Evaluating an Emerging Mobility Program: E-Scooter Pilot Case Study
By: Eliot Mueting
Tags: Mobility, Scooters, Smart Cities, Cities, Transportation

As new mobility services evolve around the world, city staff are leading the way to ensure that these services are safe, equitable, and efficient. The world of transportation is changing fast, which can pose new challenges for public agencies who are responsible for infrastructure that must last over long timeframes (decades, not months), such as updates to street design and policies that outline the use of our streets, curbs, and sidewalks.

Brookline, Massachusetts evaluated micromobility services through a pilot in 2019

Increasingly, private companies arrive in cities to provide new services — ones that fundamentally require the use of public city streets. Over the last decade, cities have experienced multiple disruptions which raise many questions for departments of transportation and public works such as: Are these services providing access to historically underserved communities? What transportation services are these new solutions replacing? How do these trends impact potential infrastructure improvements?

The development of a pilot can be a quick and effective way for a city to explore new and innovative solutions. Populus works closely with cities as they manage and evaluate new mobility programs around the world, and a major breakthrough for cities to evaluate mobility services has been the development of data sharing standards, such as MDS and GBFS. Based on a recent survey, most cities (more than 80%) prefer to use a trusted third party, to securely manage this type of data, rather than using limited staff time to store, validate, harmonize, and analyze big data from a changing landscape of mobility companies. As an example, Populus is the trusted platform for delivering data in 70 cities around the world from 20 mobility operators.

While vehicle and trip data from mobility services can be extremely valuable, it only tells one piece of the story. Here, we share a few key findings from Brookline, Massachusetts where Populus managed vehicle and trip data and analysis for their e-scooter pilot.

To provide comprehensive insights into mobility pilots for cities, Populus also brings additional resources to bear, including integration with existing city services such as 311 systems, as well as Populus’ own survey solutions that help cities gather key data points directly from their citizens to understand the demographics of people adopting new mobility services and how these services have changed their travel choices.

Case Study: Brookline E-Scooter Pilot

Brookline, Massachusetts is a town of approximately 60,000 people located adjacent to the City of Boston. The town was the first municipality in the state to conduct a shared e-scooter pilot program with many other regional municipalities eager to learn from their pilot. The town’s Transportation Administrator developed the E-Scooter Pilot Program with evaluation in mind by requiring the service providers to report vehicle and trip information using data standards. In addition to the data reporting requirements, service providers were also required to support the distribution of surveys to their users at the end of the pilot program to answer questions that cannot be answered by vehicle and trip data alone.

The pilot ran for eight months from April 1 to November 15, 2019 with the stated goal to, “determine whether Shared Electric Scooters contribute to the Town’s mobility, equity, safety, and climate action goals.”

Evaluating Vehicle Operations and Trip Data

Brookline staff leveraged the Populus platform to securely receive and visualize the vehicle and trip delivered to Brookline from new mobility service providers in MDS and GBFS formats, including Bird, Spin, and Lime. Vehicle and trip data provided in these formats can be analyzed by a platform like Populus to answer many key questions such as:

How many trips have occurred? over a particular time period? in a particular geography?

What are the trip volumes for specific street segments and corridors?

How far is a typical trip? How long is a typical trip?

How are vehicles distributed throughout the city? If we have put in place specific policies to guide where vehicles are placed, are they effective?

What is the difference in vehicle usage behavior by time of day?

Fig. 1: Anonymized route analysis using Populus Mobility Manager.

Survey Deployment and Evaluation

To begin answering key questions that cannot be answered through operational data, Populus also supported the Brookline pilot by deploying a Mobility Program Evaluation Survey designed to help the town conduct a comprehensive evaluation. Building on more than a decade of experience designing transportation surveys as academic researchers and as consultants for public agencies, our team developed rigorous surveys designed to help cities measure adoption of new mobility services, public perception towards them, and impacts on safety and mode shift.

The survey was disseminated through each scooter operator’s riders, as well as made available to the general public and citizens groups as requested by local policymakers (see. Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Summary of Populus survey responses by user type, resident type, and recruitment method.

The Populus mobility evaluation survey was designed to gather the following key data points to support a comprehensive evaluation Brookline’s mobility program:

Demographics of shared mobility users (age, income, race, and gender)

Basic transportation inventory (vehicle ownership, licensure, etc.)

Travel behavior changes, including mode shift and first- and last-mile access

Equity and accessibility issues

Safety-related data (for shared bikes and scooters)

Perceptions of shared mobility by users and non-users of these services

How Do E-Scooters Fit Into The Transportation Ecosystem?

Through our national transportation surveys, Populus has found that there can be significant variation in how new services, such as e-scooters, fit into a city’s transportation ecosystem. Whether they reduce driving, complement transit, and are used for commuting trips is unique to every geography. Surveys still remain a key tool in a city’s toolbox to understand how new mobility services have an impact in their specific locale.

In the case of Brookline, which is a fairly dense, transit-oriented city, surveys found that a significant portion of riders (47%) drove less or significantly less overall after they began using e-scooters, and an even larger portion (60%) used services like Uber and Lyft less. Other modes, including personal biking and public transit also saw reductions, but these were significantly less as compared to auto-oriented modes.

Another common question about how e-scooters fit into our transportation ecosystem is whether people use them as a practical way to get around or whether they are primarily recreational trips by young people. Similar to the national survey data Populus has gathered for major metropolitan areas of the United States, we found that a significant portion of trips in urban, transit-rich areas are utilitarian in nature. In Brookline, a majority (38%) of trips in were made for shopping or errands, and the next most common type of trip was as part of a commute to work or school (33%).

Fig. 4: Last e-scooter trip purpose.

Public Opinion

Another important element of a new mobility evaluation are the opinions and reported behaviors of citizens who use these new services, but also the opinions of citizens who do not. Our survey gathered a number of key data points from the broader public on what they thought of the shared electric scooter pilot that city staff and elected officials have available for a more comprehensive decision making process for the program.

Best Practices for City Pilots

Brookline’s comprehensive evaluation for their new mobility pilot included the secure analysis of both operational data, as well as context-rich survey data to help answer important questions about travel behavior. Vehicle and trip data analyzed through Populus Mobility Manager provided valuable geospatial information about vehicle placement and trip patterns, while survey data provided city staff and elected officials with an understanding of how the new services impact people’s lives and transportation decisions.

A robust evaluation of a new mobility pilot includes both quantitative geospatial data, as well as qualitative data that can answer important questions about transportation behavior change, potential impacts to existing services, and transportation equity. With the mobility landscape constantly changing, mobility pilot evaluations powered by quality data can help cities make decisions that help drive progress on their transportation goals.

About Populus

At Populus, we’re helping cities and private mobility providers deliver safe, efficient, and equitable streets through better data. The Populus platform is a comprehensive digital solution that empowers cities to manage the public right of way, including their curbs, streets, and sidewalks, and develop data-driven policies with access to data from mobility operators (e.g. shared bikes, scooters, and cars). Founded by transportation PhDs from MIT and UC Berkeley, the Populus team combines over 30 years of experience building software for public agencies to plan for the future of transportation. Learn more at populus.ai

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