Assessing potential sustainability benefits of micromobility: a new data driven approach

Abstract

Promoting the shift from private cars to micromobility (e.g., bike, e-bike, scooter) can represent a valuable action to improve city sustainability and liveability. Micromobility can help to replace trips by individual private cars (e.g., daily short round trips) as well as to improve coverage and accessibility of transit services, and, subsequently, to reduce the traffic impacts (e.g., pollutant emissions). It can be seen as a potential solution to move people more efficiently in urban areas, as well as to push people towards a more active mobility behaviour, contributing to the well-being goals. In this context, the paper, rather than inferring the users’ propensity to change their travel mode, proposes a methodology to identify car trips that can be considered the most compatible with micromobility. Estimation of the potential demand (e.g., the upper level of car trips that could be replaced by micromobility) is carried out by exploiting the opportunity offered by floating car data (FCD) for characterising car trips. Its goodness is therefore evaluated through an application to a real case study (i.e., the city of Trani, Apulia Region, Southern Italy), divided into seventy traffic zones, and where a FCD dataset of about 5,200 trips was available. The FCD allowed the car trips to be characterised (e.g., origin and destination, path features) instead of using the traditional surveys. The results indicate that a significant share of daily car trips can be substituted (i.e., the most compatible) by micromobility (31% of car round trips in the case study), with considerable potential environmental gains (traffic emission reduction; less than 21% of total emissions from private cars). Results can be of interest to local authorities in integrating micromobility in urban mobility planning and promoting new sustainable transport alternatives, as well as to transport companies for designing new appeal services. The developed methodology is parametric and uses easy-to-obtain data available worldwide; thus, it can be easily transferred to other city contexts.

A mixed behavioural and data-driven method for assessing the shift potential to electric micromobility: evidence from Rome

“…Due to the heterogeneity of electric micro-vehicles (Sandt, 2019), for the purposes of this study, a micromobility device is defined as a light motorized vehicle used for transporting people and goods, not subject to type-approval for on-road use, in accordance with the definition provided by Holve et al (2020). Given the high diffusion of e-bikes and e-scooters, especially in the European Union and Italy (Nigro et al, 2022;Comi and Polimeni, 2024), only these last two electric micro-vehicles have been considered in this study.…”