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As cities adopt sustainable mobility solutions, electric scooters (e-scooters) offer both challenges and opportunities for public transportation systems. This study, the first in Latin America, examines the effects of e-scooters on public transport demand in Santiago, Chile, focusing on two scenarios: "generation" of trips (trips starting in study zones) and "attraction" of trips (trips ending in study zones). A negative binomial regression model was applied to data from public transport smart cards and e-scooter GPS. The methodology included urban area clustering and a differences-in-differences approach. The findings reveal significant regional differences: in the Central Region, public transport trips decreased by 21.38% in the generation scenario, while bus trips increased by 76.39%. In the Intermediate Region, metro trips increased by 70.05%, and in the Peripheral Region, bus trips increased by 84.64%. These results suggest that e-scooters reduce public transport usage in highly accessible areas but increase it in less accessible regions., Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures. Submitted to Transport Research Part D

Work-related traffic incidents significantly impact urban mobility and productivity. This study analyzes a decade of work-related traffic incident data (2012--2021) in Santiago, Chile, using records from a major social insurance company. We explore temporal, spatial, and demographic patterns in these incidents in urban and rural areas. We also evaluate the impact of a 2018 urban speed limit reduction law on incident injury severity. Using negative binomial regression, we assess how various factors, including the speed limit change, affect injury severity measured by prescribed medical leave days. Our analysis reveals distinct incident occurrence and severity patterns across different times, locations, and demographic groups. We find that motorcycles and cycles are associated with more severe injuries, with marginal effects of 26.94 and 13.06 additional days of medical leave, respectively, compared to motorized vehicles. Female workers tend to have less severe injuries, with an average of 7.57 fewer days of medical leave. Age is also a significant factor, with each year associated with 0.57 additional days of leave. Notably, the urban speed limit reduction is associated with a decrease of 4.26 days in prescribed medical leave for incidents in urban areas, suggesting that lower speed limits contribute to reduced injury severity in work-related traffic incidents. Our results provide insights for urban planning, transportation policy, and workplace safety initiatives, highlighting the potential benefits of speed management in urban areas for improving road safety and minimizing the economic impact of work-related incidents., Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures

The COVID-19 outbreak implied many changes in the daily life of most of the world's population for a long time, prompting severe restrictions on sociality. The Behavioral Immune System (BIS) suggests that when facing pathogens, a psychological mechanism would be activated that, among other things, would generate an increase in prejudice and discrimination towards marginalized groups, including immigrants. This study aimed to test if people tend to enhance their rejection of minorities and foreign groups under the threat of contagious diseases, using the users' attitudes towards migrants in Twitter data from Chile, for pre-pandemic and pandemic contexts. Our results only partially support the BIS hypothesis, since threatened users increased their tweet production in the pandemic period, compared to empathetic users, but the latter grew in number and also increased the reach of their tweets between the two periods. We also found differences in the use of language between these types of users. Alternative explanations for these results may be context-dependent., Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, under review