Estimating the potential for shared autonomous scooters

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of self-repositioning scooters in urban mobility, showing they could significantly increase vehicle utilization and influence infrastructure planning, based on large-scale dockless bike-share data analysis.

Contribution

It adapts shareability network methodology to assess self-repositioning scooters, providing estimates of ideal fleet sizes and highlighting infrastructure's role in maximizing benefits.

Findings

Self-repositioning scooters can achieve up to 10 times higher utilization.

Infrastructure availability critically impacts the benefits of scooter systems.

Technological advances can reshape urban transportation infrastructure.

Abstract

Recent technological developments have shown significant potential for transforming urban mobility. Considering first- and last-mile travel and short trips, the rapid adoption of dockless bike-share systems showed the possibility of disruptive change, while simultaneously presenting new challenges, such as fleet management or the use of public spaces. In this paper, we evaluate the operational characteristics of a new class of shared vehicles that are being actively developed in the industry: scooters with self-repositioning capabilities. We do this by adapting the methodology of shareability networks to a large-scale dataset of dockless bike-share usage, giving us estimates of ideal fleet size under varying assumptions of fleet operations. We show that the availability of self-repositioning capabilities can help achieve up to 10 times higher utilization of vehicles than possible in current bike-share systems. We show that actual benefits will highly depend on the availability of dedicated infrastructure, a key issue for scooter and bicycle use. Based on our results, we envision that technological advances can present an opportunity to rethink urban infrastructures and how transportation can be effectively organized in cities.