  Micro-mobility is promising to contribute to sustainable cities in the future
with its efficiency and low cost. To better design such a sustainable future,
it is necessary to understand the trends and challenges. Thus, we examined
people's opinions on micro-mobility in the US and the EU using Tweets. We used
topic modeling based on advanced natural language processing techniques and
categorized the data into seven topics: promotion and service, mobility,
technical features, acceptance, recreation, infrastructure and regulations.
Furthermore, using sentiment analysis, we investigated people's positive and
negative attitudes towards specific aspects of these topics and compared the
patterns of the trends and challenges in the US and the EU. We found that 1)
promotion and service included the majority of Twitter discussions in the both
regions, 2) the EU had more positive opinions than the US, 3) micro-mobility
devices were more widely used for utilitarian mobility and recreational
purposes in the EU than in the US, and 4) compared to the EU, people in the US
had many more concerns related to infrastructure and regulation issues. These
findings help us understand the trends and challenges and prioritize different
aspects in micro-mobility to improve their safety and experience across the two
areas for designing a more sustainable micro-mobility future.
