E-scooter sharing has become a popular micro-mobility for short travels in Brisbane, Australia. E-scooter sharing may satisfy short travel demand unmet by inconvenient transit services of excessive indirectness, transfer, and access-egress walking distance. However, this demand may be overlooked by e-scooter operators if not generating sufficient profits. In this paper, we identify the overlap and division of e-scooter welfare zones (serving inconvenient transit services) and profit zones in Brisbane CBD (central business district) and surrounding suburbs, in order to provide policy implications for city councils and e-scooter operators on how to reach a win-win goal.

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We dissect the Brisbane CBD and surrounding suburbs into grids of 250m*250m. Based on over 100 thousand e-scooter trip trajectory data in Brisbane, we calculate the percentage of e-scooter trips serving inconvenient transit services and the percentage of profitable e-scooter trips in each grid. An e-scooter trip is identified as serving inconvenient transit service when it is off transit operation hours or its alternative transit travel has at least 1 transfer, above average indirectness level, and longer than 1km access-egress walking distance. An e-scooter trip is identified as a profitable trip when its trip revenue is above the mean value of all e-scooter trips and its time interval between trip end and trip start is below the mean value. Based on the percentage of e-scooter trips serving inconvenient transit services and percentage of profitable e-scooter trips, we use K-means method to cluster all grids into four zones:

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(1) Welfare and profit zone, with medium to high percentage of e-scooter trips serving inconvenient transit services and medium to high percentage of profitable e-scooter trips; majorly located in the center of Brisbane.

(2) Welfare and non-profit zone, with high percentage of e-scooter trips serving inconvenient transit services but low percentage of profitable e-scooter trips; mostly located in Brisbane suburbs, especially western and eastern suburbs.

(3) Non-welfare and profit zone, with low percentage of e-scooter trips serving inconvenient transit services but high percentage of profitable e-scooter trips; mostly located in Brisbane suburbs, especially northern suburbs.

(4) Non-welfare and non-profit zone, with low percentage of e-scooter trips serving inconvenient transit services and low percentage of profitable e-scooter trips; mostly located in Brisbane suburbs, especially eastern and northern suburbs.

 

This research provides insights for city councils on how to regulate e-scooter sharing and how to trade-off between public welfare and e-scooter profits. The welfare and profit zone indicates the common interest by public and e-scooter operators, while e-scooter supply for non-welfare and non-profit zone can be reduced. For the welfare but non-profit zone, city council may use economic and regulatory tools to encourage e-scooter operators providing a certain level of non-profit services to bridge transit gaps.