Evaluating an E-Scooter Pilot for Greensboro, NC

1. Introduction: Scooter Origins

In November of 2018, the Greensboro City Council approved an ordinance and permit process to allow for the operation of shared e-scooter programs in the public right of way. Shared scooter operators received approval to deploy up to 200 scooters during a short-term pilot to test the long-term viability of this new form of micromobility. Bike and e-scooter company, Lime , was the only operator to participate, deploying vehicles throughout the pilot period: January 28th to August 1st 2019.

This report gives an initial look into the pilot by exploring data that Lime was required by permit to provide to the City via an MDS-compliant API ( Mobility Data Specification ).

In order to ingest and analyze this data, the City of Greensboro enlisted the support of Stae , a software platform that empowers cities to manage real-time, civic data. Stae served as the City’s data platform throughout the pilot, helping the City access, monitor, map, and analyze scooter data on a day-to-day basis, as well as to perform the analysis and findings shared here. Together, we began to explore trends and insights from this scooter data by asking simple questions such as: What were the most traveled routes? What time of day did people scoot? Was scooter usage higher on weekdays or weekends? Eight months of data can be overwhelming. We hope that through these simple maps and graphs, key stakeholders from City Hall and members of the public alike will be inspired to take an empirical approach to important discussions about the next steps for the scooter program. We created the following data visualizations using MDS and the Stae Mobility Data Manager platform.