Toward climate-neutral urban mobility: understanding shared e-scooter carbon emission patterns through multi-city evidence in Europe

Shared e-scooters represent a promising low-carbon solution for short-distance travel, with significant potential to accelerate the urban transport transition toward climate neutrality. Based on shared e-scooter trips and carbon intensity data, we conducted a comparative analysis of 28 European cities to investigate the mechanisms linking urban characteristics with scooter-related carbon emissions. The results revealed significant variations in emissions sensitivity to specific city characteristics across the five city groups, with the Nordic city group demonstrating the lowest sensitivity. Factors such as population density, road length, and nightlight exhibited strong nonlinear positive correlations with other city groups. Temporal analysis revealed that weekday carbon emissions significantly exceeded weekend levels, with peak emissions occurring during midday and evening hours. Through Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) analysis, this study quantitatively evaluated the differentiated impacts of demographic, transportation, land use, economic, and environmental factors on carbon emissions. These findings can assist urban managers in optimizing shared e-scooter deployment strategies and provide empirical evidence for developing inclusive low-carbon transport policies, offering important implications for advancing urban transportation systems toward climate neutrality.