Coming back strong? Bike-sharing in pandemic.

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The global pandemic hit many bike-sharing and e-scooter startups hard during the first two month of 2020. Lime, Bird, Uber and Lyft all announced layoffs in order to cut costs when trips had plummeted due to the pandemic. As hard as it was to keep running a shared-mobility company in the pandemic, biking and e-scooter companies were predicted to be able to “come back strong” once they survived the initial months (Washington Post). Biking and e-scooter might make people feel more safe than other public transportation, such as subways and buses. There is also some research done earlier this year, stating similar points.

 

Now 2020 is almost over, did bike-sharing come back strong as predicted?

I downloaded data of bike-sharing trips from New York CitiBike program. I chose New York because it was once the city with most cases and has been doing relatively well in recovering from the pandemic.

 


                       Data downloaded from: https://maps.dot.gov/BTS/dockedbikeshare-COVID/



The first figure is a comparison of daily bikeshare trips. The square indicates State-wide lock down period. It was clear that before the pandemic hit New York, bikeshare trips were higher than the same period in 2019. The bike share trips plummeted before the state-wide lockdown, which indicated that the overall people were willing to stay at home and protect themselves and others. However, towards to end of the lockdown, the bikeshare trips raised and even exceeded the number in 2019. The later trend was quite close. To see more clearly, I calculated the monthly average trips.

I planned to use difference-in-difference (DID) to check whether the lockdown actually worked but the prerequisite of DID is very strict and the data does not show required parallel trend before the policy. Luckily, the trend is pretty clear in the monthly figure. Since May, the bikeshare trips has been recovering rapidly. By August, trip number was very close to trip number in 2019 and even exceeded in September and October.




                      Data downloaded from: https://maps.dot.gov/BTS/dockedbikeshare-COVID/



It is worth noticing that CitiBike is a docked bike share system (BBS) and the distribution of the docks is highly overlapped with the distribution of transit line as shown in the map (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2020.100166). Considering this situation, it is possible that the “coming back strong” prediction has an even stronger premise- it is for those BBS that has enough supply to compete with subways. People are using BBS to avoid staying in a closed space with strangers.

The question is: will this comeback stay strong when the pandemic slow down? Is the period enough for people to get into a habit of using BSS?

Comments

  1. SymeonDecember 11, 2020 at 7:36 AM

    Hi Jiahui, thanks for the great map and graphs. It’s really encouraging to see that bike share in NYC has rebounded since the lockdown and that the trend of usage exceeding last year has actually continued. I’m very intrigued by the map comparing bike share access to public transit. It looks to me like the gaps in bike share access are concentrated in lower income communities of color. I wonder what is driving that.

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