Analysis of Recreational and Last Mile E-Scooter Utilization in Different Land Use Regions

With rise in shared e-scooter deployment, there is growing interest in evaluating the proportion of recreational vs. non-recreational use so that public agencies can develop appropriate policies and infrastructure support. In the Indianapolis metropolitan area from September 2018 to May 2019, approximately 728,000 e-scooter trips covered 1,250,457 km (777,000 miles) during 162,000 hours of use. This paper focused on three regions with distinct land-use patterns that had 509,241 trips covering 879,209 km (546,317 miles) during 118,440 hours of use. A technique was proposed that compared the ratio of travelled distance to the linear distance between trip start and end points. Trips with ratio larger than 2.0 were assumed to be recreational. As agencies begin to adopt policies and infrastructure support, we believe the methodology described in this paper will be an important consideration for better understanding of the proportion of non-recreational “last-mile” users versus recreational users. The analysis will be helpful for agencies and decision makers in shaping better policies for the safe integration of e-scooters into urban ecosystems.