Atop my escooter, I’m a human in a metropolis of apes. With my again straight, I tower above my fellow road-users who’re hunched over automotive steering wheels and bike handles. This newfound poise, nevertheless, lasts for less than seconds at a time. At junctions, it’s changed by one other emotion: the concern of being squashed by passing site visitors. After a 20-minute experience, my arms ache from tightly gripping the deal with. I’m too scared to go a lot sooner than 10 kilometers per hour, sufficient to maintain tempo with an novice jogger. 

This is my first time on an escooter in Paris or, the truth is, wherever. I glide gingerly previous indicators of a metropolis in disaster. The French are within the throes of collective outrage brought on by President Emmanuel Macron’s makes an attempt to boost the retirement age by 4 years. Refuse staff are on strike, so there are nice mountains of trash on each avenue. Sometimes these piles ooze putrid liquid onto the street, which my escooter takes in its stride. In different locations, the rubbish has been set alight by demonstrators, leaving a charred smudge on the pavement. Near the River Seine, my scooter and I weave by means of a clump of closely armored riot police. 

Against this backdrop, Paris has determined to have its first referendum in nearly a decade. But the referendum is just not about pension reform, the reason for the continued riots. Instead it’s about escooter leases. If Parisians vote towards escooters on Sunday April 2, the mayor is anticipated to impose a swift ban. This is why I’m right here: to spend a day experiencing Paris by scooter to grasp why the French capital, as soon as one of the vital welcoming cities on this planet for this new mode of transport, is on the verge of a dramatic U-turn. 

Lime, a US escooter firm that arrived in Paris in the summertime of 2018, blames the shift in perspective on politics. The metropolis’s early adoption of escooters was chaotic and crowded. By 2019, there have been a minimum of 10 firms working within the metropolis, with zero regulation. That led the town authorities to crack down in 2020, kicking seven operators out of Paris and imposing a restrict of 5,000 escooters on every remaining firm.

Lime was certainly one of simply three to outlive the cull. Xavier Mirailles, the corporate’s director of public affairs in France, says these modifications introduced order to Paris. “From that day in 2020, we were in a good place with the city,” he says, over orange juice in a ninth arrondissement cafe. “We had a good relationship, with regular meetings.” 

That modified, he says, with the election of the Green Party’s David Belliard, the brand new deputy mayor who’s now accountable for transport, later in 2020. With Belliard in workplace, scooter firms say relations soured and their conferences stopped. “We are supposed to have a quarterly review of the services with all the operators, and this did not happen for more than a year,” says Mirailles. Belliard, who said in January that he backs a ban, didn’t return WIRED’s request for remark.