(I am concentrating on scooters as I know a lot about them. I know much less about bikes, but you are asserting they are both great so I get to concentrate on either.)
You are literally throwing an opinion at a pile of data :(. This isn't a "framing" issue--some narrative you can just throw out--this is an actual study that is claiming the exact opposite of what you are asserting.
The biggest issue you are missing--which, FWIW, isn't new from this article: we also knew this years ago, though the analyses were less formal--is that these scooters don't actually replace "personal automobiles".
Now, you might claim "well they do for me", but you are in sufficient minority of people that you just don't matter. As this very study directly shows, these shared scooters mostly replace trips people would have walked or bicycled, not driven (in either a personal or shared vehicle).
The core problem with them is that the majority of trips people use in personal automobiles are for shopping and commuting, and the shared scooter programs don't solve shopping use cases at all and have only minimal impact on commuting (due to a combination of the distance the majority of commuters--weighted by their miles commuted, which is actually critical even if it sounds circular--are commuting combined with the extreme clockwork certainty they require in being able to reliably find a nearby scooter even at short distances).
It gets a lot worse for the scooters also--which this study does seem to be factoring in--because they tend to be somewhat "disposable" in a way you might not expect or appreciate given the battery they require: they are left outside constantly and as a public goods issue tend to get treated very poorly and even directly destroyed. In my community, they seriously end up in the ocean, due to a combination of people leaving them on the beach or even directly throwing them in.
(In our local community, the scooters mattered so little to the scooter company that when they were impounded by the police for various reasons the companies wouldn't even bother coming to pick them up; the local police were freaking out about what to do with the giant pile of scooters they were accumulating ;P.)
They also have to be collected and dragged back to electricity to charge, and then re-balanced across the city. This tends to get done in inefficient ways by random people doing "gig economy" work, and those vehicle trips--which were mostly done using low fuel efficiency trucks--to pick up and move the scooters after every handful of uses has to be taken into consideration.
The reality is then that people who go around insisting that these scooters get deployed everywhere are just making the environment worse: they are making very little impact on car trips while more than compensating for their benefit in production/waste, charging/rebalancing trips, and reduced usage of actually green transportation (such as bicycles).
While most of what you have stated I can find myself agreeing with, I am also an avid fan of scooters.
If you realistically want people to avoid having cars, you’re going to need to make the prospects of transit without a car (whether they would have walked or biked or driven) much more palatable. Scooters do this. They are more convenient for the trips you otherwise would have walked (faster, easier, less sweaty) or biked (a lot more work to lug the bike up and down the apartment block stairs and find a place to lock it and hope it’s not vandalized when you return).
Comments
(I am concentrating on scooters as I know a lot about them. I know much less about bikes, but you are asserting they are both great so I get to concentrate on either.)
You are literally throwing an opinion at a pile of data :(. This isn't a "framing" issue--some narrative you can just throw out--this is an actual study that is claiming the exact opposite of what you are asserting.
The biggest issue you are missing--which, FWIW, isn't new from this article: we also knew this years ago, though the analyses were less formal--is that these scooters don't actually replace "personal automobiles".
Now, you might claim "well they do for me", but you are in sufficient minority of people that you just don't matter. As this very study directly shows, these shared scooters mostly replace trips people would have walked or bicycled, not driven (in either a personal or shared vehicle).
The core problem with them is that the majority of trips people use in personal automobiles are for shopping and commuting, and the shared scooter programs don't solve shopping use cases at all and have only minimal impact on commuting (due to a combination of the distance the majority of commuters--weighted by their miles commuted, which is actually critical even if it sounds circular--are commuting combined with the extreme clockwork certainty they require in being able to reliably find a nearby scooter even at short distances).
It gets a lot worse for the scooters also--which this study does seem to be factoring in--because they tend to be somewhat "disposable" in a way you might not expect or appreciate given the battery they require: they are left outside constantly and as a public goods issue tend to get treated very poorly and even directly destroyed. In my community, they seriously end up in the ocean, due to a combination of people leaving them on the beach or even directly throwing them in.
(In our local community, the scooters mattered so little to the scooter company that when they were impounded by the police for various reasons the companies wouldn't even bother coming to pick them up; the local police were freaking out about what to do with the giant pile of scooters they were accumulating ;P.)
They also have to be collected and dragged back to electricity to charge, and then re-balanced across the city. This tends to get done in inefficient ways by random people doing "gig economy" work, and those vehicle trips--which were mostly done using low fuel efficiency trucks--to pick up and move the scooters after every handful of uses has to be taken into consideration.
The reality is then that people who go around insisting that these scooters get deployed everywhere are just making the environment worse: they are making very little impact on car trips while more than compensating for their benefit in production/waste, charging/rebalancing trips, and reduced usage of actually green transportation (such as bicycles).
While most of what you have stated I can find myself agreeing with, I am also an avid fan of scooters.
If you realistically want people to avoid having cars, you’re going to need to make the prospects of transit without a car (whether they would have walked or biked or driven) much more palatable. Scooters do this. They are more convenient for the trips you otherwise would have walked (faster, easier, less sweaty) or biked (a lot more work to lug the bike up and down the apartment block stairs and find a place to lock it and hope it’s not vandalized when you return).