Bird riders saved more than 1.1 million gallons of gasoline during 2021 by swapping car travel for more sustainable modes of transport.
This saving equates to around 10,000 metric tonnes of CO2 that was prevented from entering the atmosphere, calculated with reference to guidance from the EPA.
In addition, estimates show that Bird e-scooters added more than $100 million in incremental spending, predominantly across local food and beverage companies, across its partner cities in 2021.
Bird went public on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year and has a presence in more than 350 locations around the world.
Assistant Professor of Marketing Daniel McCarthy, who co-authored the study along with Emory University PhD student Kyeongbin Kim, said: “Our initial results were promising, but it was especially heartening that a wide-ranging collection of additional analyses supported the hypothesis of a genuine causal relationship between e-scooter deployments and local food sector spending.
“We began working on this project near the end of 2019. The economic implications of e-scooter deployments were very relevant back then, but their importance has been magnified by the pandemic, which shut down many traditional forms of transport and created significant economic stress. E-scooter activity could help counteract both of these effects, providing individuals with a socially distanced transit option and spurring on economic activity.
“There is little that we can see that would lead us to believe that the results in Europe would not be substantively the same as what we infer here in the US. Many of the largest cities in Europe currently do not allow e-scooters to operate. We hope that these results contribute to their possibly reconsidering their stance on e-scooters.”
