  The micromobility is shaping first- and last-mile travels in urban areas.
Recently, shared dockless electric scooters (e-scooters) have emerged as a
daily alternative to driving for short-distance commuters in large cities due
to the affordability, easy accessibility via an app, and zero emissions.
Meanwhile, e-scooters come with challenges in city management, such as traffic
rules, public safety, parking regulations, and liability issues. In this paper,
we collected and investigated 5.8 million scooter-tagged tweets and 144,197
images, generated by 2.7 million users from October 2018 to March 2020, to take
a closer look at shared e-scooters via crowdsourcing data analytics. We
profiled e-scooter usages from spatial-temporal perspectives, explored
different business roles (i.e., riders, gig workers, and ridesharing
companies), examined operation patterns (e.g., injury types, and parking
behaviors), and conducted sentiment analysis. To our best knowledge, this paper
is the first large-scale systematic study on shared e-scooters using big social
data.
