Exploring impacts of COVID-19 on city-wide taxi and ride-sourcing markets: Evidence from Ningbo, China

Exploring spatio-temporal impact of COVID-19 on citywide taxi demand: A case study of New York City

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought dramatic changes in our daily life, especially in human mobility since 2020. As the major component of the integrated transport system in most cities, taxi trips represent a large portion of residents' urban mobility. Thus, quantifying the impacts of COVID-19 on city-wide taxi demand can help to better understand the reshaped travel patterns, optimize public-transport operational strategies, and gather emergency experience under the pressure of this pandemic. To achieve the objectives, the Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) model is used to analyze the impact mechanism of COVID-19 on taxi demand in this study. City-wide taxi trip data from August 1st, 2020 to July 31st, 2021 in New York City was collected as model's dependent variables, and COVID-19 case rate, population density, road density, station density, points of interest (POI) were selected as the independent variables. By comparing GTWR model with traditional ordinary least square (OLS) model, temporally weighted regression model (TWR) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) model, a significantly better goodness of fit on spatial-temporal taxi data was observed for GTWR. Furthermore, temporal analysis, spatial analysis and the epidemic marginal effect were developed on the GTWR model results. The conclusions of this research are shown as follows: (1) The virus and health care become the major restraining and stimulative factors of taxi demand in post epidemic era. (2) The restraining level of COVID-19 on taxi demand is higher in cold weather. (3) The restraining level of COVID-19 on taxi demand is severely influenced by the curfew policy. (4) Although this virus decreases taxi demand in most of time and places, it can still increase taxi demand in some specific time and places. (5) Along with COVID-19, sports facilities and tourism become obstacles on increasing taxi demand in most of places and time in post epidemic era. The findings can provide useful insights for policymakers and stakeholders to improve the taxi operational efficiency during the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Advance Monitoring of COVID-19 Incidence Based on Taxi Mobility: The Infection Ratio Measure

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on various aspects of our lives, affecting personal, occupational, economic, and social spheres. Much has been learned since the early 2020s, which will be very useful when the next pandemic emerges. In general, mobility and virus spread are strongly related. However, most studies analyze the impact of COVID-19 on mobility, but not much research has focused on analyzing the impact of mobility on virus transmission, especially from the point of view of monitoring virus incidence, which is extremely important for making sound decisions to control any epidemiological threat to public health. As a result of a thorough analysis of COVID-19 and mobility data, this work introduces a novel measure, the Infection Ratio (IR), which is not sensitive to underestimation of positive cases and is very effective in monitoring the pandemic's upward or downward evolution when it appears to be more stable, thus anticipating possible risk situations. For a bounded spatial context, we can infer that there is a significant threshold in the restriction of mobility that determines a change of trend in the number of infections that, if maintained for a minimum period, would notably increase the chances of keeping the spread of disease under control. Results show that IR is a reliable indicator of the intensity of infection, and an effective measure for early monitoring and decision making in smart cities.

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on ridesourcing services differed between small towns and large cities

To curb the spread of the ongoing 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19), authorities have adopted several non-pharmaceutical (NPIs) and pharmaceutical interventions, which significantly affected our daily activities and mobility patterns. However, it is still unclear how severity of NPIs, COVID-19-related variables, and vaccination rates have affected demand for ridesourcing services, and whether these effects vary across small towns and large cities. We analyzed over 220 million ride requests in the City of Chicago (population: 2.7 million), Illinois, and 52 thousand in the Town of Innisfil (population: 37 thousand), Ontario, to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the ridesourcing demand in the two locations. Overall, the pandemic resulted in fewer trips in areas with higher proportions of seniors and more trips to parks and green spaces. Ridesourcing demand was adversely affected by the stringency index and COVID-19-related variables, and positively affected by vaccination rates. However, compared to Innisfil, ridesourcing services in Chicago experienced higher reductions in demand, were more affected by the number of hospitalizations and deaths, were less impacted by vaccination rates, and had lower recovery rates.