Adopting micro-mobility for urban people and freight transportation
Oil-dependent transportation is an enormous burden on the United States in varied areas. One recognized approach to addressing transportation oil-dependency and corollary emissions, and to promoting sustainability, is shared mobility. One form of shared mobility is shared micro-mobility, which is based on shared use of low-speed transportation modes such as regular and electric bicycles or scooters. The most common types of shared micro-mobility are bike-sharing and scooter sharing systems. Despite growing attention to shared micro-mobility in the literature, understanding potential users' choice of this emergent transportation mode, and thus insights into potential markets of shared micro-mobility, are noticed as a major knowledge gap. Furthermore, design frameworks for shared micro-mobility which can help authorities better reflect the benefits and costs associated with these systems is another knowledge gap. On the other hand, understanding measures and contexts in favor of micro-mobility for urban freight delivery is also a gap to bridge. This research sets out to address these discerned knowledge gaps in three major directions.First, users' stated commute mode choices, from options in a mixed fleet bike-sharing system as well as conventional alternatives, were captured through an online survey. The survey presented respondents, who were a sample of commuters to Michigan State University, with hypothetical commute scenarios introducing quantified health benefit values and emission costs of offered commute modes, as well as conventionally considered travel costs and travel context specification. Through discrete choice models developed with the collected data, travel time and dominant topography of the commute path were found to significantly affect commute mode choice. This observation indicates necessity of incorporating electrically assisted micro-mobility, namely electric bikes and scooters, to ensure success of shared micro-mobility schemes in hilly terrain, or shared micro-mobility programs anticipated to support long trips. Next, a multi-objective optimization problem is proposed, which encompasses operational and societal costs of a conventional urban transportation network incorporating a mixed fleet bike-sharing system. This framework addresses the tradeoff between authoritarian perspectives influencing transportation and user perspectives. Through a hypothetical case study and a proposed metaheuristic solution algorithm, varied analyses found pedal-assist electric bike (pedelec) and bus to be the most popular public modes. Results show that more authoritarian emphasis on public health results in in more pedelecs and less bus and e-scooter ridership in the system. On the other hand, more importance of emission in authoritative decision-making would lead to switching from bus to pedelec. It was also realized that in cases of increased inactivity-related health care expenditure or higher emission costs, the design framework would be required to provide more pedelecs to serve the demand. Lastly, a framework is formulated to provide insights into policy implications and operational insights in favor of micro-mobility for last mile freight transportation. Analyses of a hypothetical delivery instance in downtown Chicago indicate that electric cargo bikes and tricycles always serve as the optimal fleet when customers are within 3 mi of their assigned distribution center. In this case, increase in delivery sizes shifts the optimal fleet towards electric cargo tricycles. On the other hand, in case of customers lying beyond 3 mi of the distribution center, electric micro-mobility would not be an optimal choice; however, when customers are over 12 mi from the distribution center, or within 6 mi of the distribution center while pollution tax is in place, another sustainable alternative, namely electric van, constitutes the optimal delivery fleet.
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- In Collections
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Copyright Status
- In Copyright
- Material Type
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Theses
- Authors
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Shojaei, MohammadHossein
- Thesis Advisors
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Buch, Neeraj
- Committee Members
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Talluri, Srinivas (Sri)
Savolainen, Peter
Gates, Timothy
- Date Published
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2020
- Subjects
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Transportation
- Program of Study
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Civil Engineering - Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree Level
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Doctoral
- Language
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English
- Pages
- 166 pages
- ISBN
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9798672177298
- Permalink
- https://doi.org/doi:10.25335/ck2w-4k03