Impact of e-scooter sharing on bike sharing in Chicago

As a new type of shared micromobility, e-scooter sharing first appeared in the United States and became popular worldwide. Considering e-scooter sharing and bike sharing have similar service attributes, the ridership of bike sharing may be affected by the introduction of e-scooter sharing. To date, studies exploring this impact are limited. In this study, we seek to analyze the impact of e-scooter sharing on the usage of bike sharing from trip data of e-scooter sharing and bike sharing in Chicago for a total of 30 weeks. We rely on a difference-in-differences modeling approach based on the propensity score matching method. We found that the average duration of e-scooter trips is shorter than that of bike trips. The introduction of e-scooter sharing reduced the overall bike sharing usage by 23.4 trips per week per station (10.2%). bike sharing usage of non-members and members decreased by 18.0 (34.1%) and 5.4 (4.0%) trips, and that of male and female members decreased by 3.3 (3.1%) and 2.0 (7.3%) trips, respectively. Furthermore, the volume of short-, medium-, and long-duration trips of bike sharing decreased by 10.9 (7.5%), 5.4 (9.6%), and 3.4 trips (20.5%), respectively. Finally, bike sharing use during non-peak hours decreased but was not affected during peak hours.

Automated summary

This study analyzes the impact of e-scooter sharing on bike sharing in Chicago, finding that the introduction of e-scooter sharing led to a decrease in overall bike sharing usage, especially among non-members and female members.