No way to put them away. The withdrawal of the 15,000 self-service electric scooters branded Dott, Lime or Tier is being organized in Paris, a few months after the decision of the municipal majority led by Anne Hidalgo to end their contract. Direct consequence of the results of the citizen vote organized on Sunday April 2, during which the majority of Parisians voted “against” the maintenance of this shared mobility service. For several weeks, the latter have therefore begun to withdraw their motorized vehicles in successive waves. “There are fewer and fewer of them,” confirms William, a young Parisian in his thirties, who has already noticed the disappearance of these two-wheelers that have long been criticized for occupying public space “in a totally anarchic way”.

“We are withdrawing around 400 scooters a day, and we will go up to 750 scooters in the last few days”, assures Erwann Le Page, the director of public affairs for Western Europe at Tier Mobility, who affirms that the whole of the fleet will be withdrawn on September 1. In the meantime, the German group intends to take full advantage of its presence on the Parisian market. “We know that, during the summer period, micro-mobility works quite well,” he says. As for knowing what will become of this fleet of 5000 scooters once they are withdrawn, Erwann Le Page replies that “two thirds of the fleet will leave for Germany and Poland” in the cities where Tier is already established, and that the remaining third “will be redispatched in Île-de-France”.

“We are present in the urban community of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Grand Paris Seine et Oise and Val d’Europe, in Val-de-Marne (…) all of this encompasses 80 municipalities with the prospect of continuing to develop”, welcomes the representative of Tier. Before that, all of the group’s scooters will be “sent to maintenance centers”, where they will be “restored” or even “fully repaired if necessary”, before being disseminated in the region or sent overseas. Rhine. An important criterion for the company, which insists that “97% of the parts” that make up each of them are “interchangeable”. The solution to increase their life expectancy, today estimated “between 5 to 6 years”.

A speech shared by its American competitor Lime, which praises the environmental qualities of its Gen4 scooters: “much more robust than their elders”, they “have an estimated lifespan of 6.8 years” and “are 100% repairable” , knowing that “the 62 components of the scooters are all individually removable and replaceable”.

Concretely, the 5,000 Lime vehicles will first be transported to the group’s Ile-de-France warehouse, where “maintenance operations will be carried out on all Parisian electric scooters, before the gradual reassignment of the fleet in several dynamic European cities where the user demand is growing. Among them, Lille, in the north of France, but also foreign cities like Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark or London, the capital of England. Lime also talks about Germany, where the group continues to transition its armada of two wheels to replace the older generation of scooters in circulation.

Finally, on the side of the Franco-Dutch Dott, we started to remove the 5000 scooters from the park for more than a month, so much so that there are already not many left. And as on the side of its competitors, they will be sent to other cities where the group already has a large fleet, in particular to Bordeaux, and to Brussels in Belgium, after having passed through the maintenance center. The cities of Rome, Italy, and Tel Aviv, Israel, could also receive some Parisian models. Discussions are ongoing.

Other questions arise, in particular about the future of the employees of the three companies concerned. Asked about this, Erwann Le Page explains that “the decision has not yet been made” at Tier and that “everything will depend on the modal transfer of users from scooters to bicycles”. He also asserts that the consolidation of the market for the rental of electric bicycles from Dott, Lime and Tier is a “common fight” led with the Parisian municipality, but remains measured on the success of the project. “Our goal is for as many people as possible to turn to cycling, but the latest trends show only a 12% carryover,” said Tier’s director of public affairs. Far from the 50% put forward by the municipal team, which is more optimistic.

To meet the demand described as “growing” and “permanently increasing”, Lime has already announced for its part that it has distributed 10,000 electric bicycles in the streets of the capital. As a reminder, the American company – after deploying 3,000 bikes at the time of its launch in 2018 – finally expanded its offer, with the agreement of the City of Paris, to 5,000 bikes in 2021, 7,000 in 2022 and now has more. 10,000. Last year, the group thus “recorded a 73% increase in its bicycle trips in the capital”, while “the number of users jumped by more than 80% compared to 2021”. “We had several months to organize ourselves internally and define our priorities. In Paris, we will continue to do everything we can to guarantee users their freedom of movement via a bicycle fleet with exemplary maintenance and quality service”, recently announced Hadi Karam, the general manager of Lime in France. A strategy that he considers “paying off in view of the growing increase in Lime electric bike trips in the capital”.

And if Lime batteries are completely removable and interchangeable between scooters and bicycles, this “allows to drastically optimize maintenance operations”, underlines the group, which has not planned to reduce its number of employees in 2023. Unlike what is happening at Dott, where at least fifty employees – out of the sixty that the group has – are affected by a “job protection plan” approved by the Ministry of Labor and still in progress, according to the Franco-Dutch company.