Ridesharing Drivers as Community Connectors: A Comparison Between Before, Amid, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Keywords: Ridesharing Drivers, Community Connectors, Spatial Extents, COVID-19, Baoding
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 16

Abstract

The sociology in transportation has been a widely studied topic since the 1980s. Nonetheless, the social network in ridesharing—comprised of drivers and passengers—its structure and the spatial characteristics associated, have not been fully investigated. In this paper, we focus on the ridesharing social network in the core urban area of Baoding, a medium-sized city on the North China Plain and study the change of the driver-passenger network between before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. With a network constructed with trip records including anonymized passenger and driver IDs in three three-month periods, we conclude the following findings. First, the social network became more fragmented with smaller communities during the pandemic, but the smaller communities were more internally connected than before the pandemic; Second, the spatial extents of the communities, identified by the distributions of the pick-up locations of the passengers in the community, significantly shrank during the pandemic. By comparing the pre- and amid-pandemic spatial distributions of two suburb-related communities, Mancheng and Qingyuan, we found that during the pandemic, the activities of the community members, when traveling to the center city, are more concentrated within the urban core, and less spread out as before the pandemic. We also discuss the implications of our results in terms of ridesharing operation, urban planning, and policy.