Towards more sustainable urban transportation for NetZero cities: Assessing air quality and risk for e-scooter users using sensor fusion and artificial intelligence

Abstract

The need to develop smart and NetZero cities and reduce carbon emission is driving innovation in cities around the world to use electric transportation technologies. Among that the use of e-scooters. Nottingham (UK) is one of the cities that has an e-scooter scheme where people could rent e-scooters to travel around the city. However, in the current situation, to ensure pedestrian safety e-scooters need to be ridden on the road amongst cars, most of them are fossil fuelled. This gives rise to two potential risks for e-scooter users: the air quality that they breathe and the physical risk of being near cars, where drivers may not be familiar with seeing e-scooters on the road. This paper uses a mixed methods approach by conducting surveys to drivers and e-scooter users, jointly with an experimental work to monitor the journey of e-scooter users combining air quality, GPS data and 360 degrees camera footage to assess the risk to e-scooter riders using sensor fusion and artificial intelligence. The results indicate that the suggested novel methodology is effective in understanding the current limitations and the potential air quality and physical risks to e-scooter users.