Understanding and comparing the public transit and ride-hailing ridership change in Chicago during COVID-19 via statistical and survey approaches

Changes in transportation ridership during COVID-19 indicate several important factors, including the need to serve changing spatial and temporal patterns of travel demand, and the equity implications of pandemic impacts across lines of race, age, and income. Various papers have sought to understand changes in transportation ridership during the pandemic, but have been focused solely on a single mode (often public transit), and have been limited to a single data source for analysis. This paper examines and compares the changes in public transit and ride-hailing ridership in Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic, investigating ‘who’ stopped using transit and Transportation Network Company (TNC) services from a demographic perspective, how remote work relates to changes in transit use, how pandemic ridership changes are clustered in space, and what factors will impact a return to regular travel. Analysis integrates datasets spanning over a year of the pandemic, including aggregate spatial ridership counts that are used to form spatial regression models, and a six-month panel survey that received input from approximately 1,000 Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) riders. Continued transit use is correlated with areas with a greater percentage of African American and Spanish-speaking people, and with a greater percentage of pre-pandemic bus riders and off-peak riders, while peak-period, frequent, and rail system riders stopped using transit to the greatest extent. Areas with a higher share of young, college-educated people, and those with a high walkability metric, generally saw the greatest decreases in TNC use, reflecting a potential loss of trips for those who used TNCs to access social events or employment, and moved to virtual work during COVID-19. Our findings can help to guide transportation service providers and policy-makers in planning service for public safety and a changing demand profile, advancing equity of access to mobility, and anticipating long-term mobility patterns.