>>Makes sense. You could own an ebike or scooter for years, but the shared ones have a much shorter lifespan, sometimes as little as a few days or a week. Vanda

>>Makes sense. You could own an ebike or scooter for years, but the shared ones have a much shorter lifespan, sometimes as little as a few days or a week. Vandals, people riding 2 to a scooter, etc. Your personal assertion bears no relationship with the case, and rationale, presented in the paper. The paper's author's simply found out that shared e-bike/scooter users answered in a survey that if they did not had access to that mode of transportation then the next best option would be walking, and thus the authors proceeded to conclude that shared e-bike s/scooters are bad for the environment because if they didn't existed then people would walk and walking doesn't pollute as much. To me, frankly, that sounds like specious reasoning. Walking is only an option in routes which are not that long and are not served by affordable public transportation with an acceptable availability. It makes no sense to depict a mode of transportation to be bad for the environment only if there is no alternative, and it makes no sense to assert that the same mode of transportation became awesome for the environment if a preferable but more polluting mode of transportation is suddenly provided.