Understanding the Shared E-scooter Travels in Austin, TX

Abstract

This paper investigated the travel patterns of 1.7 million shared E-scooter trips from April 2018 to February 2019 in Austin, TX. There were more than 6000 active E-scooters in operation each month, generating over 150,000 trips and covered approximately 117,000 miles. During this period, the average travel distance and operation time of E-scooter trips were 0.77 miles and 7.55 min, respectively. We further identified two E-scooter usage hotspots in the city (Downtown Austin and the University of Texas campus). The spatial analysis showed that more trips originated from Downtown Austin than were completed, while the opposite was true for the UT campus. We also investigated the relationship between the number of E-scooter trips and the surrounding environments. The results show that areas with higher population density and more residents with higher education were correlated with more E-scooter trips. A shorter distance to the city center, the presence of transit stations, better street connectivity, and more compact land use were also associated with increased E scooter usage in Austin, TX. Surprisingly, the proportion of young residents within a neighborhood was negatively correlated with E-scooter usage.

Exploring Public Opinion on Personal Mobility Vehicle Use: A Case Study in Palermo, Italy

“…The results state that there is a heterogeneity of gender in using PMV among participants that is consistent with the former studies [37][38][39]. Gender plays an important role in the preferences regarding PMV use.…”

Are Shared Vehicles Shared by All? A Review of Equity and Vehicle Sharing

“…The limited data on shared e-scooters so far also reveals a large gender gap in use (Figure 1). A gender gap is also found in population-based surveys and GIS-based analyses (Bai and Jiao 2020; Baltimore City 2019; Fitt and Curl 2019; Jiao and Bai 2020).…”

“…In Portland, income levels of users were a close match to the city overall (Orr, MacArthur, and Dill 2019), while Lime released data showing that 34 percent of its 2018 ridership reported incomes under US $50,000, and 52 percent reported incomes under US $75,000. A GIS-based analysis found that trips were positively correlated with areas with lower-income and higher-educated populations in Austin, Texas (Jiao and Bai 2020). Trip data in Baltimore also found that scooters were used in low-income neighborhoods, perhaps for commuting (Baltimore City 2019).…”

Parking Places to Moped-Style Scooter Sharing Services Using GIS Location-Allocation Models and GPS Data

“…These works have used the GPS records generated by the systems themselves, which store the history of the origins and destinations of the trips made by users. The data collected from the GPS systems installed in the shared mobility vehicles have been used to analyze the accessibility offered by these new systems [16], spatiotemporal patterns of use [17][18][19], and models for predicating demand and customer segmentation [20].…”