Recently, a referendum was held in Paris to ban e-scooters. In large French cities such as Paris, Lyon and Marseille, 23% of e-scooter trips are intermodal (6t-Bureau de recherche, 2019), in 44% of cases the return trip was made using another means of transport, usually public transport. Quite often (30% of local users’ trips) e-scooters replace public transport.
Lukasz Nawaro, DELab UW analyst
Accident statistics show that the number of e-scooter users injured in accidents is over 3 times lower than the number of bicycle users, which is roughly consistent with the difference in the share of trips (there are no current estimates, not necessarily a difference in the number of kilometres travelled). What's more, especially with appropriate speed limits, it is the scooter users themselves who are harmed, not bystanders - quite unlike in the case of drivers killing pedestrians. Despite this (rightly so), there is no referendum on the ban on car traffic. There should certainly not be a referendum on the ban on e-scooters.
Decisions and data from Paris, which has 16 metro lines and is building another 200 kilometers, including 4 new lines, are of little use to Warsaw, which has less than two and is thinking about building a third on a crazy route. As it results from my research for Warsaw, which will be updated in the near future with more data, thanks to cooperation between the city and operators, and the results of similar studies in other cities, e-scooters are sometimes used as a solution to the last mile problem – getting to/from rapid public transport. Of course, most of these journeys are still made on foot, and in percentage terms Veturilo is used in this way less often than e-scooters. Sometimes users also travel to/from poorly connected places, frequented by wealthy people for whom time is highly valued. They will not take the bus, and there are no streams for more expensive means of transport such as tram/metro – the only real alternative option is a car. E-scooters are therefore in Warsaw, to an even greater extent than in Paris, a reasonable support for the transport system, in which we want to waste as little energy as possible on transporting steel, rubber, glass, aluminium, etc. instead of people.
There are many examples of externalities in the city. Many people want to be able to use a PaczkomatⓇ, but no one wants to have one under their window – it makes noise and shines brightly. The benefit of a PaczkomatⓇ a little closer to home is smaller than the disadvantage of a PaczkomatⓇ under their window, so residents can organize around a ban – even though society as a whole would lose out on the ban, because there are many more users, the benefit for them individually is too low to leave home for a referendum or public consultation. The Paris referendum shows that there is another, opposite way of making ineffective decisions: a small group gains a lot, an average group loses little, a large group is indifferent - an average group wins a referendum against a small group. Efficiency in the Pareto sense, in which everyone gains, is often impossible to achieve. We should look at Kaldor-Hicks efficiency: I will lose something, I will gain something, on average I will be happiest when every decision will be made with the whole of society in mind, and not a handful of people for whom the significance of the decision exceeds their personal threshold of profitability of involvement.
When it is easy to compensate for Pareto efficiency, it should be done – as is the case with e-scooters in Warsaw, where, in accordance with an agreement with ZDM, operators pay for parking zones, thanks to which non-users also benefit. And is it sometimes difficult or impossible? Simply put: if someone doesn't like it, they should move to the countryside for their own good. They will be happier and calmer there.
Unfortunately, political decisions are going in the opposite direction. The local referendum law adopted by the Sejm (and rejected by the Senate) lowers the threshold so that a sufficiently organized group of squabblers can credibly threaten to recall the authorities in the case of decisions that are beneficial to the public. The vast majority of Parisians rejected the idea of a referendum, being in the aforementioned group of indifferent people. The turnout in the presidential elections there was over 78% in the first round and 74% in the second, so one cannot speak of the political passivity of the Parisian society. Seven and a half percent of the residents took part in the referendum. 92,5% made a rational decision – the referendum question has such a minimal impact on their lives that it is not worth spending time on it. Even with the absurdly low turnout threshold, the new Polish law would have to have twice as many voters for the local referendum to be binding. Fortunately, the litigiousness would lose.
For political reasons, many decisions that increase the happiness of the entire society cannot be made now. An unpopular example is the toll for entering city centers, and a less controversial one is the speed of trams on the Poniatowski Bridge. More and more minor decisions will be paralyzed, and city dwellers will live worse and worse when the particular interests of people who have wrongly chosen their place of residence dominate over the majority who want to live in a city with the characteristics of a city, but work, create GDP, and do not have time to get involved in every minor matter.
