Can ride-hailing alleviate urban mobility inequity for residents living in low-income communities? Evidence from Chengdu, China

Keywords: ride-hailing, mobility, distance decay effect, low-income communities, inequities
Abstract Type: Virtual Poster Abstract

Abstract

The inequality-mobility nexus of emerging transport services has attracted increasing attention. Especially, there are intensive debates on whether ride-hailing services could be equally accessed by different population segments or residents living in different communities. Some studies attempt to examine the mobility changes derived from ride-hailing in low-income neighborhoods. A classical statistical measure of mobility patterns is the distance distribution. However, few studies have explored this issue from the perspective of distance decay effect. This paper aims to reveal the differences in distance decay of ride-hailing in different areas of the city. The distance decay effect is locally perturbed by a series of factors. This study intends to frame a geographically weighted regression model to examine whether income is the determinant of the inter-community variations on ride-hailing travels. Results indicate that the distribution of human’s intra-urban ride-hailing travel in general follows the truncated powerlaw. However, in local, the exponents vary from gird to grid and indicate the impact of many factors. The preliminary results indicate that ride-hailing services in Chengdu may not enhance daily travel mobility for residents living in low-income communities. The policy implication of this study would provide insights into alleviating the travel inequity of ride-hailing by smart public policy design.