Is Ride-Hailing an Effective Tool for Improving Transportation Services in Suburban New Towns in China? Evidence from Wuhan Unicom Users’ Mobile Phone Usage Big Data

Abstract

Ride-hailing, a newly emerging mobility service that is popular worldwide, has become an efficient new mode of transportation. Nonetheless, the use and value of ride-hailing remain unclear for newly developed areas in the suburbs. We crawled through the usage data of 10 ride-hailing apps from Wuhan, China, and used Spatial Autocorrelation and Geographic Weighted Regression (GWR) to explore the role of ride-hailing in suburban new towns. We found that: (1) There is variability between urban and suburban in the use of ride-hailing, and residents in suburban new towns are more inclined to complete travel activities by ride-hailing. (2) In suburban new towns, ride-hailing has a complementary effect on public transportation, and this complementary role has differences in regional and demographic attributes. This effect is greater for high-tech industrial areas and is more in women and young people than in men and elderly people. Overall, this study confirms from a geospatial perspective that residents of suburban new towns are more likely to use ride-hailing compared to central urban areas and that ride-hailing can supplement the lack of public transportation services (PTS) in suburban areas and improve transportation services in such new towns where development and construction are not yet complete. Therefore, the integration of online taxis with traditional public transportation is expected to promote multi-modal transportation options in newly developed areas and help realize the development of suburban new towns. In addition, the study also found the effectiveness of using big data from mobile phones in studying residents’ temporal and spatial behavior.