Micromobility: new road-user interactions in the urban landscape

Other conference contribution, 2024

Micromobility (i.e., transportation by light vehicles such as bikes and e-scooters) is increasingly common and challenges the safety, acceptance, and efficiency of today’s transport system. Especially in urban areas, the sudden proliferation of e-scooterists has created new conflicts with other road users that municipalities have had to handle fast. In several European cities, e-scooters were banned. (In the entirety of the Netherlands, they still are.)  In Sweden, e-scooters were eventually classified as bicycles, in part to reduce conflicts with pedestrians. However, as e-scooterists take over the bike lanes, new conflicts with cyclists are arising.

Understanding road-user interactions is critical to safety, acceptance, and efficiency. However, today, the interactions between micromobility users and other road users are hard to regulate, challenging established social norms in traffic. Naturalistic data (i.e., data collected in traffic as road users attend to their daily routine) can take advantage of the recent development of artificial intelligence to help us explore these interactions through the creation of critical scenarios for simulations and computational models. With these tools supporting intelligent systems and automated driving, safety, efficiency, and acceptance can be maximized for all road users, including those of new micromobility options.