On the second day of the General Assembly of the nuMIDAS project, a (moderate) race took place in the streets of Milan where two teams composed of four people competed to reach two different points in the city from the same starting point. In a nutshell, each group had to choose a shared mode of transport (between kick-scooters and bicycles) to reach their assigned destination and upon return, the same group had to use the other mode of transport to return to the starting point.

Team A used the ‘BikeMI’ station-based bike-sharing service on the outward journey to travel from Arco della Pace, the established starting point for both groups, to the Darsena, in the city centre, cycling 3.5 km. On the return journey, on the other hand, they used the dockless shared kick-scooters.
Instead, team B, first used shared scooters to reach the ‘Lotto’ area, 3.5 km from the Arco della Pace starting point and towards the outskirts of the city. On their return, they used the ‘BikeMI’ station-based bike sharing service.

The purpose of this race was to test the sharing services and collect some KPIs providing useful feedback for the calibration of the project’s use case models implemented at the pilot site in Milan: Pre-planning of shared-mobility services and Operative area analysis for shared-mobility services. The table below shows the values of the KPIs measured during the test.

As can be seen from the table, the search time for vehicles was very low for the station-based bike sharing, while it was somewhat higher for the kick-scooters (where, in the case of team A, there were problems with some vehicles being available but with a low battery or located inside buildings). Travel time, on the other hand, averaged around 20 minutes except for team B’s bike sharing time (45 minutes).

Finally, the cost of kick-scooters was much higher than that of bicycles (the 4.5€ is the cost of a daily subscription to the service).

In conclusion, this experience certainly served to test two of the four modes of shared transport in Milan, but also allowed the teams to see different parts of the city and have fun.

P.S. For the record, Team B won!