E-Scooters Have Taken Over Many College Campuses. Now Scholars Are Studying the Phenomenon.

Since e-scooters arrived on campuses across the country, colleges and universities have grappled with the good and bad they bring: crashes and injuries, parking-enforcement headaches, convenience and novelty.

Now researchers on two campuses are exploring what the scooter phenomenon says about human movement.

Virginia Tech and Michigan State University recently announced projects, in collaboration with the micro-mobility companies Spin and Gotcha, respectively, to collect and analyze real-time data on how e-scooters are used.

At Virginia Tech, 300 e-scooters from Spin, a Ford Motor Company subsidiary, were unveiled this month. Fifty feature extra equipment — accelerometers, sensors, GPS devices, and front-facing cameras — designed to give researchers a glimpse into riders’ experiences.

All the gear means that whenever the Virginia Tech team flags a safety hazard in the data — a rider falling, braking abruptly, or bailing out — the researchers can view video and location and speed information for that precise moment.

Video footage comes from a camera on the front of the scooter, meaning the rider’s identity remains private. And e-scooter riders on both campuses can opt into the study on a per-trip basis. If, at the end of a ride, they choose to share their trip data, they are asked questions about the purpose of their trip and how they would have traveled to their destination if not by scooter. All the data, representatives of Spin and Gotcha said, are anonymized.

“We’ve heard a lot of anecdotal reports about safety for scooters,” said Michael Mollenhauer, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’s Center for Technology Implementation and the study’s chief investigator. “So we’re trying to really get down into a fine-grained assessment of: What are these problems? How prevalent are they, and what can we do to help solve them?”

The insights, he said, could lead to changes in road infrastructure, safety measures, and even the design of the scooters themselves.

Mollenhauer and his team gained approval from Virginia Tech’s institutional-review board for the project, which also features 20 fixed cameras around the campus to offer views of scooter interactions with pedestrians and drivers. The project is funded in part by a federal grant through the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Crashes and Near Crashes

As e-scooters appear on more campuses and in more cities nationwide, manufacturers have lined up to pitch their products to college administrators. But safety concerns and permitting regulations have soured some on their presence.

That was the case at Michigan State University, where the unannounced arrival last fall of e-scooters from Bird and Lime left city and campus officials scrambling. The university ultimately decided to pursue an exclusive partnership with one e-scooter provider. Its fleet of Gotcha scooters will launch on Monday.

The university made a research collaboration an explicit part of its request for proposals, said Brice Nelson, associate director of Michigan State’s Business-Connect partnership office.

“We do want to do research in this field, and having a company that’s willing to provide us levels of data that you wouldn’t get otherwise, and access to their devices, and access to the business plan, and also the funding — those are all critical for the types of research that the groups want to do,” Nelson said.

Gotcha will pay Michigan State 10 percent of the user fees — minus deductions such as promotional offerings and service fees — each quarter in a revenue-sharing program. That money will be funneled into a research fund administered by Nelson, and faculty members will be able to apply for funding to pursue projects related to scooter use.

Peter T. Savolainen, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering, studies road-user behavior and traffic safety. He hopes to apply for funding to examine why and how e-scooters crash.

“Anecdotally, we have evidence that there’s a fair number of crashes or near crashes that either involve or are caused or contributed to by these e-scooters. But there’s really not a lot of data out there,” Savolainen said. “If we can see the trajectories of the scooters, maybe we can see when there are sudden changes in speed and acceleration that might be indicative of a crash or a near-crash event.”

At Virginia Tech, scholars reviewing the fixed-camera footage will examine how often e-scooter riders wear helmets, which the university provides at its campus bike hub, or engage in other distractions, such as using a cellphone, holding a bag, or trick-riding. They’ll look at whether efforts to discourage trick-riding influence riders’ behavior. And they’ll use survey data to gauge how people on the campus feel about the scooters’ presence at various points in time.

Ripe for Study

Both universities hope to study the sociology of e-scooter use, including how e-scooters are used in conjunction with, or as an alternative to, other modes of transportation. “What we’re really trying to find out there is: Is this micro-mobility solution a good way to replace a car trip? Is it linking transportation? Maybe I drive to a parking lot that’s positioned a little bit further out, [where] I have easier access to parking, and then I take a scooter the rest of the way,” Mollenhauer said.

“Inherently, there’s an engineering piece of it, there’s certainly also a social-science piece in terms of how users interact with these systems, and then in turn, what the impacts of the systems are on the users ultimately,” Savolainen said.

Teresa Qu, an associate professor in Michigan State’s urban- and regional-planning program, has used surveys to gauge campus responses to e-scooters. She plans to apply for funding to help optimize how Gotcha deploys its fleet — where and when, for instance, scooters are available around the campus. Qu hopes her work can ultimately inform policy makers on how e-scooters can contribute to sustainable transportation planning.

Representatives of Spin and Gotcha said e-scootering is ripe for academic study.

“It is a pretty new industry, and maybe one that a lot of these universities and research institutions aren’t focusing on,” said Gotcha’s founder and chief executive, Sean Flood. “This could be the catalyst to get them to focus on it.”

Megan Zahneis is a reporting fellow for The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.