https://twitter.com/BloombergNEF/status/1700116806713700483
Electric vehicles of all types are displacing 1.5 million barrels per day of oil usage. That’s nearly 3% of total road fuel demand.
Wild stat from that report— there are now nearly 300 million electric motorcycles/scooters/2-3 wheelers on the road worldwide and they are displacing four times as much oil demand as all the electric cars in the world so far.
There are thousands of electric scooters for hire in Porto/Gaia, practically on every street corner. Check the date!
The Captain
For those that don’t do twitter:
I question the above claim that scooters (in particular) displace oil usage - it relies on the assumption that someone using a scooter would otherwise use a gas vehicle. I think that for a lot of dense inner city travel, scooters displace walking and not ICE usage.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140522000512
Survey data suggest e-scooters disproportionately replace walking and bicycling.
E-scooter trips are more likely in highly walkable areas.
The study goes on the state a VERY interesting sea change in behavior that once someone switches from walking to an e-scooter (a non-physical form of travel), they are VERY UNLIKELY to ever go back to walking - that if the E-scooter is not available, the vast majority will instead chose to travel by car.
Makes me wonder if e-scooters are a net positive or a net negative.
I agree that they are very unlikely to go back to walking. And while going back to using a car might be likely in non-congested areas, like most of suburban, and some urban, USA, in places where there is substantial congestion (one of the big motivators of using e-scooters and e-bikes) they will not go back to using cars. That’s because cars in those places are very expensive, and the congestion causes very slow progress while driving to local places.
In the study, when e-scooters were removed, 89% chose to travel by car. That doesn’t mean they purchased a car; they very likely used a paid service.
Yes, the study was in Arizona, not in Milan, NYC, Mumbai, Tel Aviv, or Jakarta. In very congested cities, much of the time it is simply not worth entering a car to travel a kilometer or two, it could easily take longer to get to your destination. People in very congested cities find various solutions to mobility - light rail, e-scooters, dedicated bus/taxi lanes on major routes, e-bikes, subways, rickshaws, walking, etc.
Expect global longevity to rise as pollution is lifted. Expect a productivity boost.