A comparison of bike-share and general mobility change in the COVID-19 pandemic

Keywords: spatiotemporal pattern; bike-share system; urban mobility
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed a number of mobility datasets in the US and resulted in a surge in the urban mobility study to address the aftermath of the outbreak and the effectiveness of executive order of stay-at-home and reopening. Some preliminary results showed people reacted differently depending on the ways of transportation and travel purposes. More interestingly, in a comparison between bike-share system (BSS) usage and general mobility in NYC within the first 6 months of the outbreak, NYC Citibike had a stronger recovery than general mobility. The unaligned mobility footprint may indicate stronger confidence from the public in using bikes than other transportation modes. This implies an extra potential of BSS in the intra-city mobility for policymakers to consider the plan of transportation systems in the post-pandemic era. The paper exploits spatiotemporal analytic tools over the spatial interaction flow from BSS and general mobility and panel regression to validate and quantify the heterogeneity of the mobility change under the COVID-19 pandemic. And panel regression with exogenous variables e.g., COVID-related indicators, executive orders, social-economic demography, weather, and temporal labels, is performed to account for the causality of the mobility heterogeneity. The results locate the hotspots with most BSS usage recovery after the initial outbreak and give a deeper understanding of the role of BSS in the post-pandemic era.