E-scooter use is increasing in cities worldwide thanks in part to being consistently among the most well rated modes of transport. Understanding and improving travel satisfaction is helpful for attracting new users, but also can be useful in predicting current users’ behavior in the future. To date, however, not much is known on what makes e-scooters to be associated with high travel satisfaction. Further, the few research studies on the topic have mainly used quantitative methods. This paper presents a novel qualitative methodology to investigate trip satisfaction in the context of e-scooter usage. Taking an ethno-methodological approach to public space and mobility, during June and July 2022 twelve e-scooter users were individually interviewed in the context of a real daily trip. Trips were both voice and video recorded using a microphone placed in the participant’s neck and a compact camera placed on researcher’s e-scooter handlebar, respectively. By employing a dual assessment that incorporates behavioral and discursive analysis, our findings firstly show that e-scooter travel satisfaction is contingent upon the infrastructure utilized. Our study identify three distinct types of elements that play different roles in promoting trip satisfaction: enhancing elements, controversial elements and hindering elements. Secondly, this study focusses the attention into the attributes that hinders e-scooter users’ satisfaction and shows specific strategies which riders employ in order to weave rapidly through the urban environment. Overall, our findings provide valuable travel behavior insights at microlevel and suggest that policymakers should prioritize improving infrastructure to enhance the coexistence among users of active modes, a transcendental aspect for the transition to fairer and safer cities.

Oriol Roig-Costa, Oriol Marquet, Carme Miralles-Guasch
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

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ID Abstract: 651