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

Minjun Kim; Gi-Hyoug Cho

doi:10.1016/j.cities.2022.104024

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

Cities. 2022 Dec:131:104024. doi: 10.1016/j.cities.2022.104024. Epub 2022 Oct 5.

Authors

Minjun Kim¹, Gi-Hyoug Cho²

Affiliations

¹ Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, School of Urban and Environmental Engineering, Building 110, 1013-1, 50 UNIST-gil, Ulju-gun, Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea.
² Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, School of Urban and Environmental Engineering, Building 110, 1001-5, 50 UNIST-gil, Ulju-gun, Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea.

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.

Keywords: Bike-share; COVID-19; PVAR model; Public transit.