Funding an experiment using camera technology to detect highway code violations
   
5. Testing sidewalk detection technology to prevent pavement riding
   
6. An education campaign (produced by all three operators) to raise awareness of highway code laws and responsible use
   
7. Creating of a ‘micro-mobility observatory’ to produce independent data on uses and accidents, which would then be shared with city authorities
   
8. Using technology to prevent overfilled parking spots and doubling the number of patrollers to move vehicles from full spaces
   
9. Financing infrastructure which benefits e-scooter users by increasing the fee paid to the City of Paris
   
10. Creating price incentives to encourage users to choose walking over very short trips
11. Financing the long-term rental of adapted e-scooters for disabled users in collaboration with OMNI (a company specializing in developing accessible transportation options for disabled people)

Conclusions

So what do you think of the rules? Basically, these seem to be pretty much the same regulations that affect small scooters, mopeds and other motor vehicles that need to be registered so perhaps this is the inevitable path that scooters are going to face.

Paying money to the city of Paris is basically a tax, the incident registry matches what the traffic police have been doing, and enforcing rules like not allowing people to ride in parks etc. 

Perhaps these rules can be seen as encouraging as the same or similar rules have worked for other types of vehicles before. Basically, escooters can be seen as the same as scooters in the end but with the added benefit of the small size and easy operation that make them convenient to use as a mass transport solution.

Langfeite Electric Scooters for fleets and ODM

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