Challenges in the electrification of transportation: electric vehicle charging behavior, micromobility for urban transportation, and cost reductions in battery technologies

Abstract

This dissertation work explores three questions related to some of the challenges present in the ongoing electrification of transportation. Specifically, I target issues related to electric vehicle charging at the workplace, micromobility as a growing urban transportation mode, and the cost reductions observed in lithium-ion batteries during the last decade. Each chapter relies on novel data and quantitative methods to contribute new understanding about the direction that public and private decision makers can follow to achieve a faster and more effective transition to electric mobility.

The first chapter examines two deterrence mechanisms used at a large workplace charging program implemented in the U.S. Using high frequency data, we separately identify the effects of price and behavioral incentives that encourage workplace charging norms and resource sharing. Our findings provide new evidence that group norms can play an important role in driving behavioral compliance when setting EV access policies. We also find that workplace norms are complements to dynamic pricing policies. We discuss the implications of this data discovery for the effective management of common pool resources in the context of workplace charging and space-constrained environments.

The second chapter aims at determining the impact of the City of Atlanta’s nighttime shared scooters and e-bikes ban on travel times in urban areas. We use high-resolution data from Uber Movement to analyze a policy experiment in the City of Atlanta in which shared e-scooter and e-bike mobility was banned daily during evening hours of 9:00pm-4:00am with near perfect compliance. We find that the policy had an unintended effect on commuter travel times. Although the ban addressed public safety concerns about scooter use, it also resulted in unintended economic damages related to the value of time spent in traffic.

The third chapter evaluates the causes of cost decrease in lithium-ion batteries during the 2012-2020 period. The analysis includes modeling the cost components per kWh of lithium-ion battery packs used in automotive commercial applications in 2012, 2015, and 2020. Mechanisms of cost reductions including R&D, learning-by-doing, and economies of scale are used to explain the changes in cost. We find that most of the cost change can be attributed to R&D investments made both by the public and private sectors.