The reviled electric scooter is back. Does it deserve a second chance?

In 2018, Scootergeddon descended on American cities. Without warning, start-ups dropped electric scooters on city streets by the thousands. People took 39 million scooter rides that year alone — and nearly as many seemed enraged about the two-wheeled vehicles cluttering sidewalks, blocking doorways and zooming around uneasy pedestrians.

The pandemic seemed to crush the market for electric scooters. Fleets shrank. Companies filed for bankruptcy. Scooters were left for dead in trash cans and on the bottom of waterways. The coup de grâce appeared to be the vote to ban rental e-scooters in Paris in April.

But as life has flowed back into downtowns, so have the two-wheelers. In the United States, 156 U.S. cities from New York to Washington offer ride-share e-scooter systems. Rides are increasing again. The former transportation chief in the nation’s capital, Everett Lott, has called them “a fundamental part” of the city’s transportation network. Seventeen percent of D.C. residents say they use them.

Should you give scooters a second chance? From a climate perspective, today’s ultra-efficient durable models are among the cleanest vehicles you can ride, and new technology in scooters may make them safer than their forebears.

Whether you love them or hate them, the scooters are coming. Here’s what you need to know to decide whether to hop on — or get out of the way.

In search of a better commute

If you live near a big city, you’re aware of the perennial problem of too many cars in too little space. That’s only getting worse. The number of hours Americans spend stuck in traffic has more than doubled since the 1980s, topping 99 hours per year, with no end in sight. Every additional minute commuting behind the wheel correlates to poorer health for us and the planet. Long car commutes are associated with higher blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, greater obesity, more heart attacks and even premature births — not to mention emissions.

Scooters, like bicycles and e-bikes, promise to give you back some of those hours. They take up much less space than a car, and unlike the bus, they take you exactly where you want to go with minimal searching for parking. On short trips, they can radically shrink the time to get around a city: Most scooter and bike trips are short — around 15 minutes and 1.5 miles. Nearly half — 45 percent — replace taxi or personal vehicle trips, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, an association of 100 major North American cities and transit agencies.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found Atlanta’s 2019 ban on e-scooters and e-bikes raised the average commute times by about 10 percent, on average, and by 37 percent during stadium events.

But the scooter backlash will not be a surprise to those familiar with the history of how new technologies reshape society — automobiles’ chaotic arrival on American streets comes to mind.

Scooters were no different. Cities were unprepared. The technology was new. Safety precautions were lax. Riders were inexperienced. One former New York City Department of Transportation engineer described the vehicles’ frenzied deployment as compressing more than a decade of changes to people’s travel habits into just two to three years.

That’s taken a toll. Last year, reports the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, 50,000 out of over about 50 million scooter rides ended with a trip to the emergency room. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an industry group, found e-scooter riders sustained more injuries per mile than bicyclists — although their novelty may have played a role. A whopping 40 percent of those hurt reported being on their first ride, and 98 percent wore no helmet.

The reviled electric scooter is back. Does it deserve a second chance?

Cities opened thousands of miles of new lanes for bikes and scooters in the pandemic, many of which became permanent. Scooter etiquette evolved under public pressure and laws that punish sidewalk riding and abandoned vehicles.

The scooters themselves are changing: Many are now built to last five years (compared with two months for their predecessors), and employ sensors and software to avoid accidents, similar to those in self-driving cars. If a rider is on the sidewalk or breaking local rules, companies can slow or disable the vehicle remotely. Self-driving software repositions misplaced vehicles automatically.

That’s putting scooters back on track for a national rollout.

Should you ride a scooter?

Major scooter companies are now seeing ridership rebound close to, or even above, pre-pandemic levels as cities cautiously welcome them back. Shared ridership may have already hit a record in 2023, based on recent scooter company data compiled by Bloomberg, even as private ownership of scooters continues to rise.

That’s good news for the climate, argues Noah Horesh, a research scientist at Colorado State University who conducts transportation life-cycle analyses. He’s looked at the emissions generated to get you from point A to point B in different vehicle types, starting from mining metal ore to manufacturing to the last tick of their odometer. His findings are not what you might expect.

Transit buses, for example, generate higher emissions than all other fuel-powered vehicles because the average ridership in the United States is low, even though they are designed to move dozens of people (but deliver other benefits, since rapid transit disproportionately helps people escape poverty and avoid homelessness). Trains, especially subways and commuter rail running on electricity, meanwhile, perform considerably better because they transport larger numbers of people efficiently.

But scooters win over all listed vehicles. Thanks to their diminutive and efficient design, they can turn electrons into enormous numbers of miles with no tailpipe emissions. As the electric grid continues to decarbonize, scooters’ emissions will shrink further. (Because bicycles and e-bikes include life-cycle emissions from food and agriculture with fossil fuels, they weren’t included in this chart.)

Does pollution from battery manufacturing matter? Not much. Averaged over the vehicle’s lifetime miles, the vast majority of global warming emissions come from burning fuel, not manufacturing the materials. That’s true for a scooter as much as a car.

The two-wheelers are not for everyone, though. I’ve ridden many — and I’ll be testing one on my commute soon — but the family e-bike is my two-wheel workhouse.

Millions do rely on them, however, and millions more are likely to join them. As one San Francisco city supervisor said, “the genie is out of the bottle,” and scooters are bound to become even more tightly woven into the fabric of urban life.

The reflexive reaction to the scooter wars is to retreat into questions of identity: Are you anti-car or anti-scooter? A better question is how to maximize everyone’s freedom to get around. That can get us thinking not only about new forms of transportation, but how we want to live: Behind the wheel — or walking, scooting, pedaling, hovering and other manners of conveyance we’ve yet to imagine.

The Netherlands is an instructive example. More than a quarter of trips in the country are made by bike. The country didn’t enable this by banning cars, says Adie Tomer, an urban economics and infrastructure policy expert at Brookings Metro. It did it by making traveling by bicycle as safe and accessible as by car. Then people could choose.

Similarly, we could redesign our cities for all Americans, no matter how many wheels they’re using. “I’m not anti-car,” says Tomer, who owns two cars. “I’m anti-designing communities solely or primarily for the car.”