Do e-scooters fill mobility gaps and promote equity before and during COVID-19? A spatiotemporal analysis using open big data

03/11/2021
by   Xiang Yan, et al.
0

The growing popularity of e-scooters and their rapid expansion across urban streets has attracted widespread attention. A major policy question is whether e-scooters substitute existing mobility options or fill the service gaps left by them. This study addresses this question by analyzing the spatiotemporal patterns of e-scooter service availability and use in Washington DC, focusing on their spatial relationships with public transit and bikesharing. Results from an analysis of three open big datasets suggest that e-scooters have both competing and complementary effects on transit and bikesharing services. The supply of e-scooters significantly overlaps with the service areas of transit and bikesharing, and we classify a majority of e-scooter trips as substitutes to transit and bikesharing uses. A travel-time-based analysis further reveals that when choosing e-scooters over transit, travelers pay a price premium and save some travel time. The price premium is greater during the COVID-19 pandemic but the associated travel-time savings are smaller. This implies that public health considerations rather than time-cost tradeoffs are the main driver for many to choose e-scooters over transit during COVID. In addition, we find that e-scooters complement bikesharing and transit by providing services to underserved neighborhoods. A sizeable proportion (about 10 percent) of e-scooter trips are taken to connect with the rail services. Future research may combine the big-data-based analysis presented here with traditional methods to further shed light on the interactions between e-scooter services, bikesharing, and public transit.

READ FULL TEXT
research
04/05/2022

Microtransit adoption in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from a choice experiment with transit and car commuters

On-demand mobility platforms play an increasingly important role in urba...
research
12/04/2020

Efficient Social Distancing for COVID-19: An Integration of Economic Health and Public Health

Social distancing has been the only effective way to contain the spread ...
research
05/02/2020

Data-Driven Modeling Reveals the Impact of Stay-at-Home Orders on Human Mobility during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S

If the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is to reduce human travel by imposin...
research
08/19/2022

Spatial Equity of Micromobility Systems: A Comparison of Shared E-scooters and Station-based Bikeshare in Washington DC

Many cities around the world have introduced dockless micromobility serv...
research
11/16/2020

Spatiotemporal Characteristics of Ride-sourcing Operation in Urban Area

The emergence of ride-sourcing platforms has brought an innovative alter...
research
02/18/2022

Does ridesourcing respond to unplanned rail disruptions? A natural experiment analysis of mobility resilience and disparity

Urban rail transit networks provide critical access to opportunities and...
research
02/15/2021

An Overview of Agent-based Traffic Simulators

In most countries population in urban areas is growing, while available ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset