2.1. Two-Wheeler Sharing Service
With developments in ICT such as online social networks, GPS-enabled mobile devices, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile payments, and cloud computing, economic models have emerged that are based on sharing or collaborative consumption of resources, called the sharing economy. This new form of resource sharing allows users to access goods without the burden of fixed ownership costs and the greater environmental impact of personal ownership [
17]. The sharing economy has penetrated the markets of lodging, labor, equipment, food, and transportation and generated USD 15 billion in global revenue in 2014; this is poised to grow to USD 335 billion by 2025 [
18]. With regard to transportation, the shared vehicle market provides various service models and transportation modes that meet the diverse needs of travelers. Such shared vehicle services may ensure sustainable access to mobility in increasingly urbanized regions as transport demands continually rise. Shared service providers offer users access to services or goods through a mobile device with a community-based online platform and allow them to operate the vehicle themselves. Such an MaaS enables users to receive information, plan a trip, make reservations, and operate and pay for multiple types of mobility services.
This study focuses on shared micro-mobility, which is an innovative and sustainable transportation strategy. Shared micro-mobility provides station-based bike-sharing (a bicycle picked up from and returned to any station) and dockless bike, scooter, or e-scooter sharing (a two-wheeler picked up and returned to any location). Such services enable travelers to have access to a collection of personal transportation vehicles, which can be accessed at any time (subject to vehicle availability) and between a large number of source and destination locations [
19]. The important factors in the operation of shared vehicle services include prices, condition of the fleet, replacement of vehicles, rental/operation area, legal requirements, location of parking spaces, operational/serviceability safety, cost, types of systems, and electric vehicle power supply. Among them, price has the greatest impact. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on the operation of shared vehicle services. During the pandemic, sanitary and safety concerns inhibited travelers from using shared vehicles. The pandemic not only changed the needs of society, but also destroyed practices in the field of sustainable urban mobility built over the years. Shared vehicle service providers were forced to adapt their business practices to the new market situation and to new or improved services, such as disinfecting strategic places in vehicles. Additionally, operators were compelled to develop new pricing schemes to maintain the operation of shared vehicle services during the pandemic [
10]. From the consumer’s perspective, the reasons affecting the acceptance of shared micro-mobility services include cost savings, convenience, enjoyment [
20,
21], consumer innovativeness [
22], socio-demographic attributes, and motivations [
23]. Consumer innovativeness, an inherent trait of an individual that drives the use of innovation [
24], affects EV preferences [
25] and purchase intentions [
26]. Moreover, shared micro-mobility is presented as a green innovation, as it is promoted as an innovative and green transport mode [
24,
26]. However, many travelers opt against shared micro-mobility services because the service mainly caters to a rather select group of travelers [
21]. Shared micro-mobility users are more likely to perceive the environmental benefits of shared micro-vehicles than non-users. Consumers’ environmental knowledge is related to their transport mode choices [
27] and perceptions [
28]. Simply put, consumer innovativeness and green perceptions are significantly related to the use of shared micro-mobility [
23]. With regard to socio-demographic attributes, age, education, income, gender, and possession of a driver’s license are relevant in the decision to use shared micro-vehicles. Individuals who are young, educated, male, who have a higher income and are not in possession of a driver’s license are most likely to use shared vehicles [
29,
30,
31]. Among these, age is an important predictor of shared-vehicle adoption. With regard to motivation, the reasons for using shared e-bikes and shared e-scooters are different among travelers. Travelers use shared e-bikes to supplement their commute along with conventional shared bikes, while shared e-scooters are used for recreational purposes and enjoyment [
21,
32]. In addition, many travelers use shared e-bikes as alternatives to shared bikes and public transport, whereas they use shared e-scooters as a substitute for commuting by taxi, carpools, walking, and public transport [
32,
33,
34,
35]. This presents a new challenge, namely, how to guide travelers to use shared vehicles to replace cars. Thus, shared micro-mobility services may achieve their purpose as an environmentally friendly alternative.
Users’ travel demands may not be satisfied due to inefficiencies in vehicle-sharing systems, such as limited vehicles, a shortage of battery swap stations (BSSs), and unsolved issues in asymmetric demand across time and space. In addition, the majority of shared vehicles do not have permanent rack/dock parking spaces. Dockless sharing systems have faced many challenges, such as oversized fleets [
36,
37,
38], vandalism, vehicles cluttering sidewalks, curb-space management issues [
39], and traffic safety [
40]; they also require extra manpower to maintain, recycle, or park these vehicles at a considerably high cost. More specifically, the services provided by the shared fleet will bring a large number of vehicles and related hardware equipment to the city. A large number of vehicles in city traffic has led to numerous safety and chaos problems. Regarding road safety, for example, non-compliance with safety rules when moving with vehicles or vehicles cluttering sidewalks may cause communication barrier with other road users and affect the safety of vulnerable road users, especially pedestrians and people with disabilities. Regarding service management, for example, the vehicles are maliciously destroyed or thrown into rivers and the equipment of the vehicle is stolen [
41]. Fleets that are poorly managed and out of service may yield lots of abandoned equipment and vehicles. These may cause problems related to the ecological issue of users/sharing service operators dropping vehicles or equipment and the issue of waste poisoning the natural environment. In addition, city curbs are becoming increasingly crowded as shared vehicles, for-hire services, and delivery services compete for parking space and pick-up and drop-off locations. Attempts to add parking spaces and expand roadways raise environmental concerns and threaten the livability of cities. The provision of curb space reserved for shared vehicles is an important policy issue confronting public agencies. The key elements of shared vehicle curb space policies often include policy processes, device caps, service area limitations, designated parking areas, fees, and equipment and operational requirements. These are intended to facilitate walking as a safe, attractive, and viable travel mode and allow pedestrians to access their destinations [
3]. This highlights the importance of the development of special types of policies and regulations dedicated to people using shared vehicles or related devices and the education for shared micro-mobility to shape users’ appropriate transport behavior.
Shared vehicles introduce significant flexibility for users, but also for management complexities [
42]. To tackle these problems, electronic fence and geofence technologies have been applied to the sharing of dockless two-wheelers. These services may connect to walking or public transportation, encouraging travelers to plan longer or more flexible journeys, thereby reducing their transportation costs and potentially increasing their willingness to spend the saved funds on other forms of consumption during the journey. More specifically, the electronic fence system is part of a smart quarantine system. Such a system uses a convenient and simple mobile signal on the telecom base station instead of GPS information to locate the rough position of mobile devices. Dockless two-wheeler sharing with electronic fence technology enables users to pick up and drop off two-wheelers anywhere within a geographic area by locking the two-wheeler to a two-wheeler sharing station, existing two-wheeler parking, street furniture, a designated bike-sharing rack [
43], or lively hotels, attractions, and restaurants. Geofencing is a location-based technique that establishes a virtual boundary in an actual geographic area [
44]. A geofence app service uses GPS or Wi-Fi to trigger a pre-programmed action when a mobile device enters or exits a virtual boundary set up around a geographical location. Dockless two-wheeler sharing with geofencing may satisfy over 90% of total parking demand, reduce inappropriate parking behaviors [
45], preserve transportation flexibility, avoid potential conflicts, and allow electric two-wheelers to de-activate on sidewalks but turn on when they are in two-wheeler lanes. In summary, dockless two-wheeler sharing involves high vehicle maintenance, logistics, and system construction and management costs. Both the system maturity of shared two-wheeler services and recovery of costs must wait until the consumption and usage frequency of consumers reach a certain value, which generally takes several years.
E-scooters are the main product in the Taiwanese shared scooter market, which is mainly based on 24 h dockless services. The charging infrastructure throughout Taiwan, including gostation, ionex, and e-moving, accelerated the introduction and widespread adoption of e-scooters. For example, Gogoro had provided more than 2145 BSSs as of July 2021. Ionex is expected to provide 4000 BSSs in 2022. Ionex also provides an innovative service through dispatched personnel to deliver and swap batteries for e-scooter owners at night. These charging infrastructures can be regarded as stable, growing, and continuously innovative service items. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, personal mobility has become more popular than public mobility. Alongside outright sales, an increasing number of manufacturers are willing to shift the sales model of two-wheelers to subscription-based and/or lease-based models [
41]. Sharing-service providers offer specific and new e-scooters to the market. Each provider offers an intermediary app service to travelers to locate nearby available shared e-scooters or BSSs, to reserve and pick up an e-scooter, to unlock keyless e-scooters after scanning a QR code, to return e-scooters when a trip is completed, and to pay the usage fee. The e-scooter pick-up and drop-off locations need not be the same. The app on mobile devices plays a central role in the realization of connected mobility, such as e-scooter sharing. In other words, Taiwanese shared e-scooters are more likely to be used in a rental economy. Rental economies are focused on business between customers, while sharing economies are primarily focused on services that connect consumers. A recent report by the Taiwanese National Police Agency, Ministry of the Interior [
46], indicated that there were 362,393 road traffic accidents in 2020. Among them, scooters and e-scooters (55.08%) had the highest rate of accidents, followed by cars (29.28%), trucks (5.58%), and other vehicles. The main reason for scooter accidents was failure to yield the road appropriately (16.99%), followed by improper turning (10.63%), failure to maintain distance (9.35%), and other reasons. Scooter-related injuries are common and of varying severity, given the low rates of adherence to rider age requirements and low rates of helmet use [
14]. The scooter accident rate decreases with age. In addition, more than half of road traffic deaths occur among vulnerable road users, especially motorcyclists, cyclists, and pedestrians [
47]. Compared with the policies of shared bikes and shared e-bikes, the related policies of shared e-scooters recently introduced to the market are not yet mature. In addition, the lack of shared e-scooter regulations has resulted in issues relating to road users’ safety, relevance for transport, and environmental impact [
23]. To ensure that shared e-scooters can be operated legally and that related hazards of traffic safety can be reduced, Taiwanese traffic laws regulate age restrictions and requirements for use. Therefore, app registration must include an applicant’s ID card and driver’s license. Applicants can open an e-scooter- or scooter-sharing service if they are over 18 years of age and can open an e-bike service if they are 14 years old; scooters and e-scooters can take two passengers, while e-bikes hold one. Both riders and passengers must wear a helmet to drive on the road. For user convenience, two-wheeler sharing providers offer one or two helmets that are placed in the storage space of the scooter. A survey report on the analysis of shared e-scooter behavior among Taiwanese people indicated that 80% of the respondents knew about the sharing services but that only 22% had used it. The respondents further stated that convenience (65% of the respondents) and meeting travel demands (61%) were core motivators for using the e-scooter sharing service [
48]. This means that there is still much room for growth in the e-scooter sharing market.
2.2. Attitude, User Experience, and Behavioral Intention
This initial study explores the factors that may influence travelers’ acceptance of shared scooters. Here, acceptance is examined on the basis of the behavioral intention and UX with regard to using shared scooters and attitudes from the perspective of human–system interaction.
The impacts of shared micro-mobility can be grouped into four categories: travel behavior, environmental, land use, and social [
49]. The UTAUT model, which focuses on workplace technology acceptance [
50], has been extended into the UTAUT2, a conceptual model that explains the acceptance and use of technologies in a consumer use context [
16]. The UTAUT combines eight well-known theories, including the technology acceptance model (TAM) [
15], in relation to technology adoption. In the TAM, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are postulated as key constructs influencing the intention of a person to accept a technology. This study uses the UTAUT2 evaluation method to examine Taiwanese travelers’ adoption of and intentions toward the proposed scooter-sharing service. All the constructs for UTAUT2 are utilized to investigate the influence of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, habits, and price value on behavioral intention on shared scooter acceptance. Furthermore, personalization constructs—gender and scooter-usage experience—are assumed to moderate the effects of constructs on behavioral intention.
Taiwanese people live in a scooter-dominant environment and are accustomed to using a private scooter as one of the main forms of transport for short-distance mobility. Their long-term cognitive and cultural habits of private-scooter usage differ from those of shared scooter usage. Attitudes, considered to be a central concept of social psychology [
51], are multidimensional constructs [
52] and defined as “an enduring organization of motivational, emotional, perceptual, and cognitive processes with respect to some aspect of the individual’s world” [
53]. An attitude is a disposition toward or against a specified phenomenon, person, or thing [
54], as well as a response to a stimulus. In other words, an attitude has cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Attitudes can be inferred from individuals’ self-reports and behaviors. Strongly held attitudes may be more stable over time and better predictors of behavior than weak attitudes [
51,
55]. Generally, “people who hold positive attitudes should engage in behaviors that approach, support, or enhance the attitude object, and people who hold negative attitudes should engage in behaviors that avoid, oppose, or hinder the object” [
56]. In the field of marketing, attitude is crucial for predicting consumer intention and purchasing behavior [
57]. Attitudes may explain customers’ individual motives and purchasing habits over time [
58]. Consumer attitude is defined as “human beings’ learned predisposition for consistent responses in a favorable and unfavorable manner to a given object” [
59]. Consumer attitudes are based on the functional motives of the consumer, the amount of pleasure and pain they receive from the product, and the consumer’s perception that products and services affect their social identity [
58]. The functional motive is determined by consumers’ motives to satisfy various functions, such as the utilitarian function, value-expressive function, ego-defensive function, and knowledge function [
60]. In this study, individual self-reporting was used to observe travelers’ attitudes toward private and shared scooters.
All designed products and services evoke a wide range of emotions. Emotions are multidimensional constructs that have a range of components: affective (e.g., subjectively experienced feeling), cognitive (e.g., thoughts, achievement goals, and expectations), expressive (e.g., mimics and gestics), motivational (e.g., actional tendencies), and physiological (e.g., heart rate) [
61]. Consumers can hold positive or negative perceptions and feelings about products or services depending on the positive or negative emotions they have experienced previously. Products or services that evoke positive emotions are used more often and are more pleasurable than those that do not. Pleasure with products is defined as “the emotional, hedonic, and practical benefits associated with products” [
62]. Emotions govern the quality of interaction with a product in the user’s environment and relate directly to the appraisal of the UX. The UX is defined as “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system, or service” [
63]. UX evaluation is used to understand users’ experiences that a service or product evokes. In this study, UX evaluation focuses on short-term service usage, aesthetic quality, hedonic goals, pragmatic goals, and the overall quality of experience arising from the interaction with the shared scooter system.