Towards niche market for shared mobility: Identifying heterogeneity of potential early adopters to use shared electric bikes in a Chinese mega city

Abstract

Shared mobility endures the pandemic, legislative upheaval, and points to a sizable potential market with wider range of shared services. As the shared mobility segment worldwide continually increases, a noticeable trend towards segmentation of shared mobility services, namely, the niche market, is gaining attention. However, the majority of scholarship has mainly focused on early adopters’ transition from conventional transportation modes to shared mobility, with little attention given to the shift towards specialized and niche shared mobility services. To address such gap, this study aims to explore the heterogeneous characteristics of potential early adopters of shared electric bikes among different transportation groups in the existing market. The questionnaire targets 1,034 citizens living in Shenzhen, a mega city in China, from March to April in 2020, before the official launch of the shared electric bikes scheme in the city. Both binary logistic models and text sentiment analysis have been conducted to present a comprehensive analytical framework to understand the group-sensitive identification of potential early adopters. Results reveal that age, car ownership, commute time, and confidence level on the potential scheme are four significant variables to explain all respondents’ willingness to adopt shared electric bikes, regardless of their existing dominant transport mode. However, when it comes to subgroups with different travel preferences, the profile of potential early adopters vary distinctly. Specifically, younger public transport users are interested in adopting shared electric bikes but have price concerns; gender is the most significant variable to predict private vehicle user’s adopt willingness, and female user show strong concerns on safety issue; users who primarily walk or cycle can benefit from shared electric bikes to travel longer distances, and lastly, there are no significant variables to predict electric bike users’ intention to switch from self-owned bikes to shared programmes. Overall, an analytical framework is presented in the study to comprehend the diverse features of prospective early adopters who may utilize shared electric bikes from different transportation groups, and a collection of development strategies for operators is proposed.