Impact of Urban Micromobility Technology on Pedestrian and Rider Safety: A Field Study Using Pedestrian Crowd-Sensing
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The proliferation of micromobility vehicles, such as e-scooters, as last-mile transportation solutions in our cities and urban communities has been rapidly rising. However, an unprepared urban infrastructure, combined with lack of specific laws and regulations has led to e-scooters encroaching on the pedestrian sidewalks, introducing new safety concerns. Thus, it is critical to investigate the current state and to identify factors affecting pedestrian safety in urban communities with respect to these micromobility vehicles to determine how to enable pedestrian safety going forward. Unfortunately, till date there have been no holistic data-driven research work done on these issues. To this end, we analyze specific spatio-temporal metrics usable as safety benchmarks by crowd-sensing scooter encounter data using pedestrian participants in two urban university locations. Our analysis uncovers interesting scooter-pedestrian encounter statistics in unsafe spatio-temporal zones. This preliminary work also provides a blueprint for enabling safety-related studies in other urban communities. The tools and (anonymized) encounter data from this study are publicly-available, and can be used as a resource conduct further investigations in this direction.
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