Safety and ease-of-use assessment of new electric vehicles for personal mobility in urban environment

Research Project, 2020 – 2021

The move towards a future sustainable transport system requires new transport solutions that are at the same time easy-to-use and safe. Among the new transport solutions, Electric Personal Mobility Vehicles (e-PMVs) have recently become very common in many cities around the world including Göteborg, and their popularity is growing every day. However, as e-PMVs become increasingly prevalent, crashes occurring while using these vehicles are also rising, according to the statistics reported in STRADA database. Most of these crashes are single-vehicle crashes, suggesting that stability and maneuverability are issues for e-PMVs. Besides, little information is available about the mechanisms causing the e-PMVs crashes and about public opinion on the safety concerns and ease-of-use of e-PMVs.

The above-mentioned issues associated to the safety and ease-of-use of e-PMVs cannot be tackled without assuming a holistic view and looking at the problem from different perspectives. For this reason, this project leverages on the interdisciplinary approach (crash prevention, human factors, and vehicle dynamics) and the complementary methodologies (analysis of crash causation mechanisms, field experiments, questionnaires and co-creation workshops) to study the safety needs of e-PVMs users and non-users. Notably, the main objective of the project is to provide advices that could support the design of policy instruments (e.g. infrastructure and regulations) and technological development of e-PVMs, to ensure a safe utilization of these vehicles. This objective will be achieved through three main activities: 1) analysis of e-PMVs’ crashes in STRADA database (WP1); 2) quantitative evaluation of the stability and maneuverability of e-PVMs (WP2); 3) qualitative assessment of the safety and ease-of-use of e-PVMs (WP3).