Vanshika Keshwani | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Analyzing the daily flows: Exploring shared micro-mobility factors in Venice

Shared micro-mobility has emerged as a key component of a sustainable urban transportation system, however, limited research exists on how environmental factors influence the mobility demand between specific origin-destination (OD) locations. This work extends research on the demand-side perspective to explore how temporal and environmental conditions shape daily shared micro-mobility flows in Venice. The study analyses repeated variation across 158,401 OD-day observations for two years in 50 spatial zones. Daily temperature, rainfall, and PM10 concentrations are linked to each OD-day observation while accounting for vehicle-pass composition and temporal patterns. Here, the unit of analysis is the connection between OD pairs. A generalised additive mixed model (GAMM) is used to represent the non-linearity of environmental relationships across seasons, providing a flexible framework for understanding how climatic conditions influence sustainable mobility behaviour. The results show a significant nonlinear association between temperature and mobility demand across seasons. High rainfall is associated with reduced demand, with larger reductions under moderate and heavy rainfall than on dry days. The relationship between PM10 and shared mobility use was season-dependent, creating an avoidance-versus-adoption mechanism rather than a monotonic association. After adjustment for environmental and temporal factors, a recurring increase in demand within the Lido Islands during August and September remained evident, highlighting a location-specific mobility pattern across two years. The study highlights the importance of environmental sensitivity in shared micro-mobility research. This work illustrates that the adoption of shared bikes and electric bikes depends not only on service availability but also on usage patterns, which are affected by external conditions.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

Beyond the Flow: A Bayesian Latent Clustering Framework for Shared Micro-mobility Users in Venice

The study on shared micro-mobility is based on trip modeling and user data. User segmentation in shared micromobility systems is traditionally studied by aggregating trip-level observations into user-specific summary measures before applying clustering techniques. Such aggregation can obscure trip-level variability and lead to ecological fallacies if results are interpreted as applying to individual records. We propose a Bayesian finite mixture model for multivariate categorical count data that clusters users directly from repeated trip-level observations while preserving the full categorical structure of individual travel behavior. This approach focuses on identifying heterogeneous mobility users from high-dimensional categorical trip behavior while accounting for uncertainty in cluster assignments. Users are the fundamental unit of analysis for exploring latent cluster patterns. The model represents each user with a product-multinomial likelihood with latent cluster membership. The methodology is illustrated using a one-year trip record of shared bikes and e-bikes from the Municipality of Venice, Italy, comprising over 220,000 trips made by more than 11,000 recurrent users. The analysis identifies eight distinct latent mobility profiles corresponding to localized, commuter-oriented, tourist-oriented, central, and inter-zonal travel behaviors. The proposed framework provides a flexible and computationally scalable approach for clustering repeated categorical observations and is readily applicable to other large-scale behavioral and transportation datasets.

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