  Recent technological developments have shown significant potential for
transforming urban mobility. Considering first- and last-mile travel and short
trips, the rapid adoption of dockless bike-share systems showed the possibility
of disruptive change, while simultaneously presenting new challenges, such as
fleet management or the use of public spaces. In this paper, we evaluate the
operational characteristics of a new class of shared vehicles that are being
actively developed in the industry: scooters with self-repositioning
capabilities. We do this by adapting the methodology of shareability networks
to a large-scale dataset of dockless bike-share usage, giving us estimates of
ideal fleet size under varying assumptions of fleet operations. We show that
the availability of self-repositioning capabilities can help achieve up to 10
times higher utilization of vehicles than possible in current bike-share
systems. We show that actual benefits will highly depend on the availability of
dedicated infrastructure, a key issue for scooter and bicycle use. Based on our
results, we envision that technological advances can present an opportunity to
rethink urban infrastructures and how transportation can be effectively
organized in cities.
