Over the past year, app-enabled electric scooters have popped up in cities around the world,

inviting a wary public to hop a ride as indignant local governments scramble to regulate them.

It may come as a surprise, then, that e-scooters could be exactly what traffic-choked cities

need.

This is your Bloomberg QuickTake on e-scooters.

Download an app, find a scooter, unlock it, and go for a ride.

When you're done, leave it behind.

Rides can cost less than $2.

There's, Bird, Lime, Scoot, Skip, both Uber and Lyft have scooters now

as well.

They're new and by their essence, they're all over the place.

So if you're not using them, they get in your way and because people are just learning how

to use them, they tend to ride them in obnoxious ways.

And in a lot of places these become sort of a symbol of the technology industry which

annoys people.

At launch, cities like Cleveland banned them, while San Francisco halted operations for

several months to create a permit system that capped the number of scooters allowed.

Still, growth has continued: Bird now offers scooters in about 40 cities, while Lime is

in 23.

But despite the controversies, e-scooters have their defenders.

In dense urban areas, cars often aren't the fastest way to get around.

Many cities have turned to bike-share systems and dedicated bike lanes because they take

up less space than cars, and save on carbon emissions.

Some urban planners also see e-scooters as part of the future of city transportation.

The hope would be that you would eliminate a lot of shorter car trips.

That would get a lot of cars off the road which would allow for some rethinking of the

streets themselves, and which would create more protected lanes and so on.

And then, that would in turn broaden the demand for scooters.

So it would be sort of a virtuous cycle.

But despite Bird and Lime each being valued at more than $1 billion, it's too early

to tell if they will become viable businesses.

the things you look at are, how long it takes to pay off a vehicle, and how long

a vehicle stays on the road.

We don't know exactly how much this is, but you know, it does seem like you can pay these

things off fairly quickly, they're relatively inexpensive.

But, they also just get completely trashed, very quickly.

You're going to take care of your own car, but, as they say, "no one ever washes a rental

car."