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How green are dockless e-scooters?:
Dockless e-scooter companies have for roughly two years touted their devices as not only convenient but also a win for the environment.
But a growing body of research suggests that the scooter craze may not be as green as advertised.
To change that, experts say, companies such as Lime, Bird and Wheels must manufacture more robust e-scooters while riders need to increasingly use those devices in lieu of driving. According to studies, many people are cruising around on e-scooters as an alternative to cleaner forms of transportation, such as biking, walking and taking the bus.
Still, experts say the fast-evolving industry has the potential to revolutionize urban travel and significantly reduce planet-warming emissions.
"It could be huge for sustainable travel," said Juan Matute, deputy director of UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies.
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:05PM (1 child)
Yea - the whole thing is crazy. If you replace walking with biking - net loss (biking cost/mile resource investment in tires, pumps, tubes, grease, etc. exceeds shoe rubber weardown). Replace biking with ebiking - net loss (ebiking cost/mile resource investment in battery manufacture/disposal and electricity exceeds). Replace cardriving with ebiking - MASSIVELY HUGE ENVIRONMENTAL WIN ($600 ebike goes hundreds of miles on $1 of electricity, not even close).
Note that I'm ebiking to work (5.5 miles) nowadays. I took the bike for about a year (MASSIVELY HUGE ENVIRONMENTAL WIN), but didn't want to deal with the sweat, spend the extra time, and the hassle. I've now replaced it with peddle-assisted ebiking, which is almost as big of an environmental win as biking, but gets me there almost as fast with no sweat. This is a huge net win, but its only a win because I was never gonna walk 11mi/day, and I didn't actually bike. Environmentally speaking, nothing beats walking. ROM table of prices follows - the Government messes with the numbers with subsidies, but the order of magnitude doesn't change:
walking (free) ~= biking (free) ~= ebiking ($0.03/mile) > escooter ($0.09/mile) > motorcycle ($0.20/mile) ~= ecar ($0.20/mile) >> car-car ($0.50/mile) > SUV-car ($0.70/mile)
Note that ebiking is super-duper cheap - but only when you are comparing it against a trip that would have been in a car/SUV. Obviously this doesn't replace large swaths of trips (family picnic). When considering taking 5 ebikes to a picnic, the cost/mile for an electric car is comparable.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 22 2020, @02:24AM
>Yea - the whole thing is crazy. If you replace walking with biking - net loss (biking cost/mile resource investment in tires, pumps, tubes, grease, etc. exceeds shoe rubber weardown). Replace biking with ebiking - net loss (ebiking cost/mile resource investment in battery manufacture/disposal and electricity exceeds). Replace cardriving with ebiking - MASSIVELY HUGE ENVIRONMENTAL WIN ($600 ebike goes hundreds of miles on $1 of electricity, not even close).
Oh please, this is just silly. How about we compare replacing air travel with ebikes? Riding an e-bike from NYC to China would surely produce less emissions, right?
Riding a bike lets you travel much longer distances than you can by walking. I can't possibly walk 100 miles in a day, but on a bicycle it's doable. E-biking provides even more capability; the fast ones go 28mph sustained (no human can do that unless they're a world-class athlete), and most people aren't very fit anyway. Cars let you do things that no bike or ebike could do, like drive hundreds of miles in a day.
but its only a win because I was never gonna walk 11mi/day, and I didn't actually bike. Environmentally speaking, nothing beats walking.
Except that, as you point out yourself, most people just aren't going to do it, because it takes up too much time at the very least. Walking 11 miles per day will use up 3-6 hours, depending on how fast you walk. People don't have that kind of time just to get to work and back; this is why we invented mechanical transportation in the first place (and before that, why we used horses and boats).
In short, a lot of these comparisons are silly because no one's going to walk across an ocean or a continent instead of using some carbon-emitting transportation device. But for certain trips, it does make good sense to make comparisons: a 5.5-mile trip is actually pretty short for a commute these days (by American standards), so comparing SUVs, cars, ecars, motorcycles, scooters, ebikes, and even regular bikes makes sense. But it falls apart if you're comparing much longer trips, like between cities. Anything over ~15 miles in fact is beyond bike/scooter reasonableness I think, for a daily commute. Of course, if we built cities more densely and didn't have people commuting 20-50 miles each way from the exurbs, then it would make a lot more sense to use non-car transportation.