Disruptions as catalysts to sustainability? Long-term responses in bike-sharing demand to disruptions during the pandemic

Understanding the implications of large-scale, prolonged disruptions on travel demand is important for informing the future design of resilient, efficient, and sustainable transport systems. Major disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic provide an opportunity to shed light on this issue. While contemporaneous responses in such demand amidst these disruptions have been well documented, insights into long-term post-disruption responses remain limited. This research gap challenges the development of a transport policy agenda capable of adapting to and mitigating the enduring consequences of disruptions. This research contributes to this topic by scrutinising long-term responses in bike-sharing demand to major disruptions during the pandemic. It investigates (1) the characteristics of these long-term responses; (2) the discrepancies between the long-term and contemporaneous responses to these disruptions; and (3) the associations of the long-term responses with docking stations’ contextual characteristics. We use 57-month bike-sharing demand data from London, spanning the pre-, amidst-, and post-disruption phases. Utilising pre-disruption data as a baseline and data in subsequent phases as comparisons, we apply Bayesian time-series models for counterfactual analysis to assess bike-sharing demand’s responses.