Examining the causal relationship between bike-share and public transit in response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2022

Subject Area

place - asia, place - urban, mode - bike, mode - bus, mode - subway/metro, planning - integration, policy - sustainable, ridership - modelling

Keywords

COVID-19, PVAR model, Bike-share, Public transit

Abstract

As urban transportation systems often face disruptive events, including natural and man-made disasters, the importance of resilience in the transportation sector has recently been on the rise. In particular, the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant decrease in citizens’ public transit use to avoid unnecessary physical contact with others. Accordingly, bike-share has been highlighted as one of the sustainable modes that can replace public transit and, thus, improve the overall resilience of the urban transportation systems in response to COVID-19. This study aims to examine the changes in causal relationships between bike-share and public transit throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in Seoul, Korea. We analyzed bike-share and public transit ridership from Jan 2018 to Dec 2020. We developed a weekly panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model to identify the bike-transit relationships before and after the pandemic. Our results showed that COVID-19 weakens the competitive relationships between bike-share and bus transit and modal integration between bike-share and subway transit. This study also found that bus and subway transit were more competitive with each other after the outbreak of COVID-19. The study’s findings suggest that bike-share can increase the overall resilience of the urban transportation system during the pandemic situation, particularly for those who rely on public transit for their mobility.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

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