Going electric with our transportation options is a crucial part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and e-scooters are an alternative to gas-powered cars for shorter trips. How much do they change?
e-scooters can potentially save an average of 17.4 percent in travel time, according to a new study. The reduction in time spent in a car pumping out CO 2 from its exhaust is significant.
In Atlanta, Georgia, e-scooters and e- bikes were banned between the hours of 9 pm and 4 am in an attempt to improve public safety. They could be locked out of a specific area using the technology on the vehicles.
"Now that we have near- perfect behavioral compliance in response to a policy intervention, which turns out to be extremely rare, I thought that was interesting," says data scientist from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
What do you do if you don't have the scooter? To be able to measure the traffic times before and after the policy intervention was a great natural experiment.
According to Asensio and his colleagues, the average commute time in the city increased by about 10 percent, while travel to stadium events increased by 37 percent on average.
Adding up the extra time Atlanta's evening commuters spend sitting in traffic, it's a potential 784,000 extra hours per year. User data was collected by the company.
The amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the air is likely to be substantial. The economic costs of commuters sitting in congestion when e-scooters aren't available could be as high as $536 million a year for the US as a whole.
"We know that electric mobility will be the main contributor to decarbonizing the passenger transportation sector, therefore we need to understand the interactions between different modes of electric transportation," says industrial engineer from Georgia Tech
In more than 100 metropolitan areas in the US, you can hop on and off e-scooters and e- bikes with the help of an app.
Whether these travel alternatives actually reduce carbon emissions by getting people out of cars, or if they just replace other options such as walking and public transport, is questionable. The research is complex and dependent on the location.
e-scooters and e- bikes have a direct impact on congestion in Atlanta, one of the largest adopters of shared micro mobility services.
The reason for the e-scooter and e-bike ban was due to hospitalizations and fatal accidents involving riders and pedestrians, which is why the researchers want to point out the need for public safety to be prioritized in terms of city infrastructure and planning for these alternative modes of transport.
Land use and space allocation will require longer-term planning such as converting lanes usually reserved for cars into bike lanes that can be used for micro mobility.
The research has appeared in a journal.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
