Understanding Bike-Sharing Mobility Patterns in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The outbreak of COVID-19 brings huge challenges to the bike-sharing system and even society structure. Thus, it is urgent to fully understand the impacts of pandemic on bike-sharing behavior. This paper proposed a comprehensive approach to investigate the mobility patterns influenced by the outbreak of COVID-19  with the case in Washington D.C. Multiple-source data, including bike-sharing trip information, COVID-19 information, geographic and POI information, were collected. Although the total bike-sharing trips decreased up to 80% in spatial-temporal analysis, the trips made by casual user still increased. In addition, the docking stations and trips from 2019 to 2021 were utilized to construct the bike-sharing network. The results present that major network properties, such as connectivity, clustering coefficient, and accessibility, experienced significant decrease during the pandemic. Through the detection of community with modularity method, the evolution of community structure before and after pandemic was captured. The increased long-range and long-time bike-sharing trips results in the combination between central communities and outer communities. To better understand the community structure, the POI (Point of Interests) auxiliary analysis was conducted and central community was found to have similar proportion of POIs even during the pandemic. Implications for bike-sharing management and operation policy was also addressed.