Shared E-Scooters: A Review of Uses, Health and Environmental Impacts, and Policy Implications of a New Micro-Mobility Service

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents a comprehensive review on shared e-scooters research covering four main aspects.
The paper is well written and structured. The review clearly presents and evaluates actual characteristics and challenges of e-scooter sharing.

Detailed comments:

• The authors should better highlight the contribution of the paper in the introduction, also referring to one of the latest review on this topic as follows:
  Sengul B.,Mostofi H., Impacts of e-micromobility on the sustainability of urban transportation—a systematic review, Applied Sciences (Switzerland), Volume 11, Issue 131 July 2021 Article number 5851
• Why did you use only Google Scholar as research articles' database? Why didn't you consider other databases like Scopus, WOS, etc?
  Please justify this choice in section 2.

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for all their valuable comments that have helped us (we hope!) to improve the initial version of the paper.

 

An effort has been made to improve the introduction by including definitions of useful terms and by better highlighting the scope of the paper. In addition, we expanded the paper with relevant sources suggested by the reviewers: these new inputs have contributed to clarifing vital concepts and to better frame the discussion over gender equality. In general, the readability of the figure was improved, and several minor errors were detected. Finally, in response to reviewer 2, we explained our choice to consider only Google Scholar as reference database in section 2.

 

Our responses are detailed below.

 

Reviewer 1

The manuscript contains several grammatical errors.
Figure 1 should be reworded to be more readable.
The table in the appendix should be included in the text.

 

Thank you for your comments and for giving us a chance to improve the paper.

As described above, the new version of the manuscript is more readable: figure 1 is of a better quality and the former appendix (now called ‘Table 1’) is included in section 2. Several minor errors were detected and corrected.

 

A definition of micro-mobility rental and sharing services and factors influencing the propensity to use could be useful in the introduction.

Therefore we recommend reading the following works
1) Campisi, T., Akgün, N., & Tesoriere, G. (2020, July). An ordered logit model to predict the willingness to rent micro mobility in shared urban streets: A case study in Palermo, Italy. In International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications (pp. 796-808). Springer, Cham.
2) Badeau, A., Carman, C., Newman, M., Steenblik, J., Carlson, M., & Madsen, T. (2019). Emergency department visits for electric scooter-related injuries after introduction of an urban rental program. The American journal of emergency medicine, 37(8), 1531-1533.

 

Following your recommendation, we added these sentences (and references) at page 2: “Micro-vehicles are often described as new sustainable travel modes with low economic and environmental impacts (Campisi et al., 2020). Notably, they can contribute to reducing travel time on congested roads, speed up short distance trips and do not require any driving license. […] Shared micro-mobility services offer people the opportunity to rent a micro-vehicle through a digital platform (Campisi et al., 2020).”

 

Another aspect that should be underlined is the gender equality related to the investigated form of mobility.
We therefore recommend reading the following works
1) Bieliński, T., & Ważna, A. (2020). Behaviour and characteristics of users of electric scooter sharing and bike sharing. Sustainability, 12(22), 9640.

2)Svanfelt, D. (2019). Some cases of gender equality and equity planning in urban planning in Malmö, or how I became a transport feminist. In Gendering Smart Mobilities (pp. 270-284). Routledge.

 

Thank you for this remark. At pages 8-9, the new version of the text presents more data on disaggregated by gender. This has also brought us to point out the importance of investigating the causes of gender inequalities in access and use of shared e-scooter services.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors took up an interesting and important scientific topic. Nowadays, there is a change in thinking about urban transport, priorities are set for individual, but ecological transport. The reviewed article fits in with this trend. This is a typical review work that summarizes some issues. Such articles are needed and I rate it positively. In my opinion, the article has the correct structure and well-chosen scientific sources. The goals were set correctly and their achievement was demonstrated. There are some editorial and linguistic errors in the article.

Good luck!

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for all their valuable comments that have helped us (we hope!) to improve the initial version of the paper.

 

An effort has been made to improve the introduction by including definitions of useful terms and by better highlighting the scope of the paper. In addition, we expanded the paper with relevant sources suggested by the reviewers: these new inputs have contributed to clarifing vital concepts and to better frame the discussion over gender equality. In general, the readability of the figure was improved, and several minor errors were detected. Finally, in response to reviewer 2, we explained our choice to consider only Google Scholar as reference database in section 2.

Reviewer 2

The paper presents a comprehensive review on shared e- scooters research covering four main aspects.
The paper is well written and structured. The review clearly presents and evaluates actual characteristics and challenges of e-scooter sharing.

 

Detailed comments:

The authors should better highlight the contribution of the paper in the introduction, also referring to one of the latest review on this topic as follows:
Sengul B.,Mostofi H., Impacts of e-micromobility on the sustainability of urban transportation—a systematic review, Applied Sciences (Switzerland), Volume 11, Issue 131 July 2021 Article number 5851

 

We worked on the introduction to better explain the need for this paper and its scope. As suggested, we referred to the paper by Sengul and Mostofi to better frame the ongoing research on electric micro-mobility.

 

Why did you use only Google Scholar as research articles' database? Why didn't you consider other databases like Scopus, WOS, etc?
Please justify this choice in section 2.

 

As explained in section 2, we added the following phrases to justify our choice of database: “Compared to other academic databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science, Google Scholar includes more resources, but it has also been criticised for including predatory journals in its index. While having to carefully assess the credibility of each source, we decided to use only Google Scholar because it allowed us to include in the corpus the most updated research studies from a broad range of disciplines.”

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript contains several grammatical errors. 
Figure 1 should be reworded to be more readable.
The table in the appendix should be included in the text 
A definition of micro-mobility rental and sharing services and factors influencing the propensity to use could be useful in the introduction. 
Therefore we recommend reading the following works 
1) Campisi, T., Akgün, N., & Tesoriere, G. (2020, July). An ordered logit model to predict the willingness to rent micro mobility in shared urban streets: A case study in Palermo, Italy. In International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications (pp. 796-808). Springer, Cham.
2) Badeau, A., Carman, C., Newman, M., Steenblik, J., Carlson, M., & Madsen, T. (2019). Emergency department visits for electric scooter-related injuries after introduction of an urban rental program. The American journal of emergency medicine, 37(8), 1531-1533.

Another aspect that should be underlined is the gender equality related to the investigated form of mobility.
We therefore recommend reading the following works 
1) Bieliński, T., & Ważna, A. (2020). Behaviour and characteristics of users of electric scooter sharing and bike sharing. Sustainability, 12(22), 9640.
2)Svanfelt, D. (2019). Some cases of gender equality and equity planning in urban planning in Malmö, or how I became a transport feminist. In Gendering Smart Mobilities (pp. 270-284). Routledge.

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for all their valuable comments that have helped us (we hope!) to improve the initial version of the paper.

 

An effort has been made to improve the introduction by including definitions of useful terms and by better highlighting the scope of the paper. In addition, we expanded the paper with relevant sources suggested by the reviewers: these new inputs have contributed to clarifing vital concepts and to better frame the discussion over gender equality. In general, the readability of the figure was improved, and several minor errors were detected. Finally, in response to reviewer 2, we explained our choice to consider only Google Scholar as reference database in section 2.

 

Reviewer 3

The authors took up an interesting and important scientific topic. Nowadays, there is a change in thinking about urban transport, priorities are set for individual, but ecological transport. The reviewed article fits in with this trend. This is a typical review work that summarizes some issues. Such articles are needed and I rate it positively. In my opinion, the article has the correct structure and well-chosen scientific sources. The goals were set correctly and their achievement was demonstrated. There are some editorial and linguistic errors in the article.

Good luck!

 

Thank you for your encouragement, and also for your comments and suggestions. As described above, we detected several minor errors and corrected them in the new version of the manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc