Shared e-bikes and e-scooters are worse for the environment than owned ones

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361920921004296

by ivanstegic • 5 years ago

41 61 5 years ago

I mean that's nice and all but when I'm going anywhere in San Francisco it's walk if it's close enough, too far then scoot/lyft bikes, rain/massive hills then Uber. A personally owned one just isn't an option for the vast majority of my travel since I can't safely lock it indoors at most of my destination. It wouldn't last a month with me locking it outside.

devadvance• 5 years ago

Strongly agree with this. I'd add that shared vehicles of any kind make multimodal transportation far more feasible.

For example, I can walk to a bike dock, take a bike a few miles, then dock it. I can then bus/rideshare home as a result of weather, timing, luggage, etc.

It's certainly possible to do this with owned vehicles to some extent, but with far less flexibility.

ralusek• 5 years ago

Substitution patterns reveal that personal e-scooters and e-bikes emit less CO2 than the transport modes they replace, while shared e-scooters and e-bikes emit more CO2 than the transport modes they replace

This doesn't say what the title says. Surely this basically lies in what they've determined to be the transport modes being replaced rather than the bikes or scooters themselves.

couchand• 5 years ago

That's a style of silly complaint that The Simpsons already addressed: "Stop besmirching the house!"

AniseAbyss• 5 years ago

Obviously you should walk barefoot in order not to contribute to the ecocide.

seoaeu3• 5 years ago

Shared e-bikes and e-scooters are some of the most environmentally friendly transportation options in existence; they cause something like orders of magnitude lower emissions than personal automobiles. Framing them as "worse for the environment" by using a dubious baseline, really isn't productive

cammikebrown• 5 years ago

It reminds me of the recent articles saying “is this crazy weather climate change, or not?” as if we shouldn’t direct all of our resources into slowing the destruction of the planet.

gedy• 5 years ago

I've heard the most flack about shared e-scooters from transit and/or bike activists, likely "perfect is the enemy of good" situation.

haroldp• 5 years ago

Exactly. Shared bikes don't replace owned bikes. They replace cars.

CorrectHorseBat• 5 years ago

Except that according this study they don't.

Substitution patterns reveal that personal e-scooters and e-bikes emit less CO2 than the transport modes they replace, while shared e-scooters and e-bikes emit more CO2 than the transport modes they replace.

kelnos• 5 years ago

The article claims that's not the case. Ebikes predominantly replace walking or using a non-e-bike, or just not making the trip entirely.

I won't comment on how correct the study is, as I don't know, but if it's correct, that is a worse outcome, at least environmentally.

I would argue it's a better outcome for people, since they are taking trips that they want to take, but couldn't previously, or are taking trips in greater comfort and with greater speed than previously. That sounds like a win, and I'm not at all bothered by any environmental trade off there; it's not like it's putting more cars on the road.

vmception5• 5 years ago

The study isn’t saying that they arent. Its saying that the users of shared e-bikes and e-scooters were previously:

walking

using a non-motorized bike

or not making the trip at all.

They werent using public transportation, rideshares or cars to begin with, so it isnt reducing them. Thats the full extent of the study and it quantified that.

So therefore, worse.

epolanski• 5 years ago

I kinda believe that. Indeed if I think of my escooter usage it always occurred to save me from walking or taking public transport. It hardly if ever replaced my car usage.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

They werent using public transportation, rideshares or cars to begin with, so it isnt reducing them

That seems counter-intuitive. If I had to get somewhere not served by public transport, I would simply drive there. Having a conveinient way to get an e-bike once I get to the closest transit stop is the thing that would make me consider not taking the car.

Did these guys get public funding for this?

grayfaced• 5 years ago

Then study is doing a bogus comparison then. All forms of transportation are bad for environment when the alternative is people are forced to stay home.

seoaeu3• 5 years ago

Improving people's mobility isn't "worse". Giving someone a better transportation option that is also very environmentally friendly is a good thing

WaxProlix• 5 years ago

Super anecdotal, so keep your grains of salt handy, but for me and at least 1 other person I know, they've replaced a short drive to the office almost completely.

For me, they replaced getting a second car when my partner started working a bit further away. I've even found myself walking the full hour+ to the office I'm in these days if I leave early enough, depending on my mood as I get to the scooter.

I also worked at a place, and I think this is common, where such rides are reimbursable. Car ownership costs are not.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

Not only that but they help make public transit a viable option for more people since it solves the last mile problem at the destination.

Not sure what's the solution otherwise.

mytailorisrich• 5 years ago

It's not dubious, it's factual and interesting, bearing in mind that the study was conducted in Zurich, which has very good public transport and is quite walkable.

If shared e-scooters mostly replace walking then the comparison with cars is not relevant and indeed they result in increased use of resources and energy.

saurik• 5 years ago

(I am concentrating on scooters as I know a lot about them. I know much less about bikes, but you are asserting they are both great so I get to concentrate on either.)

You are literally throwing an opinion at a pile of data :(. This isn't a "framing" issue--some narrative you can just throw out--this is an actual study that is claiming the exact opposite of what you are asserting.

The biggest issue you are missing--which, FWIW, isn't new from this article: we also knew this years ago, though the analyses were less formal--is that these scooters don't actually replace "personal automobiles".

Now, you might claim "well they do for me", but you are in sufficient minority of people that you just don't matter. As this very study directly shows, these shared scooters mostly replace trips people would have walked or bicycled, not driven (in either a personal or shared vehicle).

The core problem with them is that the majority of trips people use in personal automobiles are for shopping and commuting, and the shared scooter programs don't solve shopping use cases at all and have only minimal impact on commuting (due to a combination of the distance the majority of commuters--weighted by their miles commuted, which is actually critical even if it sounds circular--are commuting combined with the extreme clockwork certainty they require in being able to reliably find a nearby scooter even at short distances).

It gets a lot worse for the scooters also--which this study does seem to be factoring in--because they tend to be somewhat "disposable" in a way you might not expect or appreciate given the battery they require: they are left outside constantly and as a public goods issue tend to get treated very poorly and even directly destroyed. In my community, they seriously end up in the ocean, due to a combination of people leaving them on the beach or even directly throwing them in.

(In our local community, the scooters mattered so little to the scooter company that when they were impounded by the police for various reasons the companies wouldn't even bother coming to pick them up; the local police were freaking out about what to do with the giant pile of scooters they were accumulating ;P.)

They also have to be collected and dragged back to electricity to charge, and then re-balanced across the city. This tends to get done in inefficient ways by random people doing "gig economy" work, and those vehicle trips--which were mostly done using low fuel efficiency trucks--to pick up and move the scooters after every handful of uses has to be taken into consideration.

The reality is then that people who go around insisting that these scooters get deployed everywhere are just making the environment worse: they are making very little impact on car trips while more than compensating for their benefit in production/waste, charging/rebalancing trips, and reduced usage of actually green transportation (such as bicycles).

cplusplusfellow• 5 years ago

While most of what you have stated I can find myself agreeing with, I am also an avid fan of scooters.

If you realistically want people to avoid having cars, you’re going to need to make the prospects of transit without a car (whether they would have walked or biked or driven) much more palatable. Scooters do this. They are more convenient for the trips you otherwise would have walked (faster, easier, less sweaty) or biked (a lot more work to lug the bike up and down the apartment block stairs and find a place to lock it and hope it’s not vandalized when you return).

danny_codes• 5 years ago

Seriously. An E-Bike weighs what, 50lb? VS a car which weighs 2000lbs. T

schwartzworld• 5 years ago

Makes sense. You could own an ebike or scooter for years, but the shared ones have a much shorter lifespan, sometimes as little as a few days or a week. Vandals, people riding 2 to a scooter, etc.

fivea• 5 years ago

>Makes sense. You could own an ebike or scooter for years, but the shared ones have a much shorter lifespan, sometimes as little as a few days or a week. Vandals, people riding 2 to a scooter, etc.

Your personal assertion bears no relationship with the case, and rationale, presented in the paper.

The paper's author's simply found out that shared e-bike/scooter users answered in a survey that if they did not had access to that mode of transportation then the next best option would be walking, and thus the authors proceeded to conclude that shared e-bike s/scooters are bad for the environment because if they didn't existed then people would walk and walking doesn't pollute as much.

To me, frankly, that sounds like specious reasoning. Walking is only an option in routes which are not that long and are not served by affordable public transportation with an acceptable availability. It makes no sense to depict a mode of transportation to be bad for the environment only if there is no alternative, and it makes no sense to assert that the same mode of transportation became awesome for the environment if a preferable but more polluting mode of transportation is suddenly provided.

zild3d2• 5 years ago

Substitution patterns reveal that ... shared e-scooters and e-bikes emit more CO2 than the transport modes they replace.

What? "Shared e-bike" for me typically replaces "car"

dogmatism2• 5 years ago

But in the studies cited, personal e-bike replaces car more often than shared e-bike, which more often replaced walking (than personal e-bike)

zild3d2• 5 years ago

and how often is taking a shared e-bike a gateway to getting a personal e-bike..

xiphias2• 5 years ago

The paper assigns 0 to walking…I’m sure that if you account CO2 emissions for raising cows, e-bikes are more CO2 efficient than walking.

smorgusofborg• 5 years ago

If you don't exercisize in your commute you more likely use more energy to either burn energy or treat the results of too much stored energy.

dogmatism2• 5 years ago

To sum up: shared e-bikes had higher rates of replacing walking and public transport than personal e-bikes which had higher rate of replacing cars

thghtihadanacct4• 5 years ago

Ooh, a good point a lot of people aint gonna get.

schimmy_changa• 5 years ago

Agree that e-bikes probably are better than no e-bikes because most people won't actually buy their own e-bike anyways.

Another piece not really discussed: shared e-bikes are a gateway drug for buying your own e-bike. You discover the freedom to move about a city without showing up sweaty and it's wonderful. Additionally, more people on 2-wheels / scooters = more support for cycling infrastructure = more cycling!

This type of research is great, but man the headlines suck and are clickbait-y.

rowanajmarshall• 5 years ago

That's me :) I got into riding e-bikes around London when the first lockdown kicked in, got my own (non-electric) bike a few months later. A few days ago (just as I left to see family!) my e-bike conversion kit arrived, and I'm SO excited to set it up and get riding!

Aerroon2• 5 years ago

The nice thing about shared ebikes is that they don't get stolen.

The not so nice thing is that they're unreliable. I can't plan to meet someone at 4:30 pm and plan using a shared ebike to get there. The bike is likely going to be unavailable and I would be late.

thghtihadanacct4• 5 years ago

LoL, look in your local river. They dont get stolen, they get tossed.

ckdarby• 5 years ago

Really? I've only tried three different ebike sharing services and all of them had apps that said exactly how many bikes were available at the stations.

Aerroon2• 5 years ago

Yes, and when they all say "0" within reasonable distance it's not helpful. Not to mention that (some of) those apps, somehow, are wrong too. The problem is with time of day and when people want to move. Residential areas tend to lack bikes in the morning, because people take them to ride to work or school or to the city center. In the evening it's the other way around.

thghtihadanacct4• 5 years ago

I DO NOT miss that silly orange ride share bike. The singular benefit of COVID was getting rid of JUMP bikes. No more of those garbage bikes in the river or abandoned in the bike path, halfway disassembled JUMPs sitting around. Terrible idea.

thghtihadanacct4• 5 years ago

Someone liked JUMP bikes? Instead of downvoting me, explain what societal need that idea met. Its a worthless insurance grab. Bike gets stolen or disappears ... insurance. Bike gets used and broken ... write offs. Its crap. get a bike.

scrollaway2• 5 years ago

The presence of e-bikes popularizes biking infrastructure in cities.

Cycling infra suffers from a catch 22: if there isn't any, people won't purchase bikes and thus won't bike. If people don't bike, cycling infrastructure isn't in demand.

Shared e-bikes lower the barrier of entry to cycling and thus people push their cities to invest in cycling infrastructure. Which increases cycling as a whole.

E-scooters are horrible but i suspect they have a similar positive effect long term.

Course correction on decades of car dependency may require over-correction in certain cities. E-scooters are likely that.

Here in Brussels, the sudden popularity of e-scooters caused a few e-bike startups to appear and get funding. The e-scooter boom faded but e-bikes gained as a result, and demand for cycling infrastructure is way up. Now the city is seriously pedestrianizing everything, which would not have happened had there not been these low barrier of entry alternatives (public transportation is very mediocre).

taurath• 5 years ago

The presence of e-bikes popularizes biking infrastructure in cities

I don’t know if I believe this - places that were increasing bike infrastructure were already doing so before ebikes became a thing. Any evidence of ebikes in particular changing or accelerating plans?

I suppose it could be different for places with already “good” infrastructure vs places which already have poor or nonexistent infrastructure.

scrollaway2• 5 years ago

I just edited an example of my current city.

The thing is, cycling infrastructure in a world of no shared bikes and scooters is something only "useful" (at first glance) to those who put in an initial investment of hundreds of euros/dollars... Often more, because it's hard to find cheap bikes in a city with poor cycling infrastructure, because there's less of a second hand / casual market.

In words startup founders may relate to, cycling heavily suffers from the bootstrapping problem. Shared vehicles ease that greatly.

vkou• 5 years ago

Sure, but how much better are they for the environment than owned cars? Shared buses?

I'm not particularly convinced by the figure in 5.2. While the personal automobile costs may be accurate per average mile, it's not clear to me if it is accurate per short-trip mile.

dang3• 5 years ago

This title was egregiously editorialized. Please don't to that—it's against the site guidelines:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

ivanstegic2• 5 years ago

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I’ll approach it differently next time.

dang3• 5 years ago

Appreciated!

rektide• 5 years ago

Hello moderator dang. Please, as well as chastize, can you help correct the situation? It'd be great if you'd help re-inform viewers along the way.

Mode choice, substitution patterns and environmental impacts of shared and personal micro-mobility seems to be the original title.

I was originally going to leave my comments at this. But I reviewed the article a little further. This is a different topic, but personally I did not find the title editorialized heavily. I found this quote fairly quickly within the above-the-fold abstract, which seems 100% in-line with what the "editorialized" title was:

Substitution patterns reveal that personal e-scooters and e-bikes emit less CO2 than the transport modes they replace, while shared e-scooters and e-bikes emit more CO2 than the transport modes they replace.

This seems to be the key finding of the study, according to the abstract.

It resounds with some fears I have. From personal experience, I cry a little when I see a pickup or full-sized van with 3+ generators going down the street with a couple score of scooters charging. I'm still very very doubtful this micromobility really is worse than a full sized vehicle, but for sure, the way we charge these devices is very very shit & sub-optimal & the environmental impacts are dozens of times higher than they ought to be. I'd like to see civic systems with better charging infrastructure.

I'm now three times removed from my original comments & intent, so, apologies apologies apologies. I also am rate limited here though, so this is just how I have to operate. Being unable to reply properly is how I have been forced to live for years.

Quadruple & pentuple apologies, readers. I simply cannot help but express some truths as I neander along.

ivanstegic2• 5 years ago

This is exactly what was going thru my brain. Thanks.

vmception5• 5 years ago

At first I thought the article would be about the vans and charging methods undermining the potential sustainability, but it doesn't even mention that and more so points out that the majority of users were previously doing things that used less emissions.

For that segment of the population, it's more analogous to going from horse and buggy to gasoline cars. The autonomy increased and more trips were made.

I'm still very very doubtful this micromobility really is worse than a full sized vehicle

its only worse if the users were never going to use a full sized vehicle. which the article is saying the majority of users never were. thats why its "worse", for emissions, because the trips weren't going to be made using something else with more emissions, or weren't going to be made at all. the article isn't drawing any conclusion about the benefits of mobility, just giving data where there was an abscence of data.

dang3• 5 years ago

Usually we replace the title with one that conforms to HN's rules, so in principle yes. I can't remember why I didn't do that in this case. Sometimes it's because the thread was so dominated by the original title that the discussion doesn't seem salvageable (I'm not sure if that was the case here—I haven't re-checked.)

CatsEyes• 5 years ago

It's early days. This study is a snapshot that doesn't take into account the impact of expanded infrastructure for e-bikes and e-scooters. It will take time to assess of the aggregate impact of more mobility options and adoption of personal vehicles resulting from exposure to shared vehicles.

For example, one element that's sorely lacking for personal ebikes is widespread security. As things stand now, parking them anywhere in public regularly is a nonstarter due to high value and ease of theft. When a critical mass of personal ebikes makes secured parking services viable, then we have a positive feedback loop that encourages more people to use them.

0xdeadb00f• 5 years ago

Off-topic and rant-y:

I hate these goddamn scooters. I swear at peak hour in the city center where I am, where there are heaps of people walking down the street, these stupid goddamn fucking scooters are parked one after the other making the footpath at least 40% smaller. It's so infuriating having to walk around these goddamn things, avoid fucking tripping over them because they're so badly placed.

I just want to get from point A to my bus stop. Is that too much to ask?

Shared e-bikes and e-scooters are worse for the environment than owned ones

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