Sharable scooters aren’t efficient. Yet.
From San Francisco to Paris and Tel Aviv, sharable electric scooters appeared in cities around the globe, but there is more to them than the “green” stickers.
Companies like Lime and Bird would like to have us believe that they are all about eco-friendly transportation, getting the cars off the streets, and making the cities cleaner. And in a perfect world, I would believe them. Everyone would ditch their cars inside cities and just use public transportation for long trips and the scooters for the “last mile”. In this world, everyone would park them responsibly(off the sidewalk), no one would throw them in lakes, and people would ride them on a lane separated from pedestrians.
But we don’t live in a perfect world, so we need to adapt to the realities of our environment.
They are harmful to the environment
What do a Honda Civic 1.5L and an electric scooter have in common? They both have a cost of 202 grams of CO2 per mile*.
How can electric scooters pollute so much? Manufacturing, shipping, and daily collection of scooters from the streets are the main contributors, with 93% of the total emissions. The average car age on the road is 12 years…
