Inferring and comparing trip purposes of shared micromobility services: A case study of Ningbo, China

Abstract

Over the past decades, shared micromobility services (SMSs) have experienced ever-fast growth around the world. Such increment has raised issues such as how to improve the efficiency of the service operation and regulation. To address these issues, it is essential to understand how and why these SMSs are used. This research aims to infer trip purposes of two types of dockless SMSs, i.e., dockless shared bikes and e-bikes, and make a comparison between them, mainly using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)-based analytical framework. The proposed framework was applied in Ningbo, China by combining a large-scale bike-sharing trip dataset and a Points of Interest (POIs) dataset. In our case study, we successfully revealed seven typical trip purposes, i.e., transport, work, lodging, eating, shopping, education, and others. The results showed that eating is the most prevalent trip purpose for both bike and e-bike users. Surprisingly, the proportions of transport-related trips were insignificant compared to previous observations, for both shared bikes and e-bikes. Moreover, the shared bike played a more significant role than the shared e-bike in daily trips related to lodging and education, indicating that the role of the shared e-bike in these trips might have been overestimated previously. This study provides insight into the trip purposes of SMSs and gives targeted planning and operation suggestions, which can promote sustainable development of the urban micromobility systems.