Infestation or liberation? E-scooters challenge the status quo

The rise of electric scooter-shares in major American cities is a welcome trend—occupying auto-centric infrastructure with alternative transit options is good for our well-being and environment.

 

Where did scooters come from?

Scooters emerged as a mass-produced commercial kids’ toy in the early 2000s, but their original conception, according to the self-proclaimed inventor of the scooter Wim Ouboter, was revolutionary: a fast, convenient, adult option for mid-distance trips around the city. Whether morning commutes to work or school, quick runs to the grocery store, or visits to your friend’s place across town—scooters can fill the awkward transportation gap between “too far to walk” and “too close to drive.”

But scooters were slow to catch on with adult users. A bicycle is more efficient and navigates better on inclines (a kick-scooter in Seattle or San Francisco is dead weight), while a car offers more room and safety, even if it isn’t as fast during heavy traffic. The game-changer for scooters was electrification. By eliminating the physical limitations of the kick-scooter and the impracticality of the Segway, electric scooters (e-scooters) finally found their place in the urban transportation ecosystem in 2018.

E-scooters are active in dozens of cities across the country. Their unannounced arrival mirrored the brash, antagonistic business strategy first modeled by Uber: show up in full-force without warning, chancing success on the ability to build a protective wall of public popularity and acceptance before cities figure out how to regulate them. Despite certain cities slapping bans and restrictive permitting on them, e-scooters are taking off. In Portland, Oregon, the first two weeks of electric scooters saw nearly 48,000 trips taken, with the average trip just 1.2 miles long. In Washington, DC, the Department of Transportation recorded over 140,000 trips by more than 55,000 users in May 2018 alone, even with a 400-vehicles-per-company cap and regulations on vehicle locking.

E-scooters have plenty of well-reasoned critics, who decry the lack of regulatory clarity around them, unreliable battery charges, and abandoned scooter clutter. However, a popular argument about safety misplaces hostility toward scooters when the greatest safety risks stem from cities’ auto-centric infrastructure problem.

The argument against scooters blames them for being in the way; for swerving on and off the sidewalks, in the bike lanes, and in the road; and ultimately for being unsafe for pedestrians, drivers, and users. As a recent class-action lawsuit alleges, e-scooter companies are guilty of “gross negligence.”

These could be critiques of e-scooters, but they are more powerful as critiques of auto-centric infrastructure, which makes other modes of transportation dangerous and inefficient. For the past century, the United States has organized cities to give cars unquestioned priority; their one-sided domination of transportation space is what creates the threat to e-scooters, bikes, and pedestrians. The threat is both physical—motor vehicle crashes killed almost 40,000 people in 2016—and environmental, given the estimated 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted from the average American passenger vehicle every year. E-scooters, on the other hand, contribute to a safer, more sustainable, and more productive (and fun) system of urban transit.

Creating infrastructure that prioritizes safety and congestion

The recent death of an e-scooter rider at Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, underscores the essential conflict between cars and non-car vehicles like e-scooters and bikes: as long as they share the same spaces, there is significant risk of collision. Of course, collision is a natural and unavoidable consequence of any crowded area populated with human (error-prone) decision-makers. How can policy or technology mitigate the lethality of collisions? Policymakers could either remove the human element or the vehicle that poses the deadly threat in the first place. (Self-driving cars are better than traditional cars in terms of safety, but fewer cars in general should still be the goal for dense cities.)

Abolishing cars goes too far, but each mode of transportation has its unique strengths and weaknesses in an efficient and safe urban system. Look at e-scooters’ most compelling comparative advantage: mid-distance travel. Over a third of car trips are two miles or less, the perfect range for an e-scooter ride (“too far to walk, too close to drive”). Using a car for such a short trip increases the lethality of a potential accident— especially given that one in three car accidents take place within a mile of home —and needlessly adds to congestion.

E-scooters and bikes are the best-designed transit options for most mid-distance trips. If the U.S. transportation infrastructure made it safer to choose these options, space currently used on parking lots and multistory garages could be converted to space for retail, housing, and parks. Creating not just shared but dedicated lanes and streets for walking, biking, and scootering would avoid the collision problem altogether and induce some of these extra benefits. Of course, cars can still be used when they have a comparative advantage: for long-distance trips to places without sufficient public transit options or major congestion issues. (At least until the country invests in ultra-high-speed rail.)

Environmental impact

According to the grim global warming projections from the most recent IPCC report, reliance on fossil fuel-burning technology is not long for this world (or this world is not long for it). Transportation, meanwhile, was responsible for 28 percent of annual carbon emissions in the United States in 2016.

E-scooters offer a much greener approach. Bird, one of the top firms in the business, claimed to have mitigated over 445,000 pounds of carbon emissions with its first million rides, assuming users would otherwise be driving. Lime insists it prevented 8,500 pounds of carbon emissions in its first two weeks under the same assumption, and recently announced an initiative to use renewable energy for vehicle charging. These are small potatoes relative to the global climate change crisis but scaling up e-scooters can be part of a larger mission to transform energy consumption and transportation habits.

While environmental metrics from e-scooter companies don’t account for how the electricity is generated, there are promising early returns. E-scooters still use less electricity than cars would. Early studies show e-scooters replace some mid-distance car trips, though more research is needed to definitively prove their substitution effect; people could be using e-scooters to replace walking or biking rather than car trips, or people could use them recreationally. In the end, any technology not totally independent from fossil fuel consumption is a climate change contributor, though e-scooters may help speed the transition to less harmful modes of transportation.

Where do we go from here?

Overthrowing decades of automobile hegemony is a tall order, but the cracks are showing. E-scooters are a symptom of the growing dissatisfaction with 20^th century urban planning. Population booms, housing crunches, gentrification, and suburban sprawl are all changing where we live and how we move through public spaces. We should be open to anything that encourages a safer, more sustainable transportation future.

 Photo by Shinya Suzuki via Flickr.