On a Shared Scooter Service under Ring Shape, Free-Floating and Prior Booking

Fabien Leurent (1)

1 LVMT - Laboratoire Ville, Mobilité, Transport

Shared Scooter Services (S3) have been deployed in many cities to provide public transport to individual users on a free-floating basis. The article brings about an analytical traffic model for such service under ring shape, i.e. postulating there is a ring road along which the scooters are required to park and expected to be driven, in order to avoid detours and increase vehicle productivity as well as local availability to potential users. Prior booking is postulated, supposedly on a web app. Also postulated are the homogeneity in both space and time. With respect to the ring circumference, the daily volume of potential trips, the statistical distributions of trip lengths, walk speeds an ride speeds, as well as the fleet size, operation period and transaction times, analytical formulas are provided for (i) access lengths and times, together with usage probability, (ii) ride lengths and times, (iii) vehicle occupation at the fleet level, (iv) the average number of available vehicles. Traffic equilibrium is shown to exist and to be unique or bi-valued with one fluid state versus one congested state. Its characteristic equation is recast as a fleet sizing rule according to demand volume and target access length, which stand respectively as the quantitative and qualitative service objectives.

Mots clés: shared mobility services; free-floating scooters; vehicle occupation; fleet sizing; stochastic model; traffic equilibrium; prior booking

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation; Gestion et management

Fabien Leurent. On a Shared Scooter Service under Ring Shape, Free-Floating and Prior Booking. 2021. ⟨hal-03213292⟩