Skip to main content

Bird: e-scooters will ‘replace short car trips in London’

More than half of car trips in the city of London are less than three miles with an average occupancy of just over one person, says Bird. 
By Ben Spencer February 17, 2020 Read time: 1 min
Bird reckons its e-scooters can reduce a 25-minute car journey in London to around 10 minutes (Source: © Tobias Arhelger | Dreamstime.com)

Speaking at Move2020, Caroline Hazlehurst, senior director of EMEA operations, says: “The journey takes much longer than it should with the average time for a trip around 25 minutes. Alternatives like electric scooters could do that same distance in roughly 10 minutes or less.”

“If you give people a true alternative to the car they will use it, and adoption has been unprecedented,” she added. 

Hazlehurst said the company is aiming to take cars off the road, reduce congestion and emissions while also making cities more liveable. 

“In the US, over a thousand million metric tonnes of CO2 is produced from car travel and we want to replace as many of those trips as possible with emissions-free transportation,” she continued. “If we were to do that by 10%, that would be the same as taking about 28 coal-fired power plants offline for a year.”

Hazlehurst claimed the firm’s Bird 2 scooter has a 60% longer battery-life than the previous generation.

“The vehicle self-reports damage through sensors which flag potential issues, a dual anti-tipping kick stand to help keep the vehicle upright and puncture-proof tyres which self-seal,” she added. 

 

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • e-Call emergency service doesn't go far enough
    January 30, 2012
    eCall misses the point and is only a tacit acknowledgement that the road safety issue has not yet been adequately addressed, according to FEMA's Aline Delhaye. According to the Federation of European Motorcyclists' Associations (FEMA), the European Commission's (EC's) ambitions for eCall implementation are premature and fail to take account of all road users' needs or of technological progress elsewhere.
  • Assessing the potential of in-vehicle enforcement systems
    December 4, 2012
    Jason Barnes considers the social and ethical ramifications of using in-vehicle safety technologies to fulfil enforcement functions. Although policy documents often imply close correlation between enforcement, compliance and safety – in part, as a counter to accusations that enforcement is rather more concerned with revenue generation – there is a noticeable reluctance among policy makers and auto manufacturers to exploit in-vehicle safety systems for enforcement applications. From a technical perspective t
  • Environmental impact assessments - where now?
    February 1, 2012
    Peter George, MVA Consultancy, questions the future direction of environmental impact assessments
  • Voice recognition still a top problem says report
    August 12, 2014
    Speaking in a presentation at the annual Management Briefing Seminars of the Center for Automotive Research, held in Traverse City, Michigan, Kristin Kolodge, J.D. Power’s executive director of driver interaction claimed that in-car voice recognition systems work so poorly that automakers should give up trying to add new features and go back to the basics. According to the consulting firm’s annual Initial Quality Study of vehicle models sold in the United States, voice activation was identified as the mo