Date of Award

Fall 2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Sociology

Abstract

With the onset of COVID-19, norms across the world shifted, including the way people moved in major cities. In order to conduct a comparative analysis, understanding transportation habits before COVID-19 hit cities is important. In this paper, I have focused on Divvy bikes in the city of Chicago, which are touted as a means to achieving first- and last-mile transit especially in underserved communities. I am interested in initiating the line of inquiring into who Divvy bikes served during a time when there was major fear around high transmission of COVID-19 on trains and buses due to the close proximity. Behaviorally, bicycling also become very popular after the pandemic started and it would be helpful to understand how much of those habits become apparent through Divvy usage. In order to get a snapshot before COVID-19 hit Chicago, I limited this project to quantifying 2019’s Divvy usage. I conducted research by utilizing the City of Chicago Data Portal and its closed-sourced data analysis tool for creating maps, pie charts and histograms. I narrowed down my use of Divvy data to the peak usage months of 2019. I found that the common users of Divvy bikes were young, male users belonging to affluent neighborhoods. In total, those who bought annual subscriptions initiated more trips than those who didn’t. However, non-subscribers made longer trips than subscribers. Understanding such trends grants insight into whose needs micromobility technology serves and also facilitates the process of conducting future comparative research.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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