What proportions of different transport modes do e-scooters replace? A meta-analysis

This paper presents a meta-analysis of stand-up e-scooters’ mode replacement, based on outcomes from one hundred studies and dataset collections. The material includes scientific publications and grey literature from Europe, North America and Oceania. We aggregate the various replaced transport modes into three groups: private motorized vehicles, public transport and active transport. The mode replacement outcomes are survey-based, primarily directed towards e-scooter users. The mode replacement question is either about what mode would have been used on the last trip if the e-scooter were not available or about general changes in trip frequency of other modes after starting using e-scooter. Site-specific characteristics are added to the characteristics of the surveys. Meta-regressions show that the proportions of replaced private motorized vehicles and public transport are primarily associated with the proportions of these modes in the cities’ transport/commuting at the outset. Active transport represents the largest proportion of modes replaced by the e-scooter, but with less explained variation with respect to site-specific characteristics. We derive quality-corrected meta-analytic estimates of e-scooter mode replacement proportions from a subset of the meta-data.