Fair, it’d be worth doing some math on this. Let’s assume a scooter Travels distance T on a full battery (across multiple trips of course) and has efficiency TE based on the efficiency of the (presumably fossil fuel) power plant and that the person picking it up for Charging drives distance C Picking Up PU scooters with a fossil fuel engine that has CE efficiency. Of course, we need to assume that TE and CE are measured in miles/kg-of-carbon-emission. So, the full equation would look something like:

(TPU/C)(TE/CE) = Carbon Efficiency of using Lime/Bird

I’ll admit that I don’t know all the numbers to plug in here (being HN, maybe someone else does) but given that even dirty power plants have better fuel efficiency than ICEs and that chargers don’t need to drive super far to find a ton of scooters my money is on this being better than driving, carbon-wise.

The distance the charger drives to/from the charging location and then to the vendor-determined deployment point has nothing to do with the distance the previous rider rode.

Yes, the companies have trucks which drive around the city picking up all the parked bikes each night and recharging them. So while they don’t “directly use fossil fuels”, a lot of fossil fuel is indirectly used.

A huge number of chargers (the people) ride the scooters and stack them on the one they are riding.

Even if a vehicle is used, it is nowhere near the fuel consumed by all the scooter trips combined. It collects multiple and is only after several days per scooter.

I saw a guy riding two simultaneously, one foot on each. Didn't look very controllable to me but he seemed practiced.

I saw one such charger break a pedestrian's ankle doing this on a sidewalk.

A future solution would be having charging ports on streets and have people plug them in after a trip. The scooter/bike can then report back to the server that it was plugged in after use.