Does ride-hailing moderate the relationship between public transit preference and transit use?

It has been widely accepted that people who have a strong preference for public transit tend to use public transit more frequently. However, the growing popularity of ride-hailing systems, by offering door-to-door mobility services, may be correlated with a decline in people’s reliance on public transit. Therefore, a critical question arises: Does ride-hailing moderate the positive relationship between public transit preference and transit use? To empirically investigate this question, this study uses data from an online questionnaire survey covering 81 Chinese cities, yielding a total of 7,205 valid participants. The results indicate that a high preference for public transit is strongly correlated with frequent public transit trips (including both bus and metro). However, with ride-hailing frequency increasing, this positive association becomes significantly less pronounced. These findings reshape the traditional understanding of the relationship between public transit preference and public transit use, indicating that the popularization of ride-hailing is potentially linked to lower loyalty among pro-transit users. This poses a new challenge to the sustainability transition of urban transportation systems and calls for strategic policies to address it.