Paris has become the latest European city to ban electric scooters following partial bans in the US cities of San Fransisco and Miami. The residents overwhelming voted for the ban after multiple injuries and fatalities to riders and pedestrians.

Electric scooters are also drawing the attention of fire departments around the world. In London, there have been 37 exploding electric scooters since the beginning of 2023.

Many local governments that are pushing the benefits of having electric scooters in their downtown areas don’t really understand the long-term impact. Proponents of the scooters claim that they benefit the environment but this isn’t accurate given the modes of transport that electric scooters are supposed to replace and the environmental waste that is generated.

Most of the assumptions about the benefits of electric scooters rely on a scooter lifespan of two years. In California, they are seeing lifespans of only one to two months, as scooters break quickly. This increases the environmental impact by five times. In other words, your family sedan has less impact on the environment than an electric scooter.

And that doesn’t include the scooters that end up in ditches on the side of the road, or in the river.

Now municipal governments are waking up to the environmental and social disaster scooters are to downtown areas.

In Spokane they have a problem with people throwing them into the Spokane River and no one knows who should pay to clean them up. The owners of the scooters, Lime according to a report in the Spokesman, won’t or can’t tell the city how many scooters have met their watery grave. The city receives $530,000 from Lime each year to have the scooters in the city but doesn’t know how much clean up will cost. Estimates show that over 250 scooters have been pulled from the river by local clubs.

A study from North Carolina State University, “Are e-scooters polluters? The environmental impacts of shared dock-less electric scooter’ written by Joseph Hollingsworth, Brenda Copeland and Jeremiah Johnson, reaches a surprising conclusion. The electric scooters that are being deployed in our cities are not as green as we have been led to believe.

The report, using a standard methodology to assess the impact a transportation mode has on the environment, shows the average electric scooter impact is 50% of the carbon emitted by one car - not quite the expected result. And that doesn’t include the carbon emitted by the vehicles needed to clean up the mess when the scooters are abandoned or catch fire.

As with many feel-good environmental policies, the benefits of scooters are frequently inflated while costs are diminished or altogether ignored.

Cities and towns should reconsider the total environmental cost and public benefit of scooters before allowing them into our downtown areas as a serious mode of urban travel.