Motivations and Mode-choice Behavior of Micromobility Users in Washington, DC

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has reduced travel in general and disrupted travel patterns across the United States. The transit and ridehailing service ridership are particularly severely impacted. After an initial dip, shared micromobility services, including bikeshare, e-scooters, and e-bikeshare, have gained popularity as social distancing promoters with fewer points of contact. The findings of this article are based on the first phase of a two-phase mixed-mode survey of users and non-users of micromobility in Washington DC (n=440) in the Summer of 2019. While the phase-2 of the study is impacted by COVID-19 prevalence, results from the phase-1 are expected to serve as a critical baseline for post-pandemic travel behavior analysis and policy design. Findings indicate that each micromobility mode caters to different trip purposes and trip lengths of riders. While pleasure and time are identified as the biggest motivator for users, safety and pricing remain the most prominent barriers to users and non-users. Women and ethnic groups prefer to stay unimodal. Young and low-income users tend to be multimodal in their micromobility usage.   

Keywords:

• micromobility,
• e-scooter,
• dockless,
• bikeshare,
• Capital Bikeshare,
• COVID-19,
• survey,
• multimodal,
• logistic regression