Design a Sustainable Micro-mobility Future: Trends and Challenges in the United States and European Union Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

Micro-mobility devices are rapidly gaining popularity since people could benefit from their efficiency, low cost and sustainability. However, people still face challenges that detain the development and full integration of these devices. In the present study, we examined people's opinions and experiences about micro-mobility in the US and the EU using social media data on Twitter. We made use of 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.