like a sultry As spring evening settled in western Paris, I had to cross the city to my apartment, about two miles away. The streets were crowded so I was hesitant to get a taxi, and I didn’t feel like taking the metro because it was hot and the station was far away. So I rented a battery powered scooter that was available on the street and cut through traffic right up to my front door. The trip was fun, not to mention affordable and fast. It was also green, I assumed: E-scooters don’t emit fumes, so they had to, right?
The rollout of massive numbers of shared e-scooters is built on this premise: instead of a gas-guzzling car, take an electric two-wheeler. Save the planet and time. Lime, which operates around the world, but mainly in Europe and North America, aims to “build a future where transport is shared, affordable and carbon-free”. Another operator, Birdsuggests that users can “cut down on CO2— one ride at a time.”
But research indicates that rental e-scooters have not really reduced carbon emissions in cities. It’s complicated, says Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. There are plenty of circumstances where e-scooter programs can be green, he says, but it depends on how and where they work.
Love them or loathe them, rental e-scooters have overrun the world’s largest cities. People in the US took an estimated 86 million trips on shared e-scooters in 2019, before the pandemic disruption saw nearly all modes of transport fall. Even in Covid-ravaged 2020 – the last year for which there is data – people in the US, Canada and Mexico managed to make up for it 25 million trips† You can find e-scooter rentals in hundreds of cities on both sides of the Atlantic, including: Seattle† London† Romeand Kiev† they are too descending in New York, and increasingly in cities in Asia.
The first of these programs was launched in September 2017 by the micromobility company Bird in Santa Monica, California. Others soon followed and were an instant success. But as the market expanded, there has been little rigorous analysis of the environmental impact of these rental programs. E-scooters were believed to have a negligible carbon footprint, helping companies to raise huge amounts of investment. In May 2019 there were 14 e-scooter companies working in 97 US cities.
To assess the environmental impact of these programs, you need to consider the emissions of e-scooters throughout their life cycle: the production of the materials and components used in each scooter; the productionproces; shipping the scooters to wherever they will be used; the collection, charging and redistribution of the scooters; and its removal. Once you do, it can paint a bleak picture.
According to an study 2019 performed in the US state of North Carolina, shared e-scooters produce 202 grams of CO2 per passenger mile over their entire life cycle – more than one electric moped (119 grams), electric bicycle (40 grams), bicycle (8 grams) and even a diesel bus (82 grams), assuming it has a high number of passengers. Although the study found that e-scooters produce lower CO2 emissions than a shared car (415 grams), only 34 percent of the e-scooter rides analyzed replace a trip that would have been made in one go.
By contrast, nearly half of the trips would have been a bike ride or a walk, and 11 percent would have been a bus ride. 7 percent of the trips would not have happened completely without e-scooters. Because the extra emissions from the scooters outweighed the gains made from car trips that weren’t made, the study concluded that e-scooter rental programs contribute to total transportation emissions.
These findings were compounded by a 2020 study in Paris, who concluded that the city’s shared e-scooters added 13,000 tons of extra greenhouse gases to the city’s carbon footprint in a year, equivalent to the total annual emissions of a small town. Again, e-scooter travel often replaced journeys made by lower-emission modes of transport.
Earlier this year, an investigation by Daniel Reck and Kay Axhausen at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich concluded that a shared e-scooter averages 51 grams of extra CO. caused2 per kilometer than the means of transport it replaces. “The bottom line is that shared e-scooters are currently damaging the climate,” says Reck said in an interview with the German newspaper The time†
Much of this is due to poor design. During the early days of e-scooter rental, the industry used slightly modified versions of models sold directly to consumers. Manufactured in China by companies like Xiaomi and Segway Ninebot, they were unprepared for the rigors of the sharing economy. The battery case was often not even waterproof, so in wetter places, batteries would ignite, and there was no protection against vandalism and theft. Where scooters were new, they were often destroyed. “The first round of vehicles weren’t really designed for this industry,” said Scott Rushforth, Bird’s chief vehicle officer.