Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives

In this work, we propose a data-driven method to use proven clustering algorithms for establishing shared electric scooter (SES) parking locations and assessing their anticipated utilization. We first address the problem of finding locations for a given number of parking facilities, based pur0ely on demand, that maximize the number of trips that would likely be parked at these facilities. We then formulate an enhanced version of the SES parking facility problem in which exogenous environmental factors are considered, such as sidewalk width. Parking SESs on narrow sidewalks raises accessibility concerns for other users of this infrastructure and capturing these trips in dedicated parking facilities is a valid priority to trade off with pure demand maximization. These methods are demonstrated in two case studies, which use a large SES dataset from Nashville, Tennessee, USA. We provide empirical results on how many facilities are needed to serve demand of SESs and necessary capacity allocation of the facilities. When the methodology considers sidewalk width in facility placement, the refined parking locations can address 300% more problematic trips parked along narrow sidewalks, with only a nominal sacrifice, around 13%, in the overall number of trips served.