A bike will be faster for anything that is longer than what would normally be a 5-10 min walk. But you also have to take into account the time of unlocking and locking up your bike, vs just grabbing your kick scooter on the way out.
Bikes have larger wheels, and you are using far more muscle groups to propel you to a top speed. So while a kick scooter might accelerate away faster, within maybe 10 meters anyone on a bike can pass you.
Top speeds for getting to work or school; What about for shorter trips, like to the park or to the store?
My kids many years ago started at first walking to school, then taking a stunt scooter, and finally a bike. I’ve gone alongside them for countless trips, and for the equivalent 10 min walk, we’d shave off at least a 1/3rd with scootering, and at least half with biking.
It’s a short trip, so the extra time getting the bike from the garage, and locking it up at school made it a wash when compared to grabbing the scooter (each year the kids took the scooter to school, the teachers just let them keep it by their coats in class, no need to spend time locking it up).
For children, a Swedish Study looked at a variety of aspects of children’s behavior and safety while cycling. They looked at age 8, 10, and 12 and found the average male cycling speeds were 3.2, 3.6, 4.4 miles per hour, with the age 8 and 10 year old girls having a similar speed but the 12 year old girls actually having a slower speed around 3.4 miles per hour compared to boys at that age. That must be a very leisurely pace, because when my kids were growing up their average biking speed was definitely 11-13 miles per hour (one had a computer on his bike) if they weren’t talking to friends while riding.
For adults, speaking from my own experience, a moderate ride that most health adults can maintain is at least 13.6 mph (22 km/hour). That’s my pace going at a leisurely ride with the family. You can get into many, many data points with all the road cyclists who can plot out their watt output etc, but I’ll just say that when I am pushing it on the flats, maybe 30 km/h is sustainable for 20 min, and I am not a trained cyclist by any means, riding a mountain bike.
An average kick scooter speed is around 8-10 miles per hour if pushing at a brisk pace. So you’ll get close to bike speeds, but not quite.
For short trips, anything that is around a 10 min walk, it’s going to be a close call, and I would say that convenience is going to be the deciding factor. If it’s easy to lock up your bike and if you a back pack of groceries to take – a bike would be my choice.
But if it’s just a quick trip to the park, a scooter is a lot of fun. Or if you will be around crowds, like a trip to a close by shopping village – a scooter would be way more convenient as you can ride it very slowly and leisurely on the sidewalk, weaving around people or even just going at a walking pace.
How about the efficiency of using a kick scooter vs riding a bike?
Both will beat walking in terms of efficiency (and fun). There are many people who report that kick-scootering is around 2-3 times faster than walking, and I do think this is a reasonable estimate. You can go quite a bit faster than this by pushing harder and gliding less, but the intensity of exercise output goes up a lot.
For the same speed, biking is much more efficient. This makes sense intuitively as well, given the larger wheels, and the larger muscle groups (and weight) involved in riding a bike.
The University of Brighton published a study The metabolic and physiological responses to scootering exercise in a field-setting in which they had participants start scootering at 6 km/hr for five minutes, increasing every 5 minutes to 12 km/hr. Note the wheel diameter on these scooters was 160 mm, larger than the standard 80-120 mm seen on stunt scooters.
50% max heart rate was seen at the 6 km/hr speed, and 71% was seen at the 12 km/hr speed. 6-10 km/hr is classifed as moderate intensity based on metabolic equivalent measuring, and 12 km/hr was “vigorous”.
This contrasts with many studies showing light intensity for cycling for around 18 km/hr. Thus, cycling is much more efficient.
Why would you choose a kick scooter for yourself or for your child?
For kids, a kick scooter is almost a right of passage. I remember getting the plastic, three wheeled scooters (with two wheels up front, and one in the back) for the very young kids, around age 3-4. It’s a great start, but pretty quickly you start looking at the two-wheeled versions that are more fun to ride, don’t have hard plastic wheels, and just coast along.
It’s a fun activity, and while I wouldn’t exactly call it exercise the way everyone else will market it, it certainly beats just lounging on the couch. It’s stable, safe, and easy to learn on – you just hop off if you can’t balance, or put one foot down.
And once you can glide a bit, it’s the fun and sensation of freedom that makes it worthwhile purchasing for both your children and yourself.
And even outside of taking a ride around the block, kick scooters are at home taking a ride to the corner store, or for an afternoon to the coffee shop. Riding to a village or town center is great, and you don’t have to worry about locking up your bike. You can go at a very slow, walking pace, right on the sidewalk beside pedestrians without any real annoyance to yourself or your walking neighbours.
What type of kick scooter should you get for yourself or your child?
When I was in university, everyone downtown was using an aluminum, foldable kick scooter. Well, not everyone, but it certainly was a very popular way to get from your apartment to your work, and the Razer brand was synonymous with this lightweight, convenient, exercise and commuting tool.
Fast forward to today, and as my kids were growing up through elementary school, some of their friends had Razer aluminum kick scooters (their parents are the same age as me and likely grew up with the same experience), and others started showing up with more durable, non-foldable, “trick” or “stunt” or “pro” scooters (they all mean the same thing).
By far, the kids seem to prefer these stunt scooters. They are insanely smooth, and literally are meant to take a beating from professional jumps and landings; you can’t really destroy them at all.
I’ve also had high-end, $300 “adult” scooters, which have wide wooden decks, are foldable, and meant to be for commuting. They are very smooth as well, but even they can’t compare to a stunt scooter that for a quality one, might be around 50-60 dollars on the low end.
These stunt scooters can be found in all skateboard shops as well as some big box sports stores. Common brands are Madd Gear, Envy, Lucky, and District. these ones might run a little bit more, but even less expensive brands such as Vokl on Amazon (a friend has this one) are certainly smooth enough.