The rentable neon orange electric scooters that have dotted the city's streets and sidewalks for nearly two years have become a popular form of transportation for many Pittsburgh residents, according to recently published data.
In a blog post from Move PGH, a mobility-as-a-service pilot program that launched in July 2021, analyst Tosh Chambers reported that Spin, the San Francisco-based service provider of the e-scooters, logged 480,470 trips in Pittsburgh throughout 2022. That's a figure that equates to about one trip per day for every e-scooter that's deployed in the city, Chambers said. It's also a figure that dwarfs the 80,000 trips taken on a bike in 2022 from the city's bike-share program, POGOH.
And while e-scooter ridership doesn't come close to the over 35 million trips that Pittsburgh Regional Transit serviced last year, the use of the e-scooters is proving to be a reliable form of transportation for many, Chambers said.
Move PGH conducted three separate surveys at different times over the past year on thousands of local Spin riders to learn more about how they're using the scooters and how that use factors into their other forms of transportation across the city.
The median trip length taken on an e-scooter hovers at just under a mile, and 80% of trips are under 1.5 miles long, the survey found.
About a third of all riders are students, but most are either full- or part-time employees, 42% of whom said they use the e-scooters to commute to work. About half of the riders surveyed said they have access to a car regularly, while 33% indicated they did not have access to a personal vehicle, and 18% said they have occasional access to one.
The number of people using e-scooters to connect to other public forms of transportation also has been rising, the survey found. In the December 2021 survey, about 15% of respondents said they used an e-scooter to make a connection to another form of transportation on multiple occasions. That figure doubled in the January 2023 survey where nearly 30% of respondents said they had done the same.
The full report with additional insights can be found here.
