Understanding spatio-temporal heterogeneity of bike-sharing and scooter-sharing mobility

Abstract

The revolution in mobility-sharing services brings disruptive changes to the transportation landscape around the globe. The authorities often rush to regulate the services without a good knowledge of these new options. In Singapore and some other cities, dockless bike-sharing systems rose and fell in just one year and were followed by the booming of docking scooter-sharing systems. This study conducts a comparative analysis of bike-sharing and scooter-sharing activities in Singapore to help understand the phenomenon and inform policy-making. Based on the collected data (i.e., origin-destination pairs enriched with the departure and arrival time and the GPS locations) for one month, this study proposed methods to construct the paths and estimated repositioning trips and the fleet sizes. Hence, the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of the two systems in two discrete urban areas was investigated. It explored the impact of the fleet size, operational regulations (dockless versus docking), and weather conditions on the usages. We found that shared scooters have spatially compact and quantitatively denser distribution compared with shared bikes, and their high demands associate with places such as attractions, metros, and the dormitory. Results suggest that scooter sharing has a better performance than bike sharing in terms of the increased sharing frequency and decreased fleet size; however, the shareability still has potential to be improved. High repositioning rates of shared-scooters indicates high maintenance cost for rebalancing and charging. Rainfall and high temperatures at noon suppress the usages but not conclusively. The study also proposes several initiatives to promote the sustainable development of scooter-sharing services.