EXPRESS: How E-Scooters Impact Shared Mobility and Consumer Safety

New forms of shared micromobility services, such as electric scooters (i.e., e-scooters) are growing rapidly across cities. However, their impact beyond the retail and restaurant sectors is less understood in the marketing literature. We examine how the entry of e-scooters impacts other incumbent shared mobility services (i.e., ridesharing and bikesharing) and consumer safety (i.e., crimes) using data on the entry of e-scooters in parts of Chicago in 2019 and a generalized synthetic control approach. We propose and test novel mechanisms based on e-scooters’ effects on overall demand and modal relationships (i.e., complementarity vs. substitution) with ridesharing and bikesharing. The results from our analysis show that the entry of e-scooters increases the number of short rideshare trips by 15.72%, but decreases the number of bikeshare trips by 7.62%. The effects are consistent with a category expansion mechanism for ridesharing (i.e., increase in the demand for trips met by complementarities between e-scooters and ridesharing) and a category cannibalization mechanism for bikesharing (i.e., increase in the demand for trips met by substitution of bikesharing by e-scooters). Interestingly, we also find that the entry of e-scooters increases the number of crimes (e.g., vehicle break-ins) by 17.94%, mostly due to street and vehicle crimes. The effects of e-scooters are heterogeneous by the age and racial composition of a neighborhood. Overall, e-scooters contribute about $8.1 million in ridesharing revenues but they also have an unintended negative environmental effect amounting to over 800 metric ton carbon emissions per year. Our research offers an app companion for stakeholders.