Where Have Shared E-Scooters Taken Us So Far? A Review of Mobility Patterns, Usage Frequency, and Personas

Abstract

The emergence of micromobility services in the form of dockless shared e-scooters has resulted in a wide range of behavioral changes in urban environments. In order to effectively steer these changes towards sustainability targets, the characteristics of e-scooter trips and users’ behaviors should be understood further. However, there is a lack of systematic literature reviews in this domain. To address this gap, we provide a two-fold systematic literature review. The first aspect focuses on the categorization of temporal and spatial patterns of shared e-scooter usage. The second aspect focuses on a deeper understanding of e-scooter users’ behaviors, utilizing the principles of persona design. The analysis of temporal patterns highlights the commonality of midday, evening, and weekend peak usage across cities, while spatial patterns suggest e-scooters are used for traveling to recreational and educational land use, as well as city center areas. The synthesis of findings on users’ behaviors has resulted in six categories, with four user types based on usage frequency (one time, casual, power, and non-adopters), and two motivation-based personas (users who are not satisfied with current mobility options and users who have had positive travel experience from e-scooter usage). The overall findings provide important lessons for evaluating this emerging mobility service, which should be considered for steering its development in public-private stakeholder networks.

Determinants of shared e-scooter usage and their policy implications. findings from a survey in Braga, Portugal

“…However, the profile of the population that is exposed to shared e-scooter services highly influences the usage of this mode of transport, hence the understanding of the relationship between the usage of shared e-scooters and the sociodemographic characteristics of the population can be crucial to the establishment of this mode of transport [24]. Recent studies show that shared e-scooters reach their peak of usage in the middle of the day or the evenings, and the trips are focused on recreational and educational usage [25].…”

Electric scooter safety: An integrative review of evidence from transport and medical research domains

“…The e-scooter literature evaluation revealed a lack of comprehensive systemic literature review studies (Toofany et al, 2021). Most studies in the medical domain research provided evidence from reviews of emergency department cases rather than previous studies (Dibaj et al, 2021;Iroz-Elardo & Currans, 2021;Shichman et al, 2021;Shichman et al, 2022). In the transport domain, the previous review focused on usage patterns and substitution effects of e-scooters (Liao & Correia, 2022;Kazemzadeh & Sprei, 2022;S ¸engül & Mostofi, 2021;Wang et al, 2022).…”

Application of Mixed Methods in Transdisciplinary Research Projects on Sustainable Mobility

“…LEVs are mostly used for entertainment or private use as a substitute for walking and not for transport. However, there is an indication that LEVs such as e-scooters have a high potential for individuals to change their mobility patterns [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. According to Brost et al [17], LEVs have the potential to reduce emissions from car passenger trips by around 44%.…”