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This seems fair. I was in Paris a month ago and we used Birds to get around. Many people rode them on the roads but plenty were whizzing up pavements too, pretty dangerous considering the top speed, speed delta with pedestrians and nobody wearing helmets.

The only issue with riding scooters on the road is a lot of the roads in the centre-north area of Paris are cobbled, but you can just slow down.

I don’t find anything remotely controversial about banning a powered vehicle capable of ~30 km/h from pavements.

<3 Paris!



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>I don’t find anything remotely controversial about banning a powered vehicle capable of ~30 km/h from pavements.

30km/h?!

Here in Sweden they forced the company to bring the top speed down to 20km/h for rental scooters.

Of course many have bought their own since the fad started dying down. And those are sometimes capable of illegal speeds up to 40km/h. Impossible for police to tell, and also a waste of time seeing as there are more pressing issues.


> Impossible for police to tell.

How's that? Here in Holland there's quite an industry making scooters faster, but the police regularly set up funnels where they test the maximum speed of the scooters they catch. From what I hear some people even install hidden buttons to limit the top speed whenever they're checked (which I suppose is not too difficult to figure out now the police knows).


A better mouse: a circuit that detects something akin to a knock sequence. You can put it into turbo mode with a cheat code, and it's only detectable if you analyze the circuit

Yup, the ones we rode had a digital speedo, and I rode mine almost 30 a few times when the roads permitted it (on the southern side of Paris where they're smooth and relatively open). It was kind of scary though given the small wheels and lack of helmet so we generally kept our speed lower than that.

Yea, had to go to Paris recently. These scooters on pavements drastically change the feel of the city: it's suddenly way too chaotic.

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