Twin4Green attended the insightful IoT Sparks event in Valencia on September 19.
The IoT Sparks event was fantastic and it will be difficult to find IoT related events matching the quality of its food…
Its rich agenda reflected the incredible opportunities made possible by leveraging IoT and collaborating to provide impactful solutions. Given the recent flooding which occured in Central and Eastern Europe, sustainability was a topic at the center of many presentations and discussions.
In 2023, the University of Washington published a very interesting study, Understanding people’s concerns and attitudes towards smart cities. We believe that one of the concerns that was not looked at is the cost to benefit ratio. Let us examine the impact of some ‘smart city’ solutions currently being widely promoted by a large number of city officials.
We will follow the Net cost per tonne of CO2 calculation methodology described by Steve Winkelman and for our case selected the ‘Lime bikes’ mobility solution as they are widely deployed in the UK and have repeatadly emphasized the sustainability motives through campaigns.
One can find a lot of information with just a few clicks:
Fleet size: 200,000 fleet + 30,000 new ones in 2023-2024
Impact: According to a Fraunhofer ISI study, a Lime bike trip saves on average 10 grams of CO2 per km (For e- scooters it is 25 g/km) (Summary of the study)
Number of trips: 160 million trips (Source)
Average 2.3 trips per bike per day: (160 million/200,000 bikes/365 days)
Average trip length is about 2 miles (3 kms x 160 million trips = 480 million kms) each representing a saving of about 30 grams of CO2, which means
As it is hard to quantify the health benefits related to the use of Lime bikes, we can estimate the Net costs to society (whether individual citizens or cities) as
Of course it is up to decision makers to determine whether this amount represents good value for money for their cities or whether diversifying their investment might actually result in better management of citizens’ taxes.
Next time someone asks your opinion about potential efficient ways to decarbonize cities we hope you will encourage them to look at the big picture and make decisions based on quantitative approaches such as Net societal ROI.
#iotsparks #loriot #sustainability #ROI