Consequential LCA for territorial and multimodal transportation policies: method and application to the free-floating e-scooter disruption in Paris

TL;DR

This paper develops a new method for assessing the environmental impacts of urban transport disruptions, applies it to e-scooter adoption in Paris, and provides insights on reducing their carbon footprint.

Contribution

It introduces a formalized CLCA method for city-scale transport disruptions and applies it to quantify e-scooter impacts in Paris.

Findings

E-scooters added 13,000 tons of CO2eq annually with 1 million users.

Major modal shifts from metro and RER contributed to increased emissions.

Reducing servicing emissions and increasing lifetime mileage can mitigate environmental impacts.

Abstract

The indirect environmental impacts of transport disruptions in urban mobility are frequently overlooked due to a lack of appropriate assessment methods. Consequential Life Cycle Assessment (CLCA) is a method to capture the environmental consequences of the entire cause and effect chain of these disruptions but has never been adapted to transportat disruption at the city scale. This paper proposes a mathematical formalization of CLCA applied to a territorial mobility change. The method is applied to quantify the impact on climate change of the breakthrough of free-floating e-scooters (FFES) in Paris. A FFES user survey is conducted to estimate the modal shifts due to FFES. Trip substitutions from all the Parisian modes concerned are considered - personal or shared bicycles and motor scooters, private car, taxi and ride-hailing, bus, streetcar, metro and RER (the Paris metropolitan area mass rapid transit system). All these Parisian modes are assessed for the first time using LCA. Final results estimate that over one year, the FFES generated an extra thirteen thousand tons of CO2eq under an assumption of one million users, mainly due to major shifts coming from lower-emitting modes (60% from the metro and the RER, 22% from active modes). Recommendations are given to enhance their carbon footprint. A scenario analysis shows that increasing the lifetime mileage is insufficient to get a positive balance: reducing drastically servicing emissions is also required. A sensitivity analysis switching the French electricity mix for eleven other country mixes suggests a better climate change effect of the FFES in similar metropolitan areas with higher electricity carbon intensity, such as in Germany and China. Finally, the novelty and the limits of the method are discussed, as well as the results and the role of e-scooters, micromobility, and shared vehicles towards a sustainable mobility.