Understanding the emergence of shared e-scooters: A user perspective

The emergence of shared micromobility in the recent years has caused enormous changes in the city landscape and people’s daily activity-space. E-scooters as an emerging transport mode are being embedded into society by offering a fast and pleasant travel experience, especially for first-mile and last-mile legs, while being relatively affordable (Fitt & Curl, 2020). Rapidly evolving literature focuses on various topics, such as trip purpose (Buehler, et al., 2021), mode substitution (Guo & Zhang, 2021), safety (Haworth & Schramm, 2019), injuries caused by e-scooters (Mukhtar, et al., 2021), using public shared space (Gibson, et al., 2021) as well as deeper conceptualization of everyday mobility and unpacking of social practices (Fitt & Curl, 2020). In order to steer urban sustainability transition that includes e-scooters, the characteristics of e-scooter users’ behaviors and intentions should be understood further. Such user-level understanding is essential for identifying triggers for long-term behavioral change, and complete interpretation of system-level results. This research introduces an important user perspective through an application of user personas, as an elaborate representation of different users’ needs, experiences, and behaviors often used in design studies. Using the concept of personas for systematic literature review (Dibaj, et al., 2021), we identify classification categories based on usage frequency and motivation. These user categories are contrasted with the analysis of temporal patterns which highlight the commonality of mid-day, evening and weekend peak usage across cities, as well as spatial patterns, which suggest that e-scooters are used for traveling to recreational and educational land use, as well as city center areas. Moreover, findings inform us that e-scooters mostly substitute walking and slow public transit modes and people use them to have a positive travel experience, for recreational purposes and first-mile and last-mile legs. The overall findings provide important lessons for the evaluation of this emerging mobility service, which should be considered for steering its development in public-private stakeholder networks.

References

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Dibaj, S., Hosseinzadeh, A., Mladenović, M. N. & Kluger, R., 2021. Where Have Shared E-Scooters Taken Us So Far? A Review of Mobility Patterns, Usage Frequency, and Personas. Sustainability, 13(21), p. 11792.
Fitt, H. & Curl, A., 2020. The early days of shared micromobility: A social practices approach. Journal of Transport Geography, Volume 86, p. 102779.
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