Improving the Management of Operations of the E-Scooter Services in Sicily: A First Step of a Descriptive Statistical Survey

Abstract

The recent pandemic has changed the modal choices of users in the urban context, highlighting in the last two years an increase in the diffusion of electric scooters, which is not homogeneous in the Italian context. At the beginning of 2020, the first e-scooter services were launched in Sicily, with the city of Palermo leading the way. A survey was therefore conducted in Sicily involving approximately 550 regular users of e-scooter services. The descriptive statistical analysis undertaken compared three different periods pre, during and post pandemic, with particular attention to the gender and age gap and different trends in the diffusion of multimodality. The results provide not only some suggestions for the improvement of services by managers but some suggestions to local administrators for implementation of democratic and sustainable planning steps, as well.

Keywords

• e-scooter
• user clustering
• pandemic
• mobility and social aspects