Full Citation

Title: Micromobility and Built Environment: Making It Accessible, Affordable, and Safe for Everyone

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: This dissertation aims to address three research questions that give us a deeper understanding of new shared micromobility to encourage accessibility, affordability, and safety for underserved communities. Firstly, this dissertation reveals the causal relationship between shared dockless escooters and first-and last-mile (FLM) connectivity to public rail transit after controlling confounding built environment and socioeconomic variables using a quasi-experimental design: propensity score matching and difference-in-difference regression. As a result, increasing the intensity of e-scooter trips around rail stations can increase the connected use of rail transit services. Planning and transportation agencies can encourage active use of e-scooters through street design guidelines, or transit-oriented development with high density, mixed land use, and pedestrian-friendly environments, thereby promoting better integration of shared dockless e-scooter programs with built environment. Secondly, this dissertation explores the nonlinear relationship between shared dockless e-scooters and housing + transportation (h+t) affordability of neighborhoods using random forest modeling. Our results suggested that economic variables have greater explanatory power than sociodemographic variables. In the partial dependency plots, neighborhoods spending more than 35% of their income on housing costs had higher e-scooter usage. On the other hand, when transportation costs took up more than 9% of household income, the e-scooter trip density decreased. Thus, higher e-scooter use in areas where h+t is lower, like in compact areas where users have more discretionary income due to lower h+t costs. Users presumably have more discretionary income in these areas, and e-scooters for some users may be a form of recreation rather than transportation, competing with other goods and services for consumer dollars. Lastly, this dissertation addresses complex relationships between the built environment, risk, exposure, and micromobility crashes. The findings suggest that pedestrian volume significantly impacts micromobility crash rates depending on the average vehicle speeds of transportation analysis zone (TAZ). When vehicle speed was higher, pedestrian volume was positively associated with crash rates, whereas the opposite association was found in TAZ with lower vehicle speed. It implies that safety-in numbers are effective and conditional on lower vehicle speed. Overall, this dissertation contributes to understanding shared dockless e-scooter travel behavior and its implications for FLM, affordability, and safety.

Url: https://www-proquest-com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/docview/2877259579?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true

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Authors: Yang, Wookjae

Institution: University of Utah

Department: City and Metropolitan Plannings

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Pages: 1-99

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Land Use/Urban Organization, Methodology and Data Collection

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