A few days ago, Paris banned e-scooters from the city by referendum. Andreas Knie, mobility researcher at the Berlin Science Center, believes that the problems could also be solved in other ways.
Mr. Knie, you live and work in Berlin: Do the e-scooters bother you in the cityscape?
No, they don’t bother me, quite the opposite. I need them because I interpret them as a living element of modern metropolitan transport, and I also use them. And that’s where they belong. They are, I would almost say, indispensable in the future to create an alternative to the car.
Others say that’s exactly what doesn’t work: Hardly anyone rents an e-scooter and leaves their car at home instead.
But first they would have to prove it. As traffic researchers, we see where the e-scooters are rented and returned. This mainly happens at public transport stops. This means that they are actually mostly used to get to the subway or S-Bahn. That’s the last mile, that’s what we need to make public transport attractive in the long term.
Can you understand that people are bothered when the e-scooters are in the way everywhere?
Of course there are many who do not handle it carefully, no question. But sometimes you have to leave the church in the village. We have space problems, that’s true. But that’s mainly due to all the cars, just nobody gets upset about that.
One can already observe a certain nonchalance with which the e-scooters are parked.
Of course, you also have to discipline the e-scooter drivers. The providers do too little for this, but the technical possibilities have long been there. The maps are now coded so well that you can see exactly where an e-scooter is parked. Whether on the side of the road or in the middle of the sidewalk. Half of the cases in which e-scooters are deliberately parked incorrectly could be prevented by saying: You can’t park like this. And as long as you don’t change it, the clock keeps running, which costs money. Such annoyances can be avoided.
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Because of exactly such annoyances, the Parisians have just decided to ban e-scooters from the city. Did you see this coming?
That surprised me. Paris was one of the first cities to allow e-scooters, and they were used a lot there. I didn’t expect Anne Hidalgo (Paris mayoress, editor’s note) striving for a ban at all, also used as a binding element.
… She spoke of a “victory for local democracy”.
A voter turnout of seven percent is not enough to legitimize such a decision.
Older people in particular voted for the ban. Has the question of e-scooters long been a generational debate?
Yes, you can see that when you look at the people who are out and about with it. It’s my impression that older men in particular always have a little difficulty with such innovations. I’ve also been asked if I wouldn’t be embarrassed to drive an e-scooter at my age. What we find in surveys, however, is that cyclists are at least as much a topic of excitement. Especially in cities where the cycle paths are not well developed and you have to use the sidewalk. The media just doesn’t hype it up that much.
The mayor of Stuttgart wants to ensure that e-scooters are no longer parked everywhere in his city, but only in specially designated parking zones
Yes, that is the debate we are having in Germany now. The question of how to deal with e-scooters if you don’t want to ban them. Allocated areas are generally a good idea. Of course, how useful this is depends on where they are ultimately supposed to be. In Leipzig, these parking spaces for e-scooters are only available at the public transport stations, which of course makes little sense on its own. Because I also want to get away from the tram and into a neighborhood. You can solve many problems with this area policy, but you have to take into account where people want to go.
Would it also be possible to simply reduce the number of approved e-scooters?
I would let the market take care of that, there will be a natural limit. The real danger for the companies is not the road construction authorities, but the money. In the face of rising interest rates, investors are becoming increasingly wary of the venture capital they put into such companies. We therefore assume that a not inconsiderable number of e-scooter providers will soon disappear from the market on their own.