E-scooters on the ground: Lessons for re-designing urban micro-mobility

TY - CHAP

T1 - E-scooters on the ground: Lessons for re-designing urban micro-mobility

AU - Tuncer, Sylvaine

AU - Brown, Barry

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - The worldwide deployment of rental electric scooters hasgenerated new opportunities for urban mobility, but also intensified conflict over public space. This article reports on an ethnographic study of both rental and privately-owned escooters, mapping out the main problems and potentialsaround this new form of ‘micro-mobility’. While it suffers from problems of reliability and conflict, user experience is an important part of e-scooters’ appeal, an enjoyable way of ‘hacking the city’. E-scooters have a hybrid character: weaving through the city, riders can switch between riding as a pedestrian, a car or a bicycle. Building on these results, we discuss how e-scooters, ridesharing services, and theirapps could develop further, alongside the role for HCI in rethinking urban transport and vehicle design.

AB - The worldwide deployment of rental electric scooters hasgenerated new opportunities for urban mobility, but also intensified conflict over public space. This article reports on an ethnographic study of both rental and privately-owned escooters, mapping out the main problems and potentialsaround this new form of ‘micro-mobility’. While it suffers from problems of reliability and conflict, user experience is an important part of e-scooters’ appeal, an enjoyable way of ‘hacking the city’. E-scooters have a hybrid character: weaving through the city, riders can switch between riding as a pedestrian, a car or a bicycle. Building on these results, we discuss how e-scooters, ridesharing services, and theirapps could develop further, alongside the role for HCI in rethinking urban transport and vehicle design.

M3 - Conference paper

BT - Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

ER -