Transportation Planning for Nashville: How Many Scooters are Optimal?

What is the ideal density of available scooters to:

1. Enable scooters to serve our transportation goals
2. Discourage scooters piling up on sidewalks
3. Keep it economically viable for companies to operate equitably in the city?

Considerations

• A major planning goal is to reduce the number of people driving alone.
• Three rides (of 3 meters or more) per day per scooter is the baseline for ridership goals.
• The original pilot program limited scooter density to 340 scooters per square mile.
• SUMD devices may be an important means of transportation in the Promise Zone to help mitigate the "last mile" problem that exists in connecting people where they live to public transportation.

Data

Six scooter datasets are available for your analysis. The polled location datasets have between 20 and 30 million rows of data each, whereas the trip datasets have just a couple hundred thousand rows each.

1. may.csv - May 2019 polled location
2. june.csv - June 2019 polled location
3. july.csv - July 2019 polled location
4. may_trip.csv - May 2019 trips
5. june_trip.csv - June 2019 trips
6. july_trip.csv - July 2019 trips

location data

pubdatetime - date and time that the device was polled
latitude - latitude location of device when polled
longitude - longitude location of device when polled
sumdid - unique identifier for the device
sumdtype - one of two types (powered or standard)
chargelevel - battery charge level of the device when polled
sumdgroup - type of device (scooter or bicycle)
costpermin - the cost per minute of device use
companyname - the company that owns the device

• Bird
• Lyft
• Gotcha
• Lime
• Spin
• Jump
• Bolt

trip data

pubTimeStamp - data and time of the trip
companyName - the company that owns the device
tripRecordNum - unique identifier for the trip
sumdID - unique identifier for the device
tripDuration - the time rounded in hours that the trip lasted
tripDistance - the distance traveled for the trip in feet
startDate - date the trip started
startTime - time the trip started
endDate - date the trip ended
endTime - time the trip ended
startLatitude - latitude location of the device at the start of the trip
startLongitude - longitude location of the device at the start of the trip
endLatitude - latitude location of the device at the end of the trip
endLongitude - longitude location of the device at the end of the trip
tripRoute - geospatial points defining the route taken
create_dt - date the data was provided to metro by the company

Shapefiles for Nashville Promise Zone
Remember that you need to keep the shapefiles together. Even though you will point to the .shp file to create polygons, that file references other files in the MDHA_Promise_Zones folder to create the geoDataFrame.

Per ordinance:

All permitted operators will first clean data before providing or reporting data to Metro. Data 
processing and cleaning shall include:  
 1. Removal of staff servicing and test trips
 2. Removal of trips below one minute
 3. Trip lengths are capped at 24 hours

Anecdotally, per metro ITS staff, some of these observations may still be in the data.