Sustainability Evaluation in Vehicle and Electric Scooter Interaction

The increasing deployment of shared micro-mobility services such as electric scooters (e-scooters) has transformed urban travel by enhancing travel efficiency and reducing costs. Despite the convenience of the novel urban travel option, the interaction between the e-scooter and motor vehicles adds complexity to drivers and increases safety concerns. The advent of automated driving may also lead to undesired traffic accidents. A safer and more reliable control method needs to be implemented to ensure traffic safety for vehicles and vulnerable road users such as e-scooters. To address these challenges, we introduce a sustainability evaluation metric for vehicle and e-scooter interaction (VEI) in this paper, which is designed to measure vehicle control performance and prioritize safety, efficiency, and comfort. We also present a detailed analysis of two hazardous VEI scenarios, validating the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation framework through extensive simulation experiments.