| In 2018, Scootergeddon descended on American cities. Without warning, start-ups dropped electric scooters on city streets by the thousands. People took 39 million scooter rides that year alone — and nearly as many seemed enraged about the two-wheeled vehicles cluttering sidewalks, blocking doorways and zooming around uneasy pedestrians. The pandemic seemed to crush the market for electric scooters. Fleets shrank. Companies filed for bankruptcy. Scooters were left for dead in trash cans and on the bottom of waterways. The coup de grâce appeared to be the vote to ban rental e-scooters in Paris in April. But as life has flowed back into downtowns, so have the two-wheelers: 156 U.S. cities from New York to Washington offer ride-share e-scooter systems. Rides are increasing again. Should you give scooters a second chance? From a climate perspective, today's ultra-efficient durable models are among the cleanest vehicles you can ride, and new technology in scooters may make them safer than their forebears. Whether you love them or hate them, the scooters are coming. Here's what you need to know to decide whether to hop on — or get out of the way. Why do scooters matter? Big cities have a perennial problem: Too many cars in too little space. That's only getting worse as the number of hours Americans spend stuck in traffic has more than doubled since the 1980s, topping 99 hours per year. Every additional minute commuting behind the wheel correlates to poorer health for us and the planet with long car commutes associated with higher blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, greater obesity, more heart attacks and even premature births. Scooters, like bicycles and e-bikes, promise to give you back some of those hours — even if you don't ride them. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found Atlanta's 2019 ban on e-scooters and e-bikes raised the average commute times by about 10 percent, on average, and by 37 percent during stadium events. As for emissions, their diminutive and efficient design mean scooters can turn electrons into enormous numbers of miles with no tailpipe emissions. As the electric grid continues to decarbonize, scooters' emissions will shrink further. But aren't they dangerous? Last year, reports the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, 50,000 out of over about 50 million scooter rides ended with a trip to the emergency room. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an industry group, found e-scooter riders sustained more injuries per mile than bicyclists — although their novelty may have played a role. A whopping 40 percent of those hurt reported being on their first ride, and 98 percent wore no helmet. But a few things are different now: Cities opened thousands of miles of new lanes for bikes and scooters in the pandemic. The scooters themselves are changing: Many are now built to last five years (compared with two months for their predecessors), and employ sensors and software to avoid accidents, similar to those in self-driving cars. | 
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