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Scooters aren't always the greener option

Your car probably weighs more than 20 times what you weigh, averaging about 4,000 lbs. If you consider high school physics, the amount of energy needed to move an object is at minimum the weight times the distance. That means the car could be using 20 times more energy than is really needed to move you from your house to work or wherever you want to go.

Enter the scooter: A cute little moped for moving one or two people, or even more if you are reckless (I once saw a family in Vietnam transporting a kid-size barbie car on top of their scooter - it was unusual even for Vietnam). Mopeds weigh 200-500 pounds, and they need a lot less parking space. 

Parents dropping off the kids at school on scooters

Despite using less fuel, many scooters create more pollution than cars. As shown in this Nature article , scooters emit from 10-100 times the mass of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as primary and secondary organic aerosals (POA and SOA), as light and heavy duty vehicles. 

All this data means that scooters may be just as or more harmful to human and environmental health than automobiles.


Here's why (#1-4 are from the Nature article)*:
  1. "two-stroke (2S), unlike four-stroke (4S), engines require addition of lubricant oils to the fuel, some of which is emitted in the exhaust."
  2. "during the 2S engine cycle some of the fresh fuel/air mixture passes directly through the engine, increasing VOC emissions, which may explain the high SOA formation. "
  3. "scooters generally utilize ‘rich combustion’ (low-air/fuel ratio), improving drivability while producing higher CO, VOC and PM emissions (but lower NOX). "
  4. "scooter after-treatment systems are inherently inefficient due to their relatively small size and longer light-off times."
  5. the size of scooters and mopeds allows for more of them to be on the road and contribute to worsened air quality (because the maximum number of cars would be fewer than scooters)
*although the article focuses on 2 stroke engines, it seems that four-stroke mopeds also emit more than vehicles. 

It seems that to reduce air pollution we need electric mopeds for cities where there is low-emission and low-impact electricity generation.

 There's a wide variety of styles and capabilities on the market, but the range can be limited to 15 - 30 miles. The batteries take up what was previously the storage space on these vehicles. The upcoming electric Vespa is supposed to get about 60 miles per charge and cost around $10,000 (undisclosed) when it's released in the U.S. in 2019. They are also going to sell a hybrid version that adds an engine to extend the range. 

I'll consider it after I research the battery end-of-life aka recycling options.

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