Understanding the impacts of a public transit disruption on bicycle sharing mobility patterns: A case of Tube strike in London

摘要

The interdependencies between bicycle sharing and public transportation systems are not yet fully understood. This paper aims to measure and characterize the impacts of a public transportation disruption on bicycle sharing mobility patterns in London using data from more than 1 million bicycle trips from July 2015. The paper provides a comparative analysis of bicycle sharing spatial mobility patterns before, during, and after a disruption in public transportation system. We also apply a complex network-theoretic approach to uncover the impact of the disruption on the connectivity of the bicycle sharing usage network. We found that the disruption in public transportation in London increased the total number of bicycle sharing trips by 85% from an average 38,886 to 72,503 trips per day. The duration of trips also increased by 88% from an average 23 to 43 min. The disruption also had a considerable impact on the structure and properties of the bicycle sharing mobility network. The connectivity of the network of bicycle sharing trips increased by 88% from 0.102 to 0.187. We found that many of the observed changes are heterogeneously distributed over space suggesting that the impact of the disruption was not uniform across the network. However, the structure of communities in the bicycle sharing mobility network remained roughly invariant from day to day. The applied geo-statistical approach complemented with the complex network-driven methodology provides a better understanding of the interdependencies between the bicycle sharing and public transportation systems in London.