How E-Scooters Impact Shared Mobility and Consumer Safety

Publication Date

10-23-2025

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Journal of Marketing

DOI

10.1177/00222429251393987

Abstract

New forms of shared micromobility services, such as e-scooters, are growing rapidly across cities. However, their impact beyond the retail and restaurant sectors is less understood in the marketing literature. The authors examine how the entry of e-scooters impacts other incumbent shared mobility services (i.e., ride-sharing and bike-sharing) and consumer safety (i.e., crimes) using data on the entry of e-scooters in parts of Chicago in 2019 and a generalized synthetic control approach. The results show that the entry of e-scooters increases the number of short rideshare trips by 15.72% but decreases the number of bikeshare trips by 7.62%. The effects are consistent with a category expansion mechanism for ride-sharing and a category cannibalization mechanism for bike-sharing. The authors also find that the entry of e-scooters increases the number of crimes (e.g., vehicle break-ins) by 17.94%, mostly due to street and vehicle crimes. The effects of e-scooters are heterogeneous by the age and racial composition of a neighborhood. Overall, e-scooters contribute about $8.1 million in ride-sharing revenues, but they also have an unintended negative environmental effect amounting to over 800 metric tons of carbon emissions per year. This research offers an app companion for stakeholders.

Keywords

bike-sharing, consumer safety, difference-in-differences, e-scooter, generalized synthetic control, quasi-experiment, ride-sharing, sharing economy

Department

Marketing and Business Analytics

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