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Comment by robert_foss | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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