Härtill 2 uppsatser

Lic. (sammanfattning) Göteborg : Chalmers tekniska högskola, 2025

The rapid increase in e-scooter popularity has brought an increase in crashes resulting in injuries and fatalities, creating growing concern about e-scooter safety. The aim of this thesis is to investigate which limitations in human behaviour, vehicle design, riding environment, and infrastructure contribute to e-scooter crashes. The two included studies address the limitations of conventional crash databases, using naturalistic riding data from instrumented rental e-scooters in an urban environment. The high-frequency kinematic and video data elucidated behaviours and factors contributing to safety-critical events (SCEs: crashes and near-crashes). The studies focused on two topics: identifying the key risk factors for e-scooters and evaluating the impact of methodological choices on the risk assessment. This unprecedented research used kinematic triggers to identify trips with at least one SCE, which were then verified through manual review of video footage. The identified events were labelled and relevant variables related to the rider, infrastructure, environment, and trip characteristics were extracted. The results highlight the need to adapt definitions of crashes and near-crashes to reflect the unique characteristics of e-scooters (and perhaps other forms of micromobility). The results also show the need to prioritise safety interventions based on both crash risk and crash prevalence to optimise their impact on safety.