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🔥 When shared fleets become street fuel

On 17 October, a nationwide day of cost-of-living protests in France, seen by some as a revival of the “Gilets Jaunes” (“Yellow Vests”) movement, degenerated into riots and looting, with nearly 1,800 people arrested. Shared mobility paid a highly visible price. More than 1,000 shared bikes were destroyed or looted across the country, many of them piled onto bonfires and barricades in central Paris. A week earlier, similar scenes had played out in Brussels. Operators were not specifically targeted: their vehicles were simply there: heavy, ubiquitous and flammable.

Counting the cost

Paris bore the brunt. Dott reported 300 bikes destroyed and 120 badly damaged. Lime lost about 6% of its Paris fleet, nearly 300 bikes, and Voi lost between 300 and 400. Vélib’ estimates that 350 of its bikes were damaged, about 1.6% of its fleet, and six of its stations were hit. Outside the capital, Dott lost 80 vehicles in Bordeaux and 30 to 40 scooters in Lyon. Voi puts its bill at €900,000 to €1m for Paris alone and around €1.2m nationwide.

Much of that damage is not covered. Voi says its insurance excludes urban violence and riots, and Pony’s shared fleet is not insured against theft or vandalism. In Tours, Pony admitted: “we didn’t expect it to be so violent”.

The new playbook: empty the streets

By the next round of protests on 24 October, cities and operators had switched to prevention. In Paris, Vélib’ closed 110 stations on 23 and 24 October so its bikes could not end up on barricades, while free-floating operators took their own precautions. In Marseille, local authorities banned all demonstrations and extended the curfew to adults, and shared bikes and scooters were removed from the city centre. In Lyon, scooters were deactivated within the area where protests were banned. Rouen put its bike-share fleet into storage for the weekend, Nîmes suspended NemoVélo, and even Épinal closed some Vilvolt stations.

Brussels: from protest routes to the whole Pentagon

Belgium went through the same escalation in fast-forward. During the national demonstration of 9 October, shared bikes and scooters were set on fire, and Dott estimated that about 100 of its vehicles had been damaged. On 16 and 17 October, the City of Brussels asked operators to clear the city centre. Until then, vehicles had usually been removed only along the march route. A week later, Bruxelles Mobilité went further and banned shared e-scooters and e-bikes across the entire Pentagon, Brussels’ historic city centre, over the weekend. The trigger was a wave of anonymous calls to gather, often spread through AI-generated posters and bot-like accounts. Car-sharing was affected too, as Poppy reduced its parking zones for the weekend, while the capital switched to fortress mode.

A new operational risk

Pulling fleets off the street is not new. In Paris, police authorities can ask operators to clear neighbourhoods, and Vélib’s organising authority Agemob says such closures usually last less than 24 hours.

What has changed is the scale: whole city centres, for whole weekends, week after week. For operators on thin margins, each riot weekend means lost revenue on top of uninsured vehicle losses, which gives a new edge to the industry’s insurance debate. For cities, continuity of service is at stake. “Their destruction directly penalises the people who use shared bikes every day,” said Agemob president Dan Lert. Shared mobility usually sells itself as a resilient alternative to the car. In recent weeks, it has been treated as a public-order risk.

💶 Profit Rides Again

Summer is the industry's harvest season, and the Q3 reports of Europe's two bond-financed operators show it was a good one, for very different reasons. Voi grew, while Dott fixed its fundamentals.

Voi: scale and profit

Voi posted net revenue of €88.2m, up 53% year on year, from 53.2m rides. Adjusted EBITDA almost doubled to €31.0m, a 35.2% margin, and net profit reached €11.1m. Growth came from around 50,000 extra vehicles deployed in spring, taking the active fleet to 178,800 (+40%). Even so, revenue per vehicle per day still rose 10%, to €5.36.

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