Framework for the Comparison of Different Transportation Modes Under the Aspects Time and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

While the presence of light electric vehicle (LEV) sharing has found its niche in Europe’s urban areas, their impact on the issues said areas are facing, such as space and environmental, is topic of debate and research. Previous research has already established LEV sharing providers environmental footprint by using the method life cycle assessment (LCA), albeit contingent on assumptions made on the operational management and usage phase and analyzed which transportation modes were substituted with shared LEVs. This paper aims to extend this research, by analyzing to what extend this novel transportation mode is suitable for urban transportation by comparing its performance in the metrics trip duration and greenhouse gas emissions to other means of passenger transportation. The case study presented uses data on Berlin, collected by data scraping for the transportation modes public transit, private car, private bicycle or rented e-scooter. To enable comparison among these two dimensions and across trips of different lengths, we propose a combined metric, equipped with a customization parameter α weighing the relativized performances. Our findings indicate that when weighing both metrics equally, rented e-scooters and public transit perform similarly, with the private car performing worst. With more and less focus on the speed metric however, the car becomes the second best and worst transportation mode respectively, with the private bicycle being optimal for any value of α regarding both time and greenhouse gas emissions.