Empirical Study on the Development of Driving Environments for Personal Mobility Vehicles

Personal mobility vehicles (PMVs) are the potential future travel mode, typically for “first-mile and last-mile trips,” in urban areas. Accordingly, the popularity of PMVs is increasing, and the purpose of using PMVs is diversifying in South Korea. Before revision of the law concerning PMVs, the driving ways and roads for PMVs were not defined by regulations in South Korea. Therefore, most PMV users preferred to drive on sidewalks and bicycle lanes to avoid collisions with larger vehicles. Furthermore, PMVs have been involved in many accidents. To solve these problems, the government of South Korea revised the Road Traffic Act to permit PMVs to travel on bicycle lanes and considered building a new type of lane for PMVs based on the results of field experiments conducted in this study. In these experiments, the minimum turning radius with various speeds, driving performance on roads with vertical alignments, lateral placements in curved sections were examined. In addition, conflicts and inconvenience of PMVs driving on bicycle lanes were tested. In the experiments, three different types of PMVs—electric scooter (e-scooter), electric unicycle (e-unicycle), and segway—were used. Through the experiments, the feasibility of using PMVs on bicycle lanes was assessed, and the design criteria for PMV lanes were derived.