Scooters are dangerous.
At Arizona State University, they’ve been banned from most sections of the main campus.
Everyone I know has either fallen off a scooter and/or knows three other people who have.
A.J. Kay first alerted me to the problem, with this story.
And as I started to think more about scooters, I realized that they are not necessarily a boon to the environment, either.
The manufacturing of the printed circuit boards, antennae and transmitters, GPS receivers, and batteries are all environmentally intensive. And the truck trips required to reposition the scooters create lots of extra fossil fuel trips (albeit at non-peak hours).
It’s not clear what sort of trips scooters displace.
They may trade one type of congestion for another, and one type of environmental and health impact for another.
On the whole, it’s an experiment that is far from conclusive.
