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Comment by nharada | Hacker News Reader

It's a bummer to see what I think is a good idea in theory be hated because the people who implemented it did such a bad job in practice.

The idea of having a fast, easy, low emission and cheap way to get around short distances in a city without needing a car or having to bring a bike or similar is awesome.

Unfortunately, instead of solving the things citizens disliked about them (sidewalk parking/riding, inexperienced riders, rapid expansion) the companies decided they should just take the Uber approach and bulldoze any opposition with money. This made them a symbol of tech and gentrification for many, a symbol of growth and change for others, and aligned basically everyone in the city against them.

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These devices are hardly low emissions if you compare them to walking or biking which are the modes of transit they are most likely to replace.

I had a conversation with an ex C-level employee of one of these companies, and there is no way for these devices to offset the environmental impact of production and shipping during the short lifetime of each device. The environmental aspect is a pure lie.

I don't buy that. I know lots of people who have switched to Lyft bikes and, for some time, had switched to scooters. The alternative was Uber, which is far worse since - you get idling drivers, the trip encompasses both the distance to pick you up and to drop you off, and it's a car.

Electric replacements that are cheap and take care of those commutes would seem to be obviously much better. I don't know about any C level exec saying whatever they said, but I'd need a lot more actual information to believe that.

Further, I can't drive, I will never be able to drive, because my vision is shit. I can bike, I enjoy biking, but I can go way faster on a Lyft bike and a way longer distance, it's just radically more convenient - if I need to get across the city to see a friend it's basically the lyft bike or a car.

yes its not the emissions during use it's the emissions from manufacturing. a car might last a decade. the scooter lasts a few months and you have to keep making them at scale

This feels like it could be handled with regulatory pressure/ quality control.

You have to remember that vans drive around these cities collecting and maintaining these scattered scooters.

There is a large auto footprint for each scooter that needs to be serviced, as well as for the people servicing them.

I'm still not convinced. Maybe that raises the footprint, but I can't see that offsetting the benefits. Sort of like taking the bus - yeah, the bus might be empty sometimes, like at night, but during the day it's able to take hundreds of cars off of the street.

I mean... you're likely talking about 1 van per 100+ scooters. The number of replaced auto trips is massive, especially in and out of urban centers like Austin that aren't as walkable.

If you live in SF, NYC, or Boston? Sure, they're mainly replacing public transit or walking, but they have a huge impact in the less walkable areas like Austin, San Jose, Seattle, or Los Angeles.

They're hardly low emissions once you consider the full lifecycle as North Carolina State University did[0] (units from article converted to less insane CO2-eq g/passenger-km.. or maybe it should be oz/mi?):

  257  Personal car
   25  Personal electric bike
    5  Personal bike
  126  Shared scooter
  118  Shared dock-less bike
   51  Bus /w high ridership

The shared scooters/bikes have lots of CO2 from lifetime, redistribution, and charging (scooters). Somewhat counter-intuitively, a popular bus has less than half the CO2 belching impact of a shared scooter.

[0]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab2da8

That's not a reasonable comparison. All other transportation methods are measured solely by tailpipe emissions or energy consumption, like they're some kind of natural geological phenomena. The CO2 emissions for shared scooters/bikes, according to Section 2.4, table 1, additionally include mining and processing the raw materials, manufacturing, shipping over the Pacific, shipping across the entire width of North America on a truck, collection, distribution, and maintenance.

The unmentioned takeaway of this study is how important it is to incentivize improved manufacturing methods that are closer to markets, as well as maintaining existing product (if it's reasonably efficient) to extend service life. Materials, manufacturing, and shipping are responsible for vast CO2 production, largely because there's a strong cost incentive to move that manufacturing to locations with inefficient production and/or loose controls that are far from the product's market. For reducing overall CO2 emissions, improving CO2/KM alone is literally only half of the picture.

It is not so counter intuitive when you consider that popular bus carries a lot of passengers. I'm not sure what is the high ridership, but even average of 20 means per passenger rate is fraction of others.

As an anecdotal counterpoint, scooters have replaced Uber as my main method of transport and it's not even close. I probably take 4-8 scooter rides every single day and an Uber or two a week, when it was previously multiple Uber rides daily.

Also Even if we deny the carbon-cycle benefits of electric scooters, they probably do have local air-quality benefits.

(I don't have a car or bicycle and never did in this city, but I do walk less now than pre-scooter.)

Also scooters/bikes don't create any noise or soot pollution. I live on a very busy street on the 5th floor and I hate the noise when my windows are open (but I love having my windows open in general) - the noise is unbearable even after midnight, and after a couple days everything is covered in a fine layer of particles (dust, soot and whatever else is in the air). I didn't have any of these problems whenever I lived on a quiet street. Thankfully I'm moving soon to a quieter area again.

That's not the right frame of reference to use. Yes, they're a little more pollutive than cycling or walking. However, they're also much faster. Scooters compete with cars, not with walking. And it is obvious that scooters are much more environmentally friendly than people driving or purchasing cars.

It's kind of amazing how we just ignore the massive environmental toll of cars, and then hyper optimize for tiny tiny amounts of smaller emissions that don't mean a thing.

Unfortunately our cultural and political biases prevent us from making the best choices all too often. We have a big discussion about whether it's ok for these small scooters to exist, but never question the far more damaging status quo.

there's history of big business actively promoting that, such as plastic recycling campaigns pushed by big oil. i think it was mark fisher who wrote about capitalism managing its own critique within itself rather than try to defend its own crap as ideal - that it keeps the debate framed away from them or real (revolutionary) solutions, and where you can even now point at your neighbor as one of the climate criminals instead of joining with that neighbor against the real enemy

with the level of organization and resources big business have, meaning years-long organized campaigning and learning what strategies work, it's hard to see how common people who dip in and out of political engagement have a hope against that

> Scooters compete with cars, not with walking

It depends in which cities... Where I live they are usually competing with bikes, public transportation, walking and maybe uber as a distant last

The only environmental analyses I have seen are for extremely short life, as is exhibited by the people who actively destroyed the things, from thrill-seeking teens to the people who hate change and would tip them over when passing them to cause as much inconvenience as possible.

It is quite possible for a culture to adapt them in a environmentally friendly way, just as it is possible to adapt e-bikes in an environmentally friendly way. But as long as we prioritize car-access over everything else, it's not going to change.

I think the goal for them is to replace cars, or rather make transit actually possible in low density. I used to have a commute where I could walk 15 minutes + take a bus for an hour with connection, or I could drive 17-20min. Reading on the bus is nice but there's no way I'm walking almost a mile and taking 3+ times longer. Scooters made it much more practical to get to the bus, or even cut out the connection and make it 12min by scooter + 25min by bus.

That might be truer in some cities than others. I'm currently visiting Yerevan where there are lots of scooters. Yerevan is hilly and hot, and your choices for public transit are cabs or busses, the latter being pretty inaccessible for tourists, especially if you can't read Armenian. Scooters seem like almost the ideal way to get around for distances of a few miles.

Comparing two systems, one with everyone using mass transit plus scooters of various types, the other, everyone owning an auto, I suspect the former would have a lower emissions footprint. A lot lower.

Scooters may be worse than walking, but they could be a step in the direction of a pollution-free future.

Is it better to just drive? (Honest question.)

>low emission

Looked into this a while back, and this isn't really true[1]. Worst case (6m lifespan) emissions from scooters are twice as bad as a passenger car per passenger-kilometer, and best case comparable to a tram (assuming 2y lifetime). Lifetime was the determining factor. Has anything happened in the last couple of years to increase the average life span of these scooters, to change this scenario? Unless average lifetime is 2 years or more, emissions are nowhere near "low".

[1]: https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/e-tems46250.2020.9111817 (In particular fig. 3 and 5).

A few years back, I talked to an engineering manager at one of the scooter companies and he said that their longest lived scooter at the time was 11 months old. I can't remember what the average was at the time, but it was shockingly low. Something like 3 months. No idea what it is now.

Having worked at one of the big scooter companies, I can say that (when I left in 2021) we had plenty of scooters in service that had been operating for two years or more.

That said, this generation of micromobility has fallen flat. Any solution that's economically viable will need either dedicated infrastructure or self-driving (so you don't need to send a person after each vehicle), not to mention better safeguards to protect the vehicles themselves (vandalism/theft was the #1 cause of vehicle end of life, and even if you can turn a stolen scooter into a brick, $20 of spare parts is still $20 of spare parts to an addict or anybody else who is sufficiently desparate). All of that is to say that the first company to crack that nut will almost certainly need to work in close partnership with city governments--the Uber model will not work.

Glad to hear that they are lasting longer. I probably should have prefaced my comment by saying that this was around the first year that these companies really blew up in LA. (Can't remember when that was.) Vandalism was super high and they were just figuring things out.

They're low emission for the city they're in however. Air quality is a big deal

> fast, easy, low emission

Also they reduce(/avoid) congestion, so fewer cars sitting idling, so they also mitigate car emissions. Where is that part of their impact factored in?

Consider the net effect of 100 people using scooters, instead of 100 people using (say) 50-100 cars for rideshares.

PS and of course, essentially zero footprint for parking, so better urban planning.

Less traffic on the road just means that others who previously didn't will take to the roads because there is less traffic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

It is unlikely that there is a 1:1 relationship between number of people that take a scooter instead of car and the actual measured reduction on the road. In fact, I'd bet it is negligible.

> instead of solving the things citizens disliked about them (sidewalk parking/riding, inexperienced riders, rapid expansion) the companies decided they should just take the Uber approach and bulldoze any opposition with money.

Are these two mutually exclusive? They probably would love to solve the problem of sidewalk riding / inexperienced drivers, but that's a very hard problem to solve.

Actually the problem of inexperienced drivers isn't so hard - and governments here (and probably elsewhere) are making it worse by only allowing registered share- scheme scooters to be used on footpaths etc., when clearly private owners are more likely to be experienced. It would surely make more sense to require a basic sort of license to ride e-scooters on footpaths or roads, but honestly I think the public just need time to adapt - there were outcries over cars when they first started appearing widely on public roads (justifiably too, as they were pretty deadly).

I wanted to use them when I was a student and lived 2 miles from campus. Unfortunately I couldn’t ride on campus, and I couldn’t ride in the residential area where I lived. So basically I could only ride in between - one mile out of the two. I just got a bicycle which didn’t have such restrictions.

Right. The popularity of e-bikes is partially just regulatory. An e-bike can go 2-3 times faster than a Bird scooter, but it looks like a bicycle so it is legal to ride more places.

As far as I know you can't really ride your bike on the sidewalk. Either the street or specialised bike lanes. So you will never really see someone driving a bike at 25 km/h (the legal limit in many European countries) on the sidewalk.

Plus, people are much more used to dealing with bikes than scooters.

> The idea of having a fast, easy, low emission and cheap way to get around short distances in a city without needing a car or having to bring a bike or similar is awesome.

The solution you're looking for is a bikesharing service. These have become increasingly more common around my parts (in Germany), and thankfully these are not run by some VC-backed startup, but by actual local companies. That's good news because they integrate with existing public transit passes, so everyone with a tram pass can just swipe the tram pass on a bike and start using it with some pretty generous discounts.

Example: https://www.dvb.de/en-gb/service-en/cycle-hire

It's a stretch to think they were even a good idea in theory. Putting riders with no helmets and no wrist protection on electric scooters is just this side of distributing free trampolines on the public pavement as a safety disaster.

The shortest path to transforming city transportation is protected bike lanes and law enforcement putting in the effort to put bike theft rings (if you have ever passed a pickup with dozens of bikes in the bed, that's a theft ring taking bikes far enough away from where they were stolen to sell them) out of business.

I feel safer on my electric scooter than my (non-assist) bike, because I can accelerate quickly enough that cars don't zoom around me. It also solves the theft problem for me, because I can take it with me inside instead of locking it up.

I agree that dockless scooters were always a stretch. I hope if they go away, they'll have been a gateway drug for private ownership of e-scooters.

> It's a stretch to think they were even a good idea in theory. Putting riders with no helmets and no wrist protection on electric scooters is just this side of distributing free trampolines on the public pavement as a safety disaster.

Any idea what the injury/accident/fatality rates are for scooters vs bicycles?

For n=1, 100% accident/injury, 0% fatality.

Those things shouldn't go above 10mph. The tech makes them seem like a bike until anything at all goes wrong, like hitting a small pothole or clipping the corner of a road barrier. Then you're suddenly in mid air above a city street with nothing helping you out.

A bike can handle hitting something small, and has enough of a gyroscopic effect that it doesn't just fall over.

I'm a bit puzzled that you didn't mention accidents at all, just like the article. Every time I see one of those rushing by it looks like some gnarly injuries waiting to happen, and an emergency doctor confirmed that (although I don't have numbers).

Also, I'm not sure that calling a battery-powered mode of transportation, for distances so short they don't require motors at all, 'low-emission' is adequate.

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