Evaluating an E-Scooter Pilot for Greensboro, NC

6. Conclusion

We hope the above exploration of Greensboro’s scooter data can be useful to decision makers, transportation stakeholders, and members of the general public alike. This preliminary analysis is by no means exhaustive, and we encourage anyone interested to check out the source data—an aggregated version of the trip data shared by Lime— on Stae to conduct their own analysis and continue informing this important community conversation.

7. Methodology and Sources

Data are from the Data Mobility Specification provided by Lime to the City of Greensboro and hosted on Stae. The dataset for the pilot period was downloaded from Stae to be used for analysis, first filtering for: 1) trips that took place between January 28, 2019 12:00 a.m. and January 2, 2019 12:00 a.m. and 2) scooter trips (excluding bike shares), and 3) trips longer than 100 meters. These data were further cleaned by checking for duplicates using the trip ID field, and dropping trips with fewer than three latitude or longitude coordinates (the primary reason for this threshold was to eliminate errors that showed trips straight across the City with very few coordinates, so those). Trips longer than 2.5 hours were also dropped. The data cleaning and analysis for trip date and time fields was done in R and Python. Dummy variables were made to indicate additional trip attributes such as whether a trip took place at night, on the weekend, and which day of the week. The time zone was adjusted to be on EST and additional attributes were calculated such as trip duration, and total and average trips. Data were reformatted to be grouped and summarized by day, month, and week, which were used to make the Britechart graphs. The spatial analysis was done following the SharedStreets methodology for Mobility Metrics that snaps trips to the street line, bins origins and destinations, draws ridership “flows” across the city, and calculates route frequency. We used the cleaned and re- formatted data from this process to create maps in Kepler.