Electric Scooter: How Sustainable are They?

When they first started gaining popularity in the late 2010s, electric scooters seemed like an innocent and sustainable urban transportation alternative. They are cheaper than cars, easier to ride than motorcycles, and can be shared using many e-scooter apps like Bird, Lime, and Spin. Being so fun to ride also made them a popular choice among younger riders. But so much of the population was not as pleased with electric scooters as their users were. Some people see them as harbingers of chaos that are already starting to take up what limited space pedestrians have left in urban cities.

There were 1,349 recorded accidents and 1,437 casualties involving electronic scooters in 2022 at the end of June. So the safety of these devices is already in question. But that’s not the only issue. When you start crunching some numbers, you will also see that electric scooters are not that environmentally friendly either.

The lithium battery most of them use causes 20 grams of CO2-equivalent of GHG emissions. The whole thing accounts for 204 grams of CO2e. When you consider the service life of an electric scooter on a sharing app is 9 to 18 months, you realize these devices are not that sustainable after all. But they are still popular and will be used if we don’t see changes in laws that allow them to roam freely on public roads.

Paris people will decide in a referendum on April 3 whether to ban shared e-scooters citywide. The result could make Paris the world’s biggest city to kick rental scooter operators out. What is your side on this issue?

Update: Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo announced that rental e-scooters will be banned in the city from September 1st, after a referendum showed that 90% of Parisians oppose them.

#electricscooter

Join our YouTube channel by clicking here: https://bit.ly/3asNo2n

Find us on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3PM21xW
Find us on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3t2Huvb
Find us on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3wQfXzA
Find us on TikTok: https://bit.ly/3wNsBOu

Get the latest stories: https://interestingengineering.com/

Support IE for high-quality journalism: https://interestingengineering.com/su...