Comparative Study of Business Models of European Micro-Mobility Online Services

The sharing economy is promoting sustainable usage of materials, equipment, and tools. Moreover, ride-sharing is a recognized means of sustainable mobility. Besides, in the wake of COVID-19 prevention measures, bicycles and e-scooters became encouraged transportation means to allow individual and non-crowded outdoor transit compared to other public transportation means. In this study, the authors aim to identify the core differentiating aspects of business models of European micro-mobility sharing online services (platforms). The Business Model Canvas framework proposed by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) was used as a basis to carry out the comparative analysis. The most popular European micro-mobility services were identified using the Crunchbase database, and the data on their business models was collected from secondary sources. The paper presents an analysis of four cases: Bolt (an international ride-hailing service), Nextbike (international bike-sharing service), CityBee (regional freefloating car-sharing service), and TIER Mobility (regional scooter sharing service). Future research will include a broader range of cases, interviews of the micro-mobility platform’s representatives, surveys of their users, and more detailed case analysis

Evaluating Impacts of Shared E-scooters from the Lens of Sustainable Transportation

As the popularity of shared micromobility is increasing worldwide, city governments are struggling to regulate and manage these innovative travel technologies that have several benefits, including increasing accessibility, reducing emissions, and providing affordable travel options. This dissertation evaluates the impacts of shared micromobility from the perspective of sustainable transportation to provide recommendations to decision-makers, planners, and engineers for improving these emerging travel technologies. The dissertation focuses on four core aspects of shared micromobility as follows: 1) Safety: I evaluated police crash reports of motor vehicle involving e-scooter and bicycle crashes using the most recent PBCAT crash typology to provide a comprehensive picture of demographics of riders crashing and crash characteristics, as well as mechanism of crash and crash risk, 2) Economics: I estimated the demand elasticity of e-scooters deployed, segmented by weekday type, land use, category of service providers based on fleet size using negative binomial fixed effect regression model and K-means clustering, 3) Expanding micromobility to emerging economies: Using dynamic stated preference pivoting survey and panel data mixed logit model, I assessed the intentions to adopt shared micromobility in mid-sized cities of developing countries, where these innovative technology could be the first wave of decarbonizing transportation sector, and 4) Micromobility data application: I identified five usage-clusters of shared e-scooter trips using combination of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering to propose a novel framework for using micromobility data to inform data-driven decision on broader policy goals. Based on the key findings of the research, I provide five recommendations as follows: 1) decision-makers should be proactive in incorporating new travel technologies like shared micromobility, 2) city governments should leverage shared micromobility usage and operation data to empower the decision-making process, 3) each shared micromobility vehicles should be approached uniquely for improving road safety, 4) city governments should consider regulating the number of service providers and their fleet sizes, and 5) decision-makers should prioritize expanding shared micromobility in emerging economies as one of the first efforts to the decarbonizing transportation sector

Paving the way to electrified road transport - Publicly funded research, development and demonstration projects on electric and plug-in vehicles in Europe

The electrification of road transport or electro-mobility is seen by many as a potential game-changing technology that could have a significant influence on the future cost and environmental performance of personal individual mobility as well as short distance goods transport. While there is currently a great momentum vis-à-vis electro-mobility, it is yet unclear, if its deployment is economically viable in the medium to long term. Electromobility, in its early phase of deployment, still faces significant hurdles that need to be overcome in order to reach a greater market presence. Further progress is needed to overcome some of these hurdles. The importance of regulatory and financial support to emerging environmentally friendly transport technologies has been stressed in multiple occasions. The aim of our study was to collect the information on all on-going or recently concluded research, development and demonstration projects on electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which received EU or national public funding with a budget >1mln Euro, in order to assess which of the electric drive vehicles (EDV) challenges are addressed by these projects and to identify potential gaps in the research, development, and demonstration (R, D & D) landscape in Europe. The data on R, D & D projects on electric and plug-in vehicles, which receive public funding, has been collected by means of (i) on-line research, (ii) validation of an inventory of projects at member state level through national contacts and (iii) validation of specific project information through distribution of project information templates among project coordinators. The type of information which was gathered for the database included: EDV component(s) targeted for R&D, location and scope of demo projects, short project descriptions, project budget and amount of public co-funding received, funding organisation, project coordinator,number and type of partners (i.e. utilities, OEMs, services, research institutions, local authorities), start and duration of the project. The validation process permitted the identification of additional projects which were not accounted for in the original online search. Statistical elaboration of the collected data was conducted. More than 320 R, D & D projects funded by the EU and Member states are listed and analyzed. Their total budgets add up to approximately 1.9 billion Euros. Collected data allowed also the development of an interactive emobility visualization tool, called EV-Radar, which portrays in an interactive way R&D and demonstration efforts for EDVs in Europe. It can be accessed under http://iet.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ev-radar.JRC.F.6-Energy systems evaluatio

Challenges in the electrification of transportation: electric vehicle charging behavior, micromobility for urban transportation, and cost reductions in battery technologies

This dissertation work explores three questions related to some of the challenges present in the ongoing electrification of transportation. Specifically, I target issues related to electric vehicle charging at the workplace, micromobility as a growing urban transportation mode, and the cost reductions observed in lithium-ion batteries during the last decade. Each chapter relies on novel data and quantitative methods to contribute new understanding about the direction that public and private decision makers can follow to achieve a faster and more effective transition to electric mobility. The first chapter examines two deterrence mechanisms used at a large workplace charging program implemented in the U.S. Using high frequency data, we separately identify the effects of price and behavioral incentives that encourage workplace charging norms and resource sharing. Our findings provide new evidence that group norms can play an important role in driving behavioral compliance when setting EV access policies. We also find that workplace norms are complements to dynamic pricing policies. We discuss the implications of this data discovery for the effective management of common pool resources in the context of workplace charging and space-constrained environments. The second chapter aims at determining the impact of the City of Atlanta’s nighttime shared scooters and e-bikes ban on travel times in urban areas. We use high-resolution data from Uber Movement to analyze a policy experiment in the City of Atlanta in which shared e-scooter and e-bike mobility was banned daily during evening hours of 9:00pm-4:00am with near perfect compliance. We find that the policy had an unintended effect on commuter travel times. Although the ban addressed public safety concerns about scooter use, it also resulted in unintended economic damages related to the value of time spent in traffic. The third chapter evaluates the causes of cost decrease in lithium-ion batteries during the 2012-2020 period. The analysis includes modeling the cost components per kWh of lithium-ion battery packs used in automotive commercial applications in 2012, 2015, and 2020. Mechanisms of cost reductions including R&D, learning-by-doing, and economies of scale are used to explain the changes in cost. We find that most of the cost change can be attributed to R&D investments made both by the public and private sectors.Ph.D