How Has the Shared Bike and Subway Ridership Integration in New York City Changed in Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic?

Abstract

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world and made significant impacts on all parts of human settlement areas. Passenger journeys on public transportation have dropped significantly. This study looks at the effects of the COVID-19 on the change of bike usage-subway ridership integration between 2019 and 2020 in New York City (NYC), USA. To investigate the effect, this study uses various data sources including bike sharing data from Citi Bike, subway ridership data from Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Census data from IPUMS, land use data from Department of City Planning (DCP) and transportation-related data from U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). The Geographically Weighted Regression was employed to examine the spatiotemporal varying effects of bike-subway integration for casual users and subscribers in the shared bike system. The results show that the pandemic impacted the usage of bike-subway integration spatially and temporally. The bike-transit integration impact is largely positive and tends to be stronger when the subway stations are located farther away from CBD areas in 2019, while the bike-subway integration tend to be insignificant for a large number of stations in 2020. It also confirms that the impact of the shared bike usage on subway ridership during workdays present a larger magnitude of the coefficients than the ones on non-workdays in 2019. In contrast, the 2020 model shows that the impacts do not differ between workdays and non-workdays. These findings are rarely discussed in earlier studies. This study also used an 800-meter boundary captures the spatial impact of shared bike usage on subway ridership in NYC. However, it is barely discussed what network typologies determines such a spatial boundary of the shared bike impact area. This will be further discussed in future research.