Friday, August 30, 2019

Electric scooters are good for the environment, right? Here’s why it’s not so simple

Electric scooters are good for the environment, right? Here’s why it’s not so simple
Excerpt: So he and his students decided to tally up the full environmental impact of electric scooters over their lifetimes. The results, published Friday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, suggest that e-scooters aren’t quite as eco-friendly as they may seem. While traveling a mile by scooter is better than driving the same distance by car, it’s worse than biking, walking or taking a bus — the modes of transportation that scooters most often replace. That’s primarily because of the energy-intensive materials that go into making the vehicles, and because of the driving required to collect, charge, and redistribute them. “That actual trip somebody’s taking on the scooter — that’s pretty green,” said Juan Matute, the deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies who was not involved with the study. “What’s not green is everything you don’t see.”

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