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This story has been discussed 3 different times on HN within a little over a day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599127

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20597711

I think we’ve found a winning theme that resonates on HN.

There's important findings in here, but it also reminds me of reactions to Prius, Tesla, public buses, etc., where people latch on to any viable excuse to continue their wasteful status quo.

Scooters aren't perfect, just like everything else, but there's some interesting innovations happening in micromobility that encourage more walkable cities and greener commutes. I'm excited to see where the trends head, even if the immediate scooter to car eco comparison is muddy.

> that encourage more walkable cities and greener commutes

People using a bike that lasts 20 year is much greener than a shared scooter that dies after 100 days of use.

Having more walkable communities start with removing cars from the streets, adding density, by planning our cities. There is no magic tech that will fix the status quo.

Early bikes probably had similar reliability problems. Once the scooter design stabilizes, we will see refurbished units and mass recycling of consumables.

There is nothing inherently wasteful or prone to rapid breakdown in scooters; the fact that there is economic reason to dump them after 100 days only points out how inefficient is everything else and how improperly we tax environmental damage.

They are prone to break down as complex machines dumped in random locations out in the weather.

Scooters can last for years if kept inside and well cared for.

The point more about a shared vehicle being more wasteful than a privately owned one:

Bikesharing in China resulted in many times more bikes being produced than ones owned privately. Even insurance and license demanding schemes like LiuBike (they rent electric 50cc equivalents) ran into that, despite their vehicles not being as "disposable" as flopped Mobike.

Time of life isn't important, duration and ridden distance are. If a bike you have for 20 years only moves you 100 miles (probably less for most bike owners due to low utilizatio ) but a shared scooter can make it ~500 miles in 100 days, the scooter is better.
D: I rode my bike 7400 miles the first year owning it, (12 km single way commute and using it for going everywhere else as well).

100 miles is just two weeks of a 5 mile commute =/

You're correct, but 5 miles/yr is a rather low average, no? That's a single commute.
Having to exert yourself so much all day isn't an option for everyone
But it would be an option for more people if they had to do it every day.
I bike to work, so a little sweat, I'm okay with. But, say, I needed to do a round-trip mile down on a warm afternoon in my work-clothes, biking is not really a viable option. But an e-scooter is, one that is competitive in price to a cab or uber, and without the parking hassle of driving your own car.
You have to compare a scooter being used 24/7 as a rental with a bike being used similarly. Pretty sure docked or dockless ride share bikes need a lot of maintenance too.
> There's important findings in here, but it also reminds me of reactions to Prius, Tesla, public buses, etc., where people latch on to any viable excuse to continue their wasteful status quo.

I think the point raised in here is that taking the bus or biking is generally more environmentally friendly. Existing solutions are already better for this particular metric.

The one thing this article hints at is that riders may have taken a more wasteful option had the scooters not been there. But it's only one survey.

I saw a scooter traveling in a bike lane, and it seems like encouraging that combined with more bike lanes could be great. Traveling by car or transit with a bike to go the last few miles in the bay area is common, and I am honked at and cut off and pulled over almost every day on my bike and it could be better, as there is no economical bike path even between big cities on the peninsula just 5-10 miles apart... scooters could be used all along my daily path and bikes would instantly fill the lanes. Maids and landscapers could also switch to utility bikes if we connected wealthy and poor areas.
I mean the european continent (not so much the UK sadly) has shown that if you build a connected thought out cycle network it will get used heavily.

I was out with my stepson for a ride today and the UK is failing poorly on this one.

I think the main problem with these stand on scooters is their semi-disposability. The sit-on scooters (like the ones from Scoot/GenZe) are likely way more durable, people also likely treat them way better and overall have a better impact on environment. Moreover, they fit into traffic patterns a lot better (they fit well into traffic rules, whereas the stand on ones are often in a grey zone like sidewalks, etc).
No, at least from my experience in China.

People like new, shiny bikes more and companies who bet on making "unkillable" bicycles lost out as nobody wanted to ride grimey, dirty, squeaky, and generally worn out bicycles.

Ones who gained a lot were ones who bet on flimsy, but more frequently and cheaply replaceable bikes.

Why not use e-bikes instead, where the user paddles along with the motor?
> For example, taking the bus on a route with high ridership is usually more environmentally friendly than an e-scooter.

To be precise, as an individual making a choice how to get somewhere, taking the bus on a route with low ridership is also environmentally friendly.

The decision to run the low-ridership bus on that route in the first place was not too environmentally friendly (unless it's a long-term play to build up the bus system), but that decision has already been made and the emissions are a sunk cost. If you get on a bus that's running anyway, the additional emissions are basically negligible.

Obviously what they're trying to analyze is averages across a population, and they're right about that. But don't let it make you feel bad about riding a low-ridership bus.

You can hop on any scheduled flight and say that the plane was flying anyway so there was no added environmental cost in you getting a seat.

Low ridership buses can form part of a wider network where the busy parts of the network depend on the feeder services. Those feeder services also have to offer round the clock service if people are to be bothered using them.

In the UK we got rid of the minor branch lines of the railway network thinking people would drive to their nearest station and complete their journey by rail. It never happened, people stayed in their cars and rail passenger numbers declined.

You are never going to have a network with all seats filled at all times. Seen that way then a transport service is getting it wrong if it is always at 100% utilisation.

The airplane thing is interesting because planes are expensive (and airlines are for-profit), so they are careful about utilization and keep planes as close to full as practical. Which means if you board that plane, you are altering some stats that someone, somewhere is watching pretty closely. You could easily be helping to tip the balance toward adding another flight to that route or switching to a bigger plane for that flight.

I don't know the right math, but I would assume this averages out to something near 1-to-1. That is, if, in the steady state, 1000 people take extra seats on airplanes, presumably it averages out to about 1000 seats of extra capacity being added.

And I suppose the concept must apply to low-ridership bus lines. If you ride it, you could tip the balance toward keeping it going rather than canceling it or consolidating it together with other routes. Maybe this is a bit less than 1-to-1, though, because transit agencies aren't just following rider behavior but also trying to fulfill a mission to have good coverage of an area.

TLDR, maybe it does matter if you're near a utilization threshold that someone is really paying attention to.

There's also the fact that maybe you wouldn't take the high-ridership bus/train that the low-ridership bus connects you to, but instead just car directly to your destination, resulting in higher overall emissions.
Was anybody arguing we should ditch bikes for scooters?

Why are so many "urbanists" dunking on scooters? Article after article basically saying scooters are worse than cars, when the study doesn't say that and fails to account for the many negative car externalities, like all of the asphalt used to pave roads and parking spots, and the environmental opportunity cost of those spaces, as just one example.

Cars are the enemy here, and scooters are on our side. Yes, we need to make them last longer, and yes scooter companies should not be advertising as "carbon free", but that doesn't mean we should stymie their momentum and push the public back towards cars.

Most of the articles stemming from this study are horrible clickbait trash. It's unbelievable.

> “The real impact comes largely from two areas: using other vehicles to collect and redistribute the scooters; and emissions related to producing the materials and components that go into each scooter.”

I think the first point can be drastically improved using city-wide electric docking for scooters and encouraging users, via pricing, to leave them in such points. Large vehicles will then be used to reshuffle scooters only to compensate for assymetric demand, much less important than charging.

The materials point can be improved by increasing reliability of the platform and mass recycling. Price competition and proper carbon and pollution taxing can optimize this automatically.

My dream would be an organized network of city sponsored docked electric scooters/bikes that would be accessible through already existing public transportation subscriptions.

But instead of that we have 10 different companies flooding cities with thousands of vehicles knowing very well they will never ever be profitable until there is only 1 left and they can finally increase their price.

Cities could even offer proper employment status and salary to the people taking care of the fleet instead of the current less than ideal reward system.

Probably you talk about America but quite a lot of cities in Europe are doing it.

Instead of dropping your bike randomly, the city is covered with connection points where you leave the machine. Like docks, where it locks and charges. Since you can't let every company build their own hubs everywhere randomly, it's city ran business.

Where I currently live it's covered if you have a monthly card for public transportation but you can buy or pay separately too, just more expensive.

What makes you think city run scooters would be so much more effective? I agree payment should be standardized and unified. But competition is a strong motive for innovation. For example, it could push providers to increase the range, safety and reliability, we could have self driving scooters that slowly go to the charging locations by themselves.
I know the paper is only looking at how "green" each option is without taking into consideration the value that they provide. Like when 7% of the responses said that they otherwise would not have taken the trip, do we really want to live in a society where simply don't move around?

I think we need to acknowledge that mobility is valuable and the answer to urban transport isn't staying put.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599127
If scooters end up being used as a replacement for walking/cycling it certainly is not as green as those alternatives. I haven't seen a study as to what they are replacing, but I can't imagine for the mile or so trips that they are actually replacing cars.
They are also dangerous.

I witness an accident a week and I do not spend much time around areas where there are scooters.

People don't obey the laws, too many ride doubled up and many ride on the sidewalk.

They ones affected most are blind and disabled people who get hit on the side walk.

I bike to work in downtown SF in one of the areas with the most scooters. Often there are more scooters in bike lanes than bicycles. I have never seen an accident, so your anecdote is not my experience.

I do often see people scooting without a helmet on streets with no protected bike lane which makes me cringe, knowing how reckless with other’s lives many car drivers are. In these situations, I think it’s better for people to ride on the sidewalk. Nobody should have to sacrifice their lives for poor urban planning, and the bruises from a pedestrian/scooter collision are much less serious than the death or brain injury from a car/scooter collision.

You having never seen a scooter accident is also an anecdote...

I was in San Diego last month, which has many times more scooters than San Francisco, and I saw several people fall (though not hurt) off scooters.

A lot of cities have tons of these scooters but no bike lanes. I saw lots of really dangerous behavior on them in St Louis and there were a lot of collisions.
So you are proposing dedicated lanes for scooters, and less lanes for much more dangerous vehicles? Why, that's an excellent idea.
I’ve seen a few people go flying off of their scooter and I know one person who broke their wrist. I don’t know what the miles to death rate is. If you excluded the drunk people who’ve been killed in crashes they probably aren’t too dangerous.

I’ve been concerned by the number of children on them, and a huge number of adults with children who appear to be between 4 and 7 years old. Also I’ve seen a number of people riding on streets at night, sometimes against traffic.

In regards to specific dangers. You have small hard wheels and if the scooter hits a pothole at speed there just isn’t many ways out of a negative outcome on that.

If you're worried about dangerous transportation, you must be positively outraged by the millions killed every year by cars, right?
So, based on your statement, you're saying that if you don't like cars that means you must love all alternatives and never ever point out any issues with them even if they are utterly legitimate?
That isn't really fair.

You are comparing something that has laws and rules, a dedicated place to 'drive' and have billions of miles driven.

Right now in most places these scooters follow whatever laws they want (if faster in middle of street, it is there, if faster on sidewalk, it is there). People aren't accountable (no driver license, hard to track) and idiots.

Electric scooters should be built and designers to be easily repaired and recycled. The current scooter designs looks like one time plastic garbage that will end on the when its ens of life.
What about impact on death? What about forecasting scenario where scooters would take over majority of transportation and impact infrastructure?
Regardless I love them for short distances. So nice not having to walk so much outside at this con I'm at.
What advantages do they have over the $150 target model?
You don't have to carry the public scooter around with you, bring it home, charge it, or worry about it getting stolen. If you meet up with friends, they can rent one too. Once your city gets to a certain density threshold, public scooters are the way to go.
When it is done satisfying your temporary desire, you get to constructively toss it in the river. er, I mean responsibly place it somewhere out of the way to enable synergistic sharing between many other people who also lead enlightened green lifestyles.
You don't have to figure out what to do with it when you get to your destination or go on public transportation.
e-Scooters are small enough and, at least in Munich, allowed in public transport. As for destination: lock it on a tree or take it into your office.
Dupe from two days ago