Nitesh Shah, a transportation engineering doctoral student studying under CEE Professor Chris Cherry, recently earned second place from the Southern District Institute of Transportation Engineers (SDITE) for his research on electric scooters (e-scooters).
He won the 2020 Outstanding Student Paper Award in the graduate student category for the paper entitled “Why do people take e-scooter trips? Big Data and Unsupervised Machine Learning Insights on Temporal and Spatial Usage Patterns.” The award comes with a $150 prize.
The research, which also won him a Best Paper Award at the Tennessee Section of Institute for Transportation Engineers (TSITE) in April, looks at the patterns of e-scooter usage as they are becoming one of the most popular micromobility options in the United States.
The findings of this study can help city administrations, planners, and micromobility operators to understand when and where people are using e-scooters. Such knowledge can guide them in making data-driven decisions regarding safety, sustainability, and mode substitution of emerging micromobility.