According to Scott Adams, the American author and creator of the Dilbert cartoon series, the definition of insanity is - “Continuing to believe the same thing, even in the face of new evidence to the contrary, is the definition of insanity - except in politics where it's called leadership.”

This couldn’t be more true than the Spokane City Councils persistence to waste taxpayer dollars on scooters in downtown Spokane.

Lime scooters are back in Spokane, using taxpayer money, with a new scooter model that promises to be safer, better handling and cheaper to run. According to the Spokesman, Lime has 293 scooters on the streets and sidewalks of Spokane as of March 2023.

Many local governments that are pushing the benefits of having electric scooters in their downtown areas don’t really understand the overall impact. There may be some benefits, but they are certainly not environmental given the modes of transport that electric scooters are supposed to replace.

Most of the assumptions about the benefits of scooters rely on a scooter lifespan of two years. In California, they are seeing lifespans of only one to two months, as scooters break quickly. This increases the environmental impact by five times. In other words, your family sedan has less impact on the environment than an electric scooter.

And that doesn’t include the scooters that end up in ditches on the side of the road.

A study from North Carolina State University, “Are e-scooters polluters? The environmental impacts of shared dock-less electric scooter’ written by Joseph Hollingsworth, Brenda Copeland and Jeremiah Johnson, reaches a surprising conclusion. The electric scooters that are being deployed in our cities are not as green as we have been led to believe.

In fact, there are several “greener” gas-powered options available to the public. The issue comes down to not just the emissions generated during use, but the additional environmental cost of production and in the case of the electric scooters, pickup and re-charging of the scooters.

The report, using a standard methodology to assess the impact a transportation mode has on the environment, shows the average electric scooter impact is about 202 grams of carbon per mile traveled. Compare that to a bicycle at 8 grams per mile or an electric bicycle at 40 grams per mile and things look pretty bad.

Of course, a personal automobile emits more carbon, but not as much as you might think. Using the same methodology, a car generates a carbon impact of 414 grams per mile. In other words, two scooters almost equal one car - not quite the expected result.

We also need to consider the modes scooters are targeted to replace – namely, walking and human-powered bicycles.

Additionally, no one is going to use an electric scooter to travel to work if they live more than a mile or two away. The typical urban mode of transport in this case - walking and bicycles - have far less impact on the environment.

Comparing electric scooters to a bus doesn’t make scooters look much better either. The bus comes in at 82 grams per mile, and that’s when it’s mostly full.

As with many feel-good environmental policies, the benefits of scooters are frequently inflated while costs are diminished or altogether ignored.

For now, the only benefit of using scooters no one can really argue against is how fun they are for tearing around like you did as a kid. That’s about where it ends, though. Cities and towns should reconsider the total environmental cost and public benefit of scooters before allowing them into our downtown areas as a serious mode of urban travel.

Spokane has now become the latest casualty of another poorly implemented scooter deployment and apparently hasn’t learnt the lessons from its previously failed scooter deployments.