How E-Scooters Impact Shared Mobility and Consumer Safety

Abstract

Shared micromobility services that comprise small lightweight vehicles, such as electric scooters (i.e., e-scooters) are growing rapidly. While e-scooters can offer several benefits (e.g., higher mobility, equitable access), they can also have potential downsides (e.g., risk of injury, reckless behavior). Research on micromobility in marketing shows that e-scooters boost restaurant spending, but it does not examine their effects on important economic and societal outcomes beyond the food sector. Similarly, research on the sharing economy rarely focuses on micromobility services or on demand interactions between shared platforms. Therefore, our paper examines the effects of the entry of e-scooters on other incumbent shared mobility services in the sharing economy (i.e., ridesharing and bikesharing) and on overall consumer safety (i.e., crimes and crashes). Using the entry of e-scooters in parts of Chicago in 2019 and a difference-indifferences analysis with propensity score matching, our results reveal a dual effect of e-scooters. First, the entry of e-scooters increases the number of short rideshare trips by 4.79%, but decreases the number of bikeshare trips by 13.53%. Our results on the complementary effect for ridesharing and the substitution effect for bikesharing can be explained by e-scooters' relative advantages and disadvantages, depending on the timing and type of usage. Second, the entry of e-scooters increases the number of crimes (e.g., vehicle break-ins) by 9.78% and crashes (e.g., bike crash) by 56.23%. The increase in crimes and crashes is explained by street and vehicle crimes, and by crashes involving micromobility vehicles. Importantly, the effects are heterogeneous and asymmetric by the age and racial composition of a neighborhood. Overall, e-scooters contribute about $4.7 million in ridesharing revenues but they also have an unintended negative environmental effect amounting to about 510 metric ton carbon emissions per year. Our research offers key implications and includes an app companion for stakeholders.

Keywords: E-scooter, Shared Mobility, Retailing, Consumer Safety, Inequity, Difference-in-differences, Quasi-experiment

JEL Classification: M31, L81, C01, C23, C90