Exploring the Impacts of COVID-19 and Lockdown on Online Car-Hailing Travel in Shanghai

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown have caused serious impacts on people’s lives, especially on daily travel like online car-hailing. Understanding the impacts of the pandemic on online car-hailing travel is essential for sustainable urban planning and governance, especially during public health emergencies including COVID-19. However, few studies have delved into the in-depth patterns and interpretations of crowd behaviors and mobility variations resulting from the lockdown, especially from different perspectives. This study attempts to make contributions to this gap by building a three-step method from a macroscopic to mesoscopic perspective. A dataset of online car-hailing trajectories for 15 days in 2018 and 3 special days (before and after the lockdown) in 2022 was used. Detailed analyses of the overall spatiotemporal patterns, the flows between administrative districts, and the four-perspective investigation in the central urban area were conducted. The main findings include a dramatic plunge in ride counts for online car-hailing due to the lockdown and a significant change in human mobility associated with hospitals and traffic hubs. Our study provides insights into the understanding of impacts of COVID-19 and lockdown and hopefully helps with the resilience and sustainability of the city. The workflow might also be inspiring for further studies.