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.
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?
I skimmed the article and I commented.
well the study wasn't making an opinion about it and just posted the results of their finding
I agree. Mobility pretty much directly correlates with QoL. It's a trip to the bar, to see grandma, to the supermarket that doesn't screw you on price, to the job you don't hate.
But people are gonna get some ideological whiplash because they're so used to slinging around tropes about induced demand being bad.
How many people are moved by shared scooters over its lifetime and how much energy went into its production and maintenance? Depending on the answers to these questions, shared scooters could certainly be worse in general. These seem to be the sort of questions the original study is trying to address.
Its just saying emissionAmount(method) < emissionAmount(otherMethod)
results might surprise you
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.
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.
Not sure what's the solution otherwise.
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).
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).
>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.
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.