San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Paris says ‘bienvenue’
Electric rentals seen as adjunct to public transit in French capital
PARIS — Zooming past the soaring arches of the Eiffel Tower, Sarah Westley and Cara Alexander balanced on Lime electric scooters, which the British tourists had rented through an app.
“It’s fantastic; you can see so much,” Westley said. After using e-scooters on a trip to San Diego, “I said we need to go find the scooters in Paris,” she said. “They’re a very good value.”
Thousands of e-scooters from California startups Lime and Bird, as well as Estonian ride-hailing company Taxify, have descended upon Paris over the past three months. Riders whiz along the promenades lining the Seine, through the Place de la Concorde, toward the Louvre and outside train stations and Metro stops.
Unlike in San Francisco, where escooters ignited controversy that led to a temporary ban and a forthcoming, carefully controlled pilot program, stand-up e-scooters in Paris seem to be embraced by tourists, residents and city officials.
That may be because Paris has a long history with two-wheel transport of all kinds — innumerable bikes, mopeds and motorcycles weave through the traffic — as well as with “shared” rentals. Its citysponsored Vélib bike program, now 11 years old, helped pioneer self-service hourly rentals that are considered an adjunct to public transit, with more than 20,000 bikes. Paris plans to double its more than 400 miles of bike lanes by 2020. What’s more, the City of Light is on a crusade to eliminate pollution-causing fossil fuels, with plans to ban diesel cars by 2024 and gasoline ones by 2030.
“Paris has always been a city of innovation, and particularly innovation in mobility,” Caroline Daude, transportation adviser to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, said in an email. “We welcome new mobility solutions if they represent an alternative to polluting cars.”
The city has a good relationship with all three scooter companies and is collaborating with them to draft a code of conduct, according to Daude. At the national level, France is working on a new law about all forms of transportation, and is considering banning e-scooters from sidewalks — something San Francisco has already done.
“Parisians are just taking scooters in stride; no one’s upset; no one’s knocking them over,” said Jim McPherson, a Benicia attorney and mobility consultant who recently visited Paris.
Although the companies’ apps urge users to ride in bike lanes and to wear helmets (neither of which is a legal requirement in Paris), of the dozens of rental scooters spotted in action during a recent visit to Paris, about two-thirds were on sidewalks and no riders wore helmets.
“The app says to wear a helmet, but you can’t if they don’t provide them,” said Alexander, the British tourist. Likewise, although the app says to ride in the road, “that seems a bit dangerous,” said her friend Westley.
Daude said some pedestrians have expressed concerns, and officials will be
vigilant. “We don’t want these new e-scooters to disturb pedestrians or to invade the public space,” she said. Indeed, several pedestrians, asked about e-scooters, merely offered a Gallic shrug.
France’s capital is a showcase for the scooter companies, which hope it will be a model for other locales — such as San Francisco.
“We saw Paris as an opportunity to create an example in a progressive city,” said Caen Contee, head of international expansion at San Francisco’s Lime. It is also operating in Zurich, Madrid and Valencia, Spain, and plans to grow rapidly throughout Europe.
Lime kicked off escooter app rentals in Paris in June with a few hundred two-wheelers. Within three months, it expanded to over 2,000 and has had more than 75,000 riders.
“I do hope that cities in the U.S., cities like San Francisco, will come to Paris and be inspired by a different way of doing things,” said Kenneth Schlenker, general manager for Bird in France. The Santa Monica startup began operations in Paris, its first international city, Aug. 1 with “a handful” and is now up to several hundred as it rushes to meet demand, he said. Last week, it added Brussels and Vienna. “We believe that the licensing route taken by a few U.S. cities is probably not the best for scale of the revolution we’re engaged in.”
Estonia’s Taxify, a ride-hailing company with close to $200 million in backing from the likes of Daimler and Didi Chuxing, made its first foray into two-wheeled transport with the introduction of e-scooters to Paris this month. It started with a few hundred and plans to expand “smartly” to several thousand, according to Henri Capoul, general manager of France for Taxify. It has not announced plans to enter the U.S.
“Paris is one of the best cities to launch scooters,” Capoul said. “One out of 5 (Taxify) rides in the city is less than 3 kilometers. There’s a real complement between ride-hailing and scooters.”
Prices for Paris escooters are comparable to those in San Francisco: just over $1 to unlock plus 15 cents a minute. As elsewhere, companies collect scooters nightly for recharging and maintenance, although rather than gig workers as in San Francisco, they use a combination of their own employees and outside vendors and return them to the streets by early morning.
The scooter companies’ relatively warm reception in Paris could reflect their own maturation. Unlike in San Francisco and other U.S. cities where they took the “ask forgiveness rather than permission” approach, they contacted Parisian officials before starting, according to Daude from the mayor’s office.
One extra boost for scooters: Paris’ Vélib bike program recently changed the company the city hired to run the program and is now struggling with software and mechanical glitches, which has caused use of the bikes to plunge.
All three scooter companies say they want to play nice with Paris, including sharing data and encouraging riders to behave.
Outside data shows the scooters are popular. Apptopia, a company that tracks Android and iOS downloads, said the Lime app had 143,000 downloads in France from July 1 through Sept. 24. During the same period, Bird’s app (which was not in France in July) had 67,000 downloads. The Taxify app had 120,000 French downloads in that period. While most of those were likely by ridehailing users, average daily downloads rose by almost 50 percent once it introduced e-scooters in Paris.
Not surprisingly, the companies are gung ho about Paris’ lack of limits on the scooter population.
Martin Mignot, a partner in British venture capital firm Index Ventures, which has a stake in Bird, said scooter caps are analogous to taxi medallions — a method of controlling supply that made taxis less useful because they were hard to find.
“Paris is taking a much more modern approach, saying here are the rules, we won’t limit the numbers of companies or scooters, but you have to give us data,” he said. “Obviously I’m biased, because I’m an investor and want as many scooters as possible, but I think 10 years from now, the fact that these things were banned and limited at the beginning will seem ridiculous.”
Scooter riders, admittedly another biased sample group, also said they felt that there should be more two-wheelers for hire.
“It’s easy to use,” said Johanna Vieli, a Swiss tourist who was finishing up a ride on a Lime scooter outside Notre Dame, and had previously ridden them in Zurich. “The hardest part is finding enough. We are a group of five people; it would be fun to do it all together.”
“It took 10 or 15 minutes to find a second one,” said Sofiane Jabeur, a Parisian riding alongside the Canal St.-Martin with his friend Rémy Saintenoy, during a weekday lunchtime. “There aren’t enough, but it’s great as an addition to bikes and the Metro.”
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid