Understanding User Behavior in Car Sharing Services Through The Lens of Mobility: Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Studies

Qualitative and quantitative user studies can reveal valuable insights into user behavior, which in turn can assist system designers in providing better user experiences. Car sharing (e.g., Zipcar and car2go), as an emerging App-based online shared mobility mode, has been increasing dramatically worldwide in recent years. However, to date, comprehensive user behavior in car sharing systems has not been investigated, which is essential for understanding their characteristics and promotion roadblocks. With the goal of understanding various facets of user behavior in online car sharing systems, in this paper, we performed a qualitative and quantitative user study by adopting a mixed-methods approach. We first designed an attitude-aware online survey with a set of qualitative questions to perceive people's subjective attitudes to online car sharing, where a total of 185 participants (68 females) completed the survey. Next, we quantitatively analyzed a one-year real-world car sharing operation dataset collected from the Chinese city Beijing, which involves over 68,000 unique users and over 587,850 usage records. We dissected this attitude-free dataset to understand the objective car sharing user behavior from different dimensions, e.g., spatial, temporal, and demographic. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative study by utilizing one-year data from other two representative Chinese city Fuzhou and Lanzhou to show if the obtained findings from Beijing data may be generalizable to other cities having different urban features, e.g., different city size, population density, wealth, and climate conditions. We also do a case study by designing a user behavior-aware usage prediction model (i.e., BeXGBoost) based on findings from our user study (e.g., unbalanced spatiotemporal usage patterns, weekly regularity, demographic-related usage difference, and low-frequency revisitation), which is the basis for car sharing service station deployment and vehicle rebalancing. Finally, we summarize a set of findings obtained from our study about the unique user behavior in online car sharing systems, combined with some detailed discussions about implications for design.