Analysis of spatiotemporal mobility of shared-bike usage during COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing

Abstract

The entire world is experiencing a crisis in public health and the economy owing to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Understanding human mobility during the pandemic helps to formulate interventional strategies and resilient measures. The widely used bike-sharing system (BSS) could illustrate the activities of urban dwellers over time and space in big cities; however, it is rarely reported in epidemiological research. In this article, we analyze the BSS data to examine the human mobility of shared-bike users, detecting the key time nodes of different pandemic stages and demonstrating the evolution of human mobility owing to the onset of the COVID-19 threat and administrative restrictions. We assessed the net impact of the pandemic using the results of co-location analysis between shared-bike usage and points of interest. Our results demonstrate that the pandemic has reduced overall bike usage by 64.8%; however, a subsequent average increase (15.9%) in shared-bike usage has been observed, suggesting partial recovery of productive and residential activities, although far from normal times. These findings could be a reference for epidemiological research, and thereby aid policymaking in the context of the current COVID-19 outbreak and other epidemic events at the city scale.