“If Parisians discover e-scooters annoying, then they’re aggravated by a failure of policymaking, not by the very concept of an e-scooter. It needs to be made more durable to desert them, to chuck them in a river, or for drunk vacationers to make menaces of themselves on them. But the route of journey is abundantly clear. The automobile, a very magnificent invention, is a menace to fashionable metropolis life. … Policy problems with immense intricacy and complexity aren’t solved, or certainly improved, by asking the individuals a easy query and getting a easy reply. Has the mayor of Paris been paying no consideration to British politics in any respect?”