As micromobility becomes a more widespread part of urban transportation, many city governments are eager to understand the environmental impacts of shared electric scooters and bikes. However, implementing cities often find that evaluating the environmental impact of micromobility is challenging. Cities do not currently have a standardized approach to estimate emissions from modes with no tailpipe emissions or incorporate the impacts of mode shift to manage greenhouse gases (GHG). There is little alignment in sustainability metrics or how metrics are generated from micromobility operators. As a result, cities often struggle to interpret the data they receive from operators and use it to inform decisions.
To address these issues, NUMO, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, developed Assessing the Environmental Impact of Shared Micromobility Services: A Guide for Cities, which offers a standardized approach for estimating GHG emissions from shared micromobility services to help cities collect, interpret and use this data effectively. It provides cities with the tools they need to navigate the complexities of sustainable micromobility, including improving micromobility programs and making informed decisions when selecting operators. The guide was created by a working group, convened by NUMO, of over 30 experts from city governments, academia and the micromobility industry, which sought standardization and consensus building for micromobility emissions assessments.
To test this guidance in the real world and socialize best practices with more cities, NUMO launched a pilot to provide two cities with one-on-one technical assistance as they used the guide to collect, analyze and act on sustainability data from micromobility operators. Each city had a unique project, since the goal of the pilot was to support their existing sustainable micromobility priorities, not walk them through cookie-cutter calculations. During the process, each faced unexpected challenges and imparted key lessons regarding micromobility emissions assessments. Bergen, Norway, wanted to select sustainable micromobility operators for their next round of permitting. Solent Transport (representing the English cities of Portsmouth, Southampton and Isle of Wight) hoped to understand the environmental impact of their existing micromobility programs.
Bergen, Norway
In spring of 2023, Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, prepared for a tendering process to select operators for its shared micromobility program. Bergen’s Agency for Urban Environment explained that in their previous round of tendering, “it was difficult to score the environmental part of the applications. The major problem was that the criterion was too open and it was left to the applicants to decide what to include. This led to information that wasn’t directly comparable. Our impression was that the applicants included anything environmentally related.” Bergen wanted to craft more streamlined environmental criteria that would make it easier to compare applications.
NUMO worked with Bergen to revise the criteria based on the guide, though some of the recommendations were not relevant for the city’s context. For example, the guide’s Activities-Based Emissions Assessment Scorecard suggests evaluating operators on the source of electricity used to charge electric scooters, but nearly all electricity in Norway is renewable, so that would not differentiate operators.
In addition, NUMO helped Bergen design fair criteria that balanced inclusivity with high-quality data and methods. Bergen was concerned that smaller or non-incumbent operators, which may have less capacity for environmental reporting and less locally specific data, might not have a fair chance of scoring high on the criteria.
With that in mind, Bergen decided not to require a lifecycle emissions assessment (LCA). Instead, when comparing operators’ GHG emissions, Bergen opted to only consider emissions from the vehicle’s production, which usually accounts for the majority of a micromobility vehicle’s lifecycle emissions. All operators, even small or non-incumbent, should have easy access to information about the vehicle manufacturing process. This approach helped Bergen avoid inadvertently penalizing new operators, which would not have existing data or results from an LCA and may have had to speculate based on data from other cities.
In November 2023, Bergen published a tender for three micromobility operators and received three applications. Two of the three, Voi and Ryde, met the minimum requirements and were automatically granted permits without further evaluation of their environmental impact. Bergen hopes to use the revised criteria in the next round of permitting, which may be more competitive.
Solent Transport, United Kingdom
Solent Transport is a regional transportation partnership that operates shared micromobility programs in Portsmouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight in the South of England. Solent Transport was eager to participate in the pilot to better understand how shared micromobility pilots were changing GHG emissions, how micromobility was contributing to regional emissions objectives, and what changes would improve the environmental impact of the region’s operators, Voi and Beryl.
Shared micromobility programs debuted in the South of England in November 2020 as part of the Solent Future Transport Zone, a program of innovative transportation trials funded by the United Kingdom’s national government set to run through 2025.
During the pilot with NUMO, Voi operated a total of 1,600 electric scooters in Portsmouth and Southampton. Beryl operated 900 shared-pedal electric bikes in Portsmouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight, in addition to a small fleet of electric scooters on the Isle of Wight.
Solent Transport worked with their evaluation partner, TRL, to calculate its micromobility’s net GHG emissions, meaning the emissions generated by micromobility minus the emissions that would have been produced if people had used other modes instead. Solent Transportation and TRL found that between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2023, the micromobility pilots across the three towns resulted in 148,579 kilograms of avoided carbon emissions, equivalent to the annual emissions of 18 United Kingdom households or driving 563,000 miles.
To produce these findings, TRL followed the process from NUMO’s guide and used the accompanying Activities-Based Emissions Assessment Scorecard. Voi and Beryl had already provided most of the data, including LCAs for all micromobility vehicle types and mode shift surveys that indicated what modes riders would have otherwise used. However, that information was not “plug-and-play.” TRL had multiple exchanges with the operators to better understand their LCA methods and assess the quality of their data sources. TRL explained that “evaluating the data quality proved quite challenging overall, given that much of the evaluation involved qualitative judgement.” In addition, TRL noted that “a large proportion of our time on this project was spent looking for regionally-specific data on carbon dioxide emitted by other transport modes… in the end, we resorted to global figures from an International Transport Forum report.” The final step was plugging the data into the Activities-Based Emissions Assessment Scorecard. NUMO provided technical assistance on methodology and data sources throughout the process.
Looking ahead, Solent Transport will share its findings with the U.K. government as part of a monitoring and evaluation package for the Solent Future Transport Zone. The findings from the pilot will enhance the national government’s understanding of the impact of shared micromobility, shaping future transportation policies and informing a more consistent approach to monitoring and evaluating transportation programs.
Refining How We Track Micromobility’s Impact
After the pilots concluded, several takeaways emerged regarding assessing the environmental impact of shared micromobility:
1) Cities want more specific guidance.
The guide left some aspects open to interpretation or adaptation, aiming to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach given the major differences among cities and their uses of information about micromobility emissions. However, it seemed that the participants would have appreciated a more complete, clear set of steps that they could replicate — with the option to tailor them, if needed. Examples could include a request for proposal (RFP) template for micromobility operators with evaluation criteria that they could publish and use as-is. Or, the Activities-Based Emissions Assessment Scorecard could come pre-filled with global average emissions factors for other modes and cities could then choose whether to research regional emissions factors. Other suggestions from TRL include creating a checklist of data to estimate GHG emissions and a step-by-step analysis process.
2) Comparing operators’ environmental performance might not be worth it.
In some circumstances, going in-depth to compare operators’ environmental performance may not be a worthwhile use of resources. Given Bergen’s laws and context, any operator selected would, by default, charge electric scooters with mostly renewable electricity, use zero-emission vehicles to transport them for charging or maintenance, and be subject to Norwegian regulations for battery recycling. Against this backdrop, and given micromobility’s already low GHG emissions, there may be a negligible environmental benefit to choosing a more sustainable operator — or, put differently, there may not be meaningful differences in operators’ environmental impact when compared to a city’s total transportation-related emissions. It is worth considering whether spending that time on other programs or analyses might yield greater emissions reductions.
3) The most enthusiastic applicants to capacity-building pilots might be cities with the most capacity.
Bergen’s pilot was successful because they were an ideal match with the scope of the pilot: they had recently experienced challenges with one of the main use cases in the guide to compare micromobility operators to each other and they were motivated to address the problem swiftly before their next tender. The city already had specialized staff working on the tender who quickly grasped (or already knew) the main points of the guide without extensive capacity-building from NUMO. Despite our efforts to widely publicize the pilot, a majority of applicants might have already been thinking about this topic or had the capacity to focus on this niche issue. The pilot may have been more impactful if it had focused on lower-capacity city agencies.
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Assessing the Environmental Impact of Shared Micromobility Services: A Guide for Cities provides a framework to support cities navigating the process of understanding emissions generated by shared micromobility. Cities need actionable data to clarify their use cases and understand how micromobility operations get them closer to their climate goals. We hope to see many more cities join Bergen and the South of England in understanding how they can have the best possible outcomes in sustainable micromobility.
Leah Lazer was Research Associate for NUMO at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.
Jyot Chadha is Deputy Director of NUMO at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.
Justyn Huckleberry is Projects & Research Associate for NUMO at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.
