Abstract for: Can E-scooters Enhance Active-Mobility Health Outcomes?

Micromobility can improve wellbeing through numerous mechanisms including mobility equity, pollution reduction, urban space reclamation, empowerment, childhood cognitive development, resilience, and sustainability. Active micromobility—most commonly bicycling and walking—additionally improves healthy life expectancy due to increased exercise. Passive micromobility modes such as e-scooters lack the exercise benefit of active modes, negating a primary public health benefit. Starting from the assumption that due to similar size, speed, and needs, e-scooters trigger safety and infrastructure feedback loops that also benefit bicycling. If this holds, then long-term system interactions may sometimes allow e-scooters to contribute positively to a healthy urban environment. Drawing from the literature, we sketch causal loops that link micromobility modeshare to safety-in-numbers, infrastructure development, and, ultimately, three health modulators: exercise, mobility safety, and pollution. In the short term, e-scooters harm population health by reducing exercise. Under some circumstances, such as slow demand response of micromobility infrastructure, they can accelerate bicycle-friendliness reinforcing feedbacks. In polluted cities, reducing car use gains importance relative to increasing exercise, making e-scooters more helpful. Interactions between e-scooters and cyclists may deter cycling. Regulating e-scooter speed limits may be a powerful modulator, nudging urban mobility systems to improve population health. Policy should always aim to improve intrinsic goods such as wellbeing, for which we use life expectancy as a proxy. We build a simplified model to illustrate the potential for e-scooters to harm or improve public health. We use speed limits to modulate e-scooter appeal, and show that these have potential not merely to reduce kinetic risk, but to amplify feedback dynamics within mobility systems, facilitating powerful societal health goals.