Assessing e-scooter rider safety perceptions in shared spaces: Evidence from a video experiment in Sweden.

Abstract

Shared spaces prioritise the role of micromobility in urban environments by separating vulnerable road users from motorised vehicles, aiming to enhance both actual and perceived safety. However, the presence of various transport modes, such as pedestrians, cyclists and e-scooters, with differing navigation behaviours, increases the heterogeneity of these spaces and impacts the perception of safety. Despite the increasing use of e-scooters, the safety perceptions of e-scooter riders remain largely underexplored in the literature. In response, I conducted an online video experiment and polled 920 e-scooter users in Sweden to assess their safety perceptions when interacting exclusively with cyclists. I collected data on socio-demographics, travel habits, crash history, and responses to hypothetical video scenarios depicting interactions in shared spaces, where e-scooter riders overtake or meet cyclists. I then employed a random effect latent class ordered logit model to quantify the determinants of e-scooter riders' safety perceptions. The findings indicate that women feel less safe in shared spaces compared to men. Additionally, the direction of encounters significantly affected young adults, who perceived meeting other users as more unsafe than overtaking them. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in safety perceptions, emphasise the significant role of demographic variables in understanding users' safety perceptions, and reinforce the need for inclusive design of shared spaces for all road users.