While ride-sharing services like Grab, Uber, and Gojek have become a pervasive part of life, many countries in the Asia Pacific region are still unconvinced when it comes to micro-mobilities such as bike and scooter sharing. While the convenience offered by these is great, especially in this Covid-19 era when people may remain wary of crowding in buses and metro trains, there is a need for in-depth knowledge of these new transportation options to help guide policy and regulation.
A group of scientists in the Senseable City Lab at MIT and the Future Urban Mobility (FM) Interdisciplinary Research Group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, set out to better understand the phenomenon and inform policy-making through a comparative analysis of bike-sharing and scooter-sharing activities in Singapore.
The researchers shared their findings in a paper titled “Understanding spatio-temporal heterogeneity of bike-sharing and scooter-sharing mobility” published in the journal Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. The study is based on real usage records containing location and time of departures and arrivals in two distinct areas in Singapore.
“We constructed historical trajectories of the bike-sharing and scooter-sharing trips and compared usage patterns of the two systems at the Marina Bay area and the NUS campus,” says Rui Zhu, a postdoc at SMART FM. “Our results showed increased sharing frequency and decreased fleet size for scooter-sharing, suggesting that it performs better than bike-sharing.”
Continue reading at MIT.
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