The digital divide in shared bicycle use: Does smart mobility technology reproduce transport inequality?

Abstract

Along with the cultivation of information and communication technology (ICT), the sharing economy platform has played a pivotal role in complementing public services. In the transportation realm, ICT-powered platforms, such as sharing bikes, car sharing, and ridesharing are transforming the traditional system into a smart multi-modal system. It is generally considered that those platforms are supplementary to the existing ones. As numerous studies identified transportation inequality in the traditional system, few studies have been conducted to reveal empirical evidence on how new forms of transportation powered by smart technology changed transport equity. To fill these knowledge gaps, this study uses the case of the shared bike system in Shenzhen, to examine whether technology reshapes distributive equity in public transport resource allocation. It utilizes a fine-grained dataset that includes shared bicycle trajectories, demographic information, road network geography, Points of Interest (POI), and housing prices to explore potential disparities in transport technology usage among communities. The finding shows that citizens with structural vulnerability face more challenges accessing public transportation facilities and are stuck in a “transport desert”. In addition, they benefit less than the wealthier from smart transportation technology. Further, we conducted interviews to investigate the institutional factors of inequality consequence, including legitimacy and support, public value, and operational capacities. This study contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence that the sharing economy, as a supplementary transport mode, further exacerbates the inequality embedded in the transport system. It calls for attention to the behavioral and institutional reasons that cause the additive effect of transport poverty as a result of the introduction of new transport modes.