Scoot Over, Uber: Assessing E-Scooter Sharing’s Impact on Ride-Hailing Usage

E-scooter sharing has experienced a rapid expansion. This fast growth is accompanied by public debate, inter alia pertaining to changes in the use of other transportation modes. We study the impact of e-scooter sharing on ride-hailing. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy and exploiting a natural experiment in Chicago, we estimate the effect of e-scooter availability on the number of ride-hailing trips and investigate effect heterogeneity across a set of time- and location-based boundary conditions. While the results of our main analysis support the notion that e-scooters replace medium-distance ride-hailing trips, several robustness checks indicate that these findings should be interpreted with caution. Moreover, we find consistent evidence that e-scooters do substitute for ride-hailing in areas with fewer private vehicles, lower income, and higher unemployment rates. Our findings contribute to prior literature on mode substitution by providing nuanced insights regarding the boundary conditions under which e-scooter sharing may substitute for ride-hailing.