Abstract:

The shared mobility options like bike/car sharing grown in popularity among residents, but researchers expect that they will also play a key role in the mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) scheme, a new transportation trend. MaaS often integrate personal (or micro) mobility solutions such as bike/scooter sharing for short-distance trips in order to provide consumers with personalized mobility services, which is the scheme's aim. With its advantages in urbanized areas, the electric scooter sharing (ESS) system has received considerable popularity as a transportation mode for short-distance trips. In this paper, people's preferences toward ESS for last-mile trips were analyzed using a stated preference experiment. The authors designed the experiment to scrutinize how people value ESS-riding compared with other conventional last-mile transportation modes. The values of travel time components such as access and riding times are estimated using a mixed logit model. The values of riding transportation modes were significantly greater than that of walking for a last-mile trip. However, none of the time values of two modes—those from a conventional last-mile mode and ESS—was dominating because the difference in the dispersions of each made the time value curves intersect around their medians. This study’s result implies that some people would perceive the joint subway/ESS utility greater than that of using automobiles for the whole journey; the lack of last-mile modes or dissatisfaction toward the existing one would have made people hesitate to use public transit.