I’d be careful about extrapolating these results across cities. In most American cities, for example, I’m going to replace an e-scooter with an Uber.
I spent months in both Vancouver and Torono without a car, and both have perfectly workable public transport systems, with Toronto's being a bit better. Both are better than every US city I've been to, and scooters replace neither.
India is a third world country with a pretty low standard of living. I haven't been to Bangalore or Mumbai, but I can't imagine them being relevant to this discussion.
Only if you confine yourself to downtowns. Which is why I said metro areas.
> India is a third world country
It is a third world country with lots of modern parts. If you don't think Mumbai or Bangalore or modern cities, that just means you have a very different definition of what modern means.
> I’d be careful about extrapolating these results across cities. In most American cities, for example, I’m going to replace an e-scooter with an Uber.
I also never said modern cities, I said "the modern world", of which India would generally not be considered part of. I may have defined that poorly though, my bad.
This is irrelevant for cities with dense metro network like Paris. Rental scooter and bikes are just complementing the public transit offer. They also allow to have a lower load in the public transit, which is a benefit in place where the public transit is already overloaded at rush hours.
But did it improve travel time?
I firmly believe that people running the scooter rental companies know that they can only succeed by destroying public transit. A survey in Norway showed that over half of the trips on rental scooters replaced public transit, and less than 10% replaced trips in private cars.
The detrimental affects on public transit, the relatively high injury rates, the disregard the riders have for the blind and handicapped who have to navigate around the scooters being left in the middle of the sidewalk, and just the sense of urban blight from them being left everywhere all add up to enough reason to ban the things.