User Surveys Can Help Cities Understand How E-Scooters Are Impacting Mobility, But We Need to Ask the Right Questions
To Make Transportation Policy Decisions, Cities Need to Know the Impacts of Shared Micromobility. Getting the Data To Do So Starts with Survey Design.
As part of the new mobility revolution of the last decade, shared micromobility — small, lightweight transportation devices — has impacted how we move on a daily basis. Some of these impacts are highly visible: you’ve surely seen clusters of colorful electric scooters, mopeds and bikes dotting the streets of many cities. Others are less immediately visible but still significant, like whether micromobility is advancing sustainability goals by replacing car trips, or safety concerns when operating micromobility vehicles in mixed traffic. Since shared micromobility is still technically a newcomer in urban mobility ecosystems, its direct effects, both positive and negative, can be unclear, posing an issue for city decision-makers who must determine whether emerging modes are actually serving the needs of communities.
To make decisions that help build more sustainable, equitable, safe and accessible transportation ecosystems, city officials and transportation practitioners need to understand how shared micromobility is shifting how we move and impacting our streets and cities. Mobility data can provide answers to these questions, but there is a glaring gap in access to consistent, reliable and standardized data. Additionally, most cities lack the advanced technical capacity to analyze complicated “big mobility data’’ generated through shared vehicles and smartphone apps. In the end, cities are left with more questions than answers when it comes to the impacts and role of shared micromobility in urban transportation.
Bridging the Mobility Data Gap with Surveys
To bridge the data gap, many cities opt for a more straightforward way to answer questions about travel behavior through self-reported data: surveys. Surveys are easy to design and administer in person, online or through apps, meaning they can reach a broad user base. The questions asked also can be tailored to target a wide range of demographics, behaviors and perceptions. Some user surveys, such as that conducted by the Portland Bureau of Transportation during the city’s 2018 e-scooter pilot program, ask about trip purpose and if alternative transportation modes were considered to dive deeper into the net impact of e-scooters on greenhouse gas emissions, traffic congestion and safety. When coupled with additional analysis, the data gathered through these surveys can be used to inform decision-making regarding the role of shared micromobility in the broader urban transportation ecosystem.
However, since there currently is no standardized survey or set of questions, most cities craft and implement their own. Consequently, data comparability has suffered, hindering broader comparison of results across surveys and survey geographies. Even differences like population sample can make impact whether the results from one survey can be compared with another.
Similarly, subtle variations in how survey questions are asked can create data inconsistencies. Simply offering users sets of possible responses that vary from one survey to another could create the appearance of modal differences that do not exist on the ground. Say you want to know what alternative modes e-scooter users would have considered for a trip. A survey offered by City A may just list alternative modes (car, public transportation, walking, etc.), whereas City B might also include an option that says “would not have made the trip.” This small difference could lead to the conclusion that e-scooters are only replacing other modes in City A while creating demand for new trips in City B. Consequently, City A could enact policies that are more friendly toward e-scooters than in City B based on biased data and the potentially false interpretation that e-scooters are replacing trips taken by less sustainable modes like cars. Essentially, what questions we ask and how we ask them matter to measure true impact that informs smart decision-making about shared micromobility.
Asking the Right Questions
To avoid biased findings regarding the impacts of shared micromobility on our cities and travel patterns, researchers, policymakers and other decision-making stakeholders need a more standardized way to design and implement shared micromobility surveys, starting with the questions we ask. The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) has already enacted this strategy with the Bike Share Intercept Survey Toolkit — a how-to guide for learning more about how bike share affects communities that includes more than 100 recommended questions for user surveys that are categorized by topics like rider behavior, pricing, economic impacts and user demographics.
But what about shared e-scooters? Inspired by the NACTO bike-sharing survey toolkit, we — Dr. Chris Cherry and Yi Wen, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville — have created the E-Scooter Survey Question Toolkit in partnership with NUMO (the New Urban Mobility alliance) to guide researchers, transportation practitioners and other industry players in designing user surveys that collect consistent, reliable and comparable data that contribute to a broader understanding of the impacts and use of e-scooters. The toolkit includes a library of common questions gathered during an analysis of 10 representative e-scooter surveys. To make it easy to find questions that target specific themes, we sorted the questions into seven categories:
- User demographics
- Motivation and attitude about e-scooters
- Travel behavior and mode choice
- Safety
- Accessibility
- Program evaluation
- User experience
In addition, we offer recommended formats for each composite question based on our survey design experience. More efficient and convenient than creating survey questions from scratch, these questions can easily be applied to larger travel surveys, especially when used in tandem with resources like NACTO’s Bike Share Intercept Survey Toolkit. Though the E-Scooter Survey Question Toolkit surveys only U.S. cities, the questions can be modified to work in international contexts, which will allow for comparison across different countries. Lastly, the toolkit can support the design of in-app surveys that bridge the gap between micromobility user and “big data” surveys by providing a reliable way to link the two datasets for comparison and validation of stated versus observed preferences of micromobility users.
As the micromobility industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, we offer the E-Scooter Survey Question Toolkit as a starting point for formalizing how we design surveys to gather data that help us understand the impacts of emerging modes. With this data, cities can begin to answer questions they have about the success of modes based on specific targets like sustainability, equity and safety. They can see where there may be gaps in accessibility or how e-scooter trips might be replacing car trips, showing them where there is work to be done and where they have hit or missed the mark. With more comparable data, cities can also benchmark their performance against that of similar cities, allowing them to learn from the experiences of others. The end result is data-driven decision-making about shared micromobility that supports an integrated, multimodal transportation ecosystem that serves the mobility needs of communities.
This post was authored by Yi Wen, a graduate student researcher, and Dr. Chris Cherry, a professor and director of the Light Electric Vehicle Education and Research Institute — both of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Assistance and editing provided by Leah Lazer (NUMO) and Madlyn McAuliffe (NUMO). The work was funded by the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety.
NUMO, the New Urban Mobility alliance, is a global organization that channels tech-based disruptions in urban transport to create joyful cities where sustainable and just mobility is the new normal. Founded in 2019 as an outgrowth of the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities, NUMO convenes diverse allies and leverages the momentum of significant revolutions in mobility to target urban issues — including equity, sustainability, accessibility and labor — impacted by the shifting transportation landscape.
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