Yes, but that is not what are being sold now as electric mopeds/ scooters that account for e.g. the 9.7 million annual unit-sales in China. Fully-motorized mopeds are. Which just makes using the ambiguity of the category in order to lie about carbon offset achieved by e-bikes even worse. The accurate headline would have been to say that electric scooters have likely proven to be far better than electric cars, but instead the author chose to make it about e-bikes.

That an especially important distinction when talking about the US, because electric scooters can already navigate our car-centric infrastructure far better than e-bikes can, which means that we can shift people to those much more quickly than we can to e-bikes (which we don't have the infra to support an explosion of, since they need their own infra), and without the environmental re-construction costs to build that infra that would offset any gains for a LOOONG time.

I get that people wish we could shift to a European-like model of city transit, but we can't without some pretty major tradeoffs (and heavy drawbacks). Electric motorcycles/ scooters are much more feasible and practical for most individual commuters than e-bikes, and electric cars for families. Most people are either not willing, or not financially able, to have both.