This article is part of a series on micromobility
By PAUL RUFFINS
Photo credit: Paul Ruffins
As cities across the DMV and around the world become more concerned with traffic congestion and climate change, Uber and Lyft have been touted as better alternatives to everyone owning, driving and parking their own cars. But the devil is in the details.
In 2020, the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that “ride-hailing trips today result in an estimated 69 percent more climate pollution on average than the trips they displace.”
Recent years have seen a surge in e-bikes, and e-scooters in College Park, but how do these alternatives stack up? This article explores how each successive wave of micromobility devices solved old problems but created new ones.
After WWII, the most popular forms of micromobility throughout the world were individually owned bicycles and gas-powered motor scooters. Amsterdam’s 1967 experiment with completely free bikes failed; the local government opposed it and too many bikes were stolen.
By the 1990s, systems where riders unlocked bikes and later returned them to specific docking stations proved successful. In 2008, SmartBike DC became the first bike-sharing program in the nation, with 10 docking stations and about 100 bikes.
Riders loved it, but the docking stations were so expensive that SmartBikes folded. In 2010, Capital Bikeshare, a collaboration between the District and Arlington County, introduced more affordable docking stations and became a huge success.
Docked bike-sharing, which can be particularly useful for people making short trips — say, from home to work, school or public transit — has its limitations. Trips must begin and end at a docking station, and companies have to regularly collect and redistribute the bikes.
College Park was eager to join Capital Bikeshare but couldn’t because the system was county-based, and Prince George’s hadn’t joined yet.
In 2016, the city contracted with mBike, which was run by a private company that used a dock with U locks and a GPS-based system, allowing users to locate and unlock bikes with their cellphones. The locks also allowed riders to stop mid-trip and continue on at their convenience. A system upgrade soon allowed riders to leave their mBike at any bike rack, and the dockless revolution had begun.
As Aaron Goldbeck, who served as the University of Maryland (UMD) bicycle coordinator at that time, said, “We are very excited about the growth and success of the system.”
Despite its initial success, mBike’s tenure in College Park was doomed by 2018, when UMD and the city approved dockless e-scooters and e-bikes. Companies like Bird and Lime had raced to introduce e-scooters nationwide, promising users a fun, convenient and pollution-free alternative to gas-powered vehicles.
Shared e-devices present two big challenges: charging and durability. Collecting the scooters to recharge and redistribute them every night uses fuel and generates emissions. And, in the rush to deploy e-scooters faster than their competitors, some companies chose cheap models that quickly wore out and were discarded. These devices require a lot of valuable materials: powerful lithium-ion batteries, and cellular and GPS technologies, that often landed in landfills.
Indeed, the waste was significant: A 2019 study conducted in North Carolina concluded, “Shared e-scooters produce 202 grams of CO2 per passenger mile over their entire lifecycle — more than an electric moped (119 grams), electric bicycle (40 grams), bicycle (8 grams), and even a diesel bus (82 grams), assuming it has high ridership.” (tinyurl.com/4e2z5xuz).
In contrast, the Veo company was producing durable e-vehicles custom-designed for heavy commercial use. It also pioneered swappable batteries, which are much more efficient because every vehicle doesn’t have to be removed, recharged and returned every night. As a result, Veo won the contract to provide College Park (and neighboring University Park) with 150 e-bikes, 70 e-scooters and 70 traditional pedal bikes.
Another issue with dockless vehicles is that riders leave them places where they block sidewalks or create other nuisances. Veo tried geofencing their vehicles, a technology that continuously charges the bike or scooter until the rider turns off the rental in an approved location. But geofencing often fails to deter riders from leaving their e-bikes and e-scooters all over the place. And the health and environmental benefits of Veo’s micromobility system have been reduced; when its contract with the two cities was renewed in 2020, the company stopped offering traditional pedal bikes.
A system meant to replace gas-powered cars had rejected its cleanest healthiest choice: human-powered bicycles.
