Think about your last couple of months. How many times did you hop in the car to drive somewhere close by? Trips to your gym around the corner, your favorite coffee shop down the street, or to pick up something at the grocery store, just to save a little time. Even I fall victim to this horrible practice.
It may be easier to drive to the grocery store when you are coming out with a whole week’s worth of groceries for a family, but do you need your car to carry just you to get coffee a mile down the street?
Making transportation more eco-friendly is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. By just cutting out car trips that are unnecessary and replacing them with electric scooter rides, you can have a small but significant impact on the well-being of our society.
The majority of car trips taken are within three miles. The simple fact is that most of these trips could easily be replaced by electric scooters or bikes, and cutting out these trips would significantly reduce your carbon footprint. Electric scooters could replace 50% of short car rides in the U.S., and as much as 70% in the U.K.!
If you look at the physics of it, it just makes sense.
- Scooters are smaller, lighter, and require less energy to start & stop
- Cars weigh over 4,000 lbs, while electric scooters weigh between 23 and 33 lbs
- If the average American male, 190 lbs, rides a 33 lb scooter, that’s still only 224 lbs, or almost 18 times less weight than the car alone
- The engines of scooters also operate at 90% efficiency while car engines operate at 30%
When it comes to carbon emissions, electric scooters and bikes are in a different league than cars. According to a study at North Carolina State University that tested the carbon emissions of scooters, they emit 202 grams of CO2 per passenger mile versus over 400 from cars. The scooters and bikes themselves create very little carbon while in use, 50% comes from their manufacturing and 43% comes from people driving around cities in vans or trucks picking up scooters to charge. There’s no disagreement that this isn’t an effective model, and companies like Bird and Lime are working to make it more effective by improving the scooters lifespan and looking to collaborate with companies to develop innovative solutions to eliminate product and operational waste.
The argument can be made that scooters aren’t eco-friendly because they have to constantly be replaced. Bird’s earliest models only lasted for a month leading to high carbon emissions from manufacturing. Improvements are constantly being made, such as longer scooter lifespan and introducing replaceable batteries. Some of the newest scooters are supposed to last for two years compared to two months when they were first introduced. This dramatically reduces the carbon emissions from manufacturing.
Replaceable batteries would also reduce charging emissions. Instead of gathering a large amount of scooters into a van or truck and hauling the to a charging station, people would just need to go around and switch out the batteries, so they would only drive about half the miles (if they’re driving at all) and wouldn’t need a large vehicle with poor MPG to carry all the scooters around. Simple changes can drastically cut down the carbon emissions for scooters, bringing their already low carbon emissions closer to zero.
Some people think using rideshare services save on carbon emission rather than using their own vehicles, but especially with short trips, drivers often drive further to get to their passenger than taking them to their destination. According to the previous study also states that the best mode of transportation in relation to its carbon footprint are buses and other mass transit systems because they transport so many people and have a longer lifespan. Because the electric scooter industry is so young, there is lots of room to improve their efficiency as mentioned in the previous paragraph while buses do not have the same flexibility. Instead of arguing against buses though, scooters and public transportation should work in concert with each other. As explained in the First/ Last Mile article, scooters are a great way to get to public transportation hubs that are further than walking distance away, better connecting cities and reducing your carbon footprint.
It’ll take some adjusting to develop these new habits, but the benefits of these small, manageable changes are too big to ignore. If the percentage of people using emobility were to increase to just 11%, there would be a 7% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030!
Scooters are still young though, and with constant improvements to charging and lifespan, their carbon emissions may only be rivaled by non-electric bikes and walking. Here at JUMPWatts, we are working closely with scooter operators to increase operational and charging efficiency by developing comprehensive network charging and mobility solutions for our partners. For more information about our products and initiatives to a greener future, check out our website and feel free to reach out!
