Who uses shared microbility? Exploring users’ social characteristics beyond sociodemographics

Due to the current environmental and traffic-related problems of motorized individual transport (MIT), the importance of new, flexible, healthy, less pollutant, accessible mobility systems is growing. Bike and e-scooters have been shown to potentially mitigate these impacts. Therefore, we aim to explore the associated social characteristics of the users of bikes and e-scooters as shared options to identify the attributes of potential new customers and make them more competitive in the market. We explored social characteristics beyond the traditional sociodemographics, including psychographic, attitudinal, and behavioral attributes. These characteristics can help to understand deeper the interests, attitudes, and behavior of customers.Therefore, we conducted an online and offline survey in Munich, Germany with 408 respondents to evaluate who is using and who is not using bike sharing, shared e-scooters, and shared micromobility offers in general. Therefore shared micromobility user were classified as users of bike sharing and/ or shared e-scooter systems. The statistically significant parameters were then used to create classification models to predict users and non-users of shared micromobility. Results show that bike sharing is mainly used by high educated employed males with high income, who think that equity and adventure are important but not tradition. Bike sharing users feel that bikes are convenient, relaxing, and fun, which is not the case for private cars. They use bike sharing as well as public transport and other shared mobility options. Moreover, shared e-scooter users have values oriented to wealth and adventure but not tradition and they enjoy using other shared modes. Naive Bayes models helped to predict potential bike sharing users with an accuracy of 72% and shared e-scooter with 83%. The highest accuracy was scored by behavioral characteristics followed by sociodemographics and psychographic parameters.To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this would be one of the few studies on shared micromobility considering social characteristics beyond sociodemographics.