Electric scooters, carsharing per minutes or applications for the transport of people are gaining popularity, changing our way of moving around the city. We note a continuous and very rapid increase in the number of people using this type of application. It is young people who use transport applications the most. However, more and more often people who are over 55 are also convinced to them.
The survey included people using applications offering passenger transportation, car rental per minutes and electric scooters. In each of discussed categories, users of three popular applications used in Poland were examined. Users using the application in the period from January 2018 (for electric scooters from October 2018) to May 2019 were included in the analysis. User demographics and sharing between application categories were defined. In total, over 22 million users were analyzed.
The study shows that transport applications are becoming more and more popular. In the analyzed period cars rented as part of carsharing gained 2.8 times more users, transporting people nearly 2.6 times. Electric scooters between February and May this year increased the number of users by 77%. However, it should be remembered that they are tested shorter than the remaining means of transport, because they came into use in October 2018. Analysis of changes month-to-month showed that the increase is recorded by carsharing: on average 8.5% of new users of the application, with an average increase of 6.5% in the case of passenger transport.
The collected data show that men are more open to new solutions in the field of transport solutions - they accounted for 89% of people using the app to rent electric scooters, 82% of people renting cars per minute and 61.2% of people using applications that allow transport of people. The scooters were most often chosen by people under 35, which together accounted for 77.7% of all users. Most people in the age of 26-35 years (36%) and 36-45 years (24.2%) used the applications for transporting people, and cars for minutes were mostly preferred by people aged 26-35 (49.5%). People over the age of 46 chose the most popular applications offering passenger transport (28.5%). However, 11.8% of people used the carsharing in this age group and only 4.4% of them electric scooters.
The conducted analyzes also allowed to check the average distance covered by various means of transport in Warsaw. Scooters, as a typical urban means of transport, users covered an average of 1.5 kilometers. The average distance for transporting people was 5 kilometers. However, the longer the distance to travel had users of transport applications, the more willingly they chose to drive a car independently - the average distance traveled by a rented car was 6.9 kilometers.
The analyzed users included people who used more than one transport application in the last 12 months. Scooter users much more often used the passenger transport service (89.2%) than carsharing (3.4%). This may be due to the fact that scooters were most often rented by young people, and therefore may be the least confident driver. 5.9% of people using the app to transport people also rented electric scooters, and 1.4% of them also rented a car. On the other hand, 67.3% of people renting a car as part of carsharing used applications that allowed people to be transported, and 2.5% of them used electric scooters.
A constantly growing number of users of transport applications should benefit residents of large cities. Sharing cars as part of car sharing, using people or moving around the city on a scooter instead of owning a vehicle can help reduce road traffic as well as environmental pollution and need for parking spaces. Users of transport applications not only improve their own mobility, but also contribute to the improvement of the entire urban infrastructure, thus improving the living comfort of all residents.