Ontario cities such as Hamilton and London remain on the fence, while e-scooters have already become ubiquitous in Calgary and Edmonton. In Vancouver, the door has been opened somewhat more tentatively, with privately owned e-scooters just approved for use on a pilot basis. Toronto, however, recently landed on a seemingly hard “no.”

When concerns were aired this spring at Toronto City Hall, the city cited “a lack of protections for pedestrians” and the particularly pressing need during the COVID era to “prevent potentially serious injuries on Toronto streets and sidewalks.” These are, of course, entirely valid concerns to raise. But they call for careful and balanced consideration, given the compelling decongestion and decarbonization benefits e-scooters offer.

Assessing the safety impacts of e-scooters

Safety data specific to e-scooters is gradually accumulating and variable conclusions have been reached, but some assessments suggest that the rates for emergency department visits and fatalities are similar to those for bicycles.

A 2020 report by the International Transport Forum concluded, “A trip by car or by motorcycle in a dense urban area is much more likely to result in the death of a road user – this includes pedestrians – than a trip using a micro-vehicle.” With advancing technological safeguards (such as the uploading of “helmet selfies” before starting a ride), rigorous user education, and carefully thought-out regulation and enforcement around where and at what speed e-scooters can operate (and park), the safety picture is also likely to improve materially.

Concerns have also centred on where e-scooters go when not in use. Haphazard parking – which is both unsightly and a particular risk for seniors and the disabled – was a major problem in many European cities as fleet operators rushed to market. But in Canada, in contrast, operators have typically collaborated with cities and implemented common-sense solutions such as vehicle docks and corrals.

Less congestion, less carbon

The reality is we need a range of e-vehicles and other low-impact transportation options if we are to have any hope of meeting key urban-planning and climate objectives. Vancouver, for example, has set targets for half of all kilometres driven to be in zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) by 2030. To get there we’ll need a lot of those kilometres to be on e-scooters. They’re an inclusive option for people who can’t or don’t want to use active transportation such as cycling and who can’t afford a heavier-weight ZEV. And while they don’t work for all trips, the car displacement effect is real.

One-for-one replacement of full-size gas vehicles with ones powered by electricity will do nothing to alleviate road congestion or to free up more of the real estate occupied by parking. Meanwhile, in a report released last month, the City of Kelowna estimated that 40% of e-scooter trips replaced driving and projected 274,000 kilometres of avoided vehicle travel annually.

Micro-mobility is also an excellent solution to the first-and-last-mile challenge, effectively bridging distances that otherwise block access to public transit. And micro-mobility is in a league nearly all of its own on energy use and emissions. A 2020 EY study, focusing on a European fleet of shared e-scooters, quantified their full life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions at 35 grams of carbon dioxide equivalency per person per kilometre, compared to 50 to 60 for a train, up to 300 for an electric car, and up to 350 for a gas-fuelled car. And their energy efficiency is an important consideration even as fossil fuels fade away, since ongoing electric car adoption has the potential to stretch the capacity constraints of our electricity grids.

Research is uncovering additional knock-on benefits. This includes an uptick in local impulse buys of such things such as food and drink in areas served by e-scooter fleets – an outcome no doubt particularly welcomed by many small businesses in this challenging late-pandemic period.

To fully capture all these benefits, we need the right combination of sound operating practices for shared fleets and smart and effective regulation. Municipalities need to continue to develop and re-allocate lanes and other transportation infrastructure to safely accommodate the full range of ZEV vehicles – recognizing that users will gravitate to where they feel safest. Cities and transit authorities in turn can benefit from the data that can be generated automatically by e-scooter fleet users, and which can be used to identify both transit service gaps and potential pinch points where there’s a high risk of conflict between different transportation modes.

Today, most Canadians see scooters as a youthful indulgence, an occasional lark or a hipster trend. But what they really are – or certainly have the potential to become – is an essential component of a more diversified and sustainable urban transportation ecosystem. Policy-makers need to help make that happen, with equal enthusiasm for ZEVs big and small.

 E-scooters: Who’s using them and how?

• Users of shared micro-mobility services skew young (McKinsey says about half are younger than 34, with relatively few above 55) and male (in the range of 66% to 81% of all users).

• Aggregated statistics suggest that 30% to 40% of e-scooter trips replace a car trip.

• The National Association of City Transportation Officials in the U.S. puts the average trip at 12 minutes and 1.6 kilometres  and says e-scooter ridership grew from 38.5 million trips in 2018 to 88.5 million in 2019.

Sandra Phillips is founder and CEO of movmi, a Vancouver-based shared mobility consulting firm.

The post Electric cars can’t be the only zero-emission vehicles on the road appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Car-sharing, bike-sharing, scooter-sharing and other modes of shared mobility are probably the most impressive growth story in transportation today. The global shared mobility market is forecast to hit US$138.7 billion by 2023. And if it’s adopted as quickly as smartphones and the internet, shared mobility could account for some 80% of total miles driven in the United States by 2040. Whether or not the environmental and other potential benefits of shared mobility are fully achieved hinges largely on just how effective municipalities policies are.

As new research confirms that ride-hailing services have increased traffic delays by 40% in San Francisco, the city is considering a per-ride tax on operators, with revenues to be used to reduce congestion. It’s a model we may well see Canadian cities adopt. If so, ride-hailing will likely lose ground against truer shared mobility options that deliver environmental benefits.

Car-share services have reduced the appeal of private vehicle ownership and have also been early adopters of zero- and low-emission cars. Vancouver’s Modo, for example, already has a 20% electric and hybrid fleet and just became the first-car share company to introduce hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Micro-mobility services such as scooter-sharing are entirely electric.

All of these benefits can translate into reductions in Canada’s second largest source of carbon emissions behind oil and gas: transportation.

The size of that potential environmental prize is one of the reasons our Vancouver-based research team regularly ranks 20 leading North American cities, based on the current scope of and future-development potential for shared mobility. The 2019 edition of the Shared Mobility Cities Index (SMCI) shows that cities are abandoning an earlier watch-and-wait stance, and becoming much more activist in fostering and regulating shared mobility.

So where are Canadian cities parked on this year’s Index?

Montreal rides into top spot

Montreal is the top-ranked Canadian city. It edged ahead of Vancouver in this year’s SMCI, tying with Portland for fifth spot. Montrealers have access to a wide range of shared mobility services and partnerships, including peer-to-peer car sharing. New condo owners sometimes receive a “mobility passport” as a welcome gift from real estate developers, providing a year of transportation across transit and car- and bike-sharing service. And testing began last fall of an integrated approach through which holders of an Opus transit smartcard pass would be able to use it to hop on a Bixi bike, flag a cab or book a Communauto shared car.

It’s also one of a handful of cities developing mobility hubs – strategic locations where multiple modes of shared and sustainable transportation are concentrated.

Although Montreal has set the goal of reducing car ownership per household from an already modest 0.90 to 0.79, a progress report last year found the trend moving in the wrong direction.

Vancouver slips in the ranks

Vancouver dropped from fifth to seventh spot, despite its continued status as the continent’s car-sharing capital. More than a third of residents use the city’s 3,000 shared vehicles, provided by four different operators.  Beginning this year, Vancouver requires transportation demand management (TDM) plans for large development projects, which incent developers to do such things as provide memberships in and dedicated parking spaces for shared-vehicle service providers.

Vancouver’s the only Canadian city where people who get to work by car are in the minority among commuters (albeit only just). And while transit commuting is less prevalent than in Montreal or Toronto, that’s more than made up for by the Vancouverites who take advantage of a warmer climate to bike or walk to work.

At this point, Vancouver remains the only SMCI city without ride-hailing services like Uber or Lyft, which may ultimately help keep its congestion in check. The current provincial government has promised a regulatory framework by year-end, but if the target date slips by unmet it wouldn’t be the first time. Vancouver has also been slow to embrace micro-mobility options such as scooters and mopeds, leaving it bottom-rung on a measure of the range of shared mobility.

Toronto lags in shared mobility race

Despite being heralded as having the best transit system in Canada, Toronto is well behind on shared mobility, largely because it has not kept pace with the progressive regulatory approaches and programs increasingly seen in other cities.

The city’s residents have access to most of the major forms of car-sharing – with round-trip car-sharing company Maven adding to the competition early last year – as well as docked bike-sharing and ride-hailing and ride-sharing services. There’s also a peer-to-peer car-sharing service called Turo.

One indication of Toronto’s regulatory shortcomings was the withdrawal last year of Car2Go (more recently merged and re-branded as ShareNow) after it charged that the city’s parking permit pilot program was too restrictive and costly.

While Toronto does have sustainability plans in place addressing mobility, congestion and C02 reduction, specific measures to advance shared mobility are limited. Zoning bylaws, for example, don’t encourage the incorporation of shared mobility into new development design.

Lessons from the Bay Area

The top-ranking city in this year’s SMCI isn’t in Canada, it’s in northern California. San Francisco has reached an ambitious “mode shift goal” set in 2017, which means that more than half of all trips from and within the city are now by transit, bicycle or foot. It also has a full range of shared mobility options, including peer-to-peer and other variations on car-sharing, docked and dock-less bike-sharing, and electric moped and powered-scooter sharing.

What can Canadian cities learn from the foggy city? San Francisco’s high scores mainly stem from its holistic regulatory and strategic approach rooted in part in high-level GHG reduction goals. That includes designing complete streets that encourage multiple modes of transportation, congestion pricing on toll roads and building infrastructure for zero-emissions vehicles.

San Francisco has also nixed minimum parking requirements for many new developments. It has an ordinance requiring that Google and other larger employers subsidize biking, transit and pooled commuting.  It’s also piloting shared mobility programs for dockless electric bike and scooter-sharing services.

Driving it home

Shared mobility is revolutionizing personal transportation. When we can hop seamlessly from bike to bus to electric vehicle – or whatever combination best gets us where we’re going – private vehicle use will be further de-valued, and we’ll better leverage the strengths of public transit and all other forms of shared mobility. To get there, we need cities putting their hands firmly on the wheel to steer things in this direction.

Seven Deadly-Effective Shared Mobility Policies

Our assessment of shared mobility policies across leading North American cities suggests these seven measures are particularly effective at capturing shared mobility’s full potential and avoiding possible pitfalls:

 

• Give shared vehicles parking privileges, in return for good fleet management and sharing of trip data with an independent clearinghouse such as a university

• Create incentives to build mobility hubs, where a wide range of shared and sustainable mobility infrastructure is co-located for ease of integration

• Work towards separated lanes for e-bikes, electric mopeds and e-scooters, to improve uptake and safety of micro-mobility options

• Have clear requirements for developers to minimize the contribution to congestion that new projects will create, with shared mobility infrastructure and incentives among the options

• Make parking less available and more expensive

• Create congestion-pricing zones or implement transportation taxes (to which ride-hailing is also subject) and dedicate the revenue to transit

• Use open innovation and private-public partnerships to identify and implement new ways of better integrating public transit with all forms of shared mobility

Source: 2019 movmi Shared Mobility Cities Index

Sandra Phillips is founder and CEO of movmi, a Vancouver-based consulting firm that works with entrepreneurs, non-profits, transit authorities, real estate developers and others to co-design shared mobility solutions. She is the lead author of the Shared Mobility Cities Index.

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