Assessing the Environmental Impact of Shared Micromobility Services: A Guide for Cities
Helping cities understand the environmental impact of shared micromobility and leverage its potential.
Highlights:
- To evaluate the environmental impacts of shared micromobility and understand how shared modes like bikes and electric scooters can help contribute to sustainability goals, cities need actionable, comparable data from micromobility operators.
- Assessing the Environmental Impact of Shared Micromobility Services: A Guide for Cities is the first comprehensive guide to support cities in navigating the process of understanding emissions from shared micromobility.
- The guide also encourages a more aligned approach to life cycle emissions assessments that will enable cities to request and use the right data to answer key questions, and assist operators in generating and reporting data more efficiently and transparently.
As shared micromobility becomes more popular in cities around the world, many city governments want to understand the environmental impact of shared e-scooters and bikes, the differences among operators and how micromobility can contribute to broader sustainability goals.
However, many cities find it challenging to evaluate the environmental impact of micromobility. Since shared e-scooters, bikes and e-bikes have no tailpipe emissions, understanding the environmental impact of these vehicles means considering the emissions from their full life cycle, as well as what modes they replace. This is new territory for many cities, with uncertainty on what environmental impact data is most important and how operators should generate it.
That is why Assessing the Environmental Impact of Shared Micromobility Services: A Guide for Cities proposes a standard approach for estimating and reporting GHG emissions from shared micromobility services. The guide walks cities through the process of clarifying their use cases for micromobility emissions data, requesting the right information from operators and using insights to improve their micromobility programs and select operators.
Focusing on life cycle emissions assessments (LCA), the guide builds on existing LCA standards and layers on micromobility-specific best practices to help cities and operators take an aligned, rigorous approach to micromobility emissions assessments. Operators can use this guide to anticipate city requests, ensure their LCAs will be considered credible and move toward industry-wide standardization so that they will be compared accurately to their peers.
The guide was developed with input from the Working Group on Micromobility Life Cycle Emissions Assessments, which was convened by NUMO in spring 2022 and consisted of over 30 members representing city governments, micromobility operators and subject matter experts from North America and Europe.
Download Assessing the Environmental Impact of Shared Micromobility Services: A Guide for Cities here.
Watch the training and Q&A with NUMO and working group experts on the guide here.
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Header image: JavyGo / Unsplash
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