Spatiotemporal evolving patterns of bike-share mobility networks and their associations with land-use conditions before and after the COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

Recent months have seen ever-increasing levels of confirmed COVID-19 cases despite the accelerated adoption of vaccines. In the wake of the pandemic, travel patterns of individuals change as well. Understanding the changes in biking behaviors during evolving COVID-19 situations is a primary goal of this paper. It investigated usage patterns of the bike-share system in Singapore before, during, and after local authorities imposed lockdown measures. It also correlated the centrality attributes of biking mobility networks of different timestamps with land-use conditions. The results show that total ridership surprisingly climbed by 150% during the lockdown, compared with the pre-pandemic level. Biking mobility graphs became more locally clustered and polycentric as the epidemic develop. There existed a positive and sustained spatial autocorrelation between centrality measures and regions with high residential densities or levels of the land-use mixture. This study suggests that bike-share systems may serve as an alternative mode to fulfill mobility needs when public transit services are restricted due to lockdown policies. Shared-micromobility services have the potential to facilitate a disease-resilient transport system as societies may have to coexist with COVID in the future.