Disparities in ridesourcing demand for mobility resilience: A multilevel analysis of neighborhood effects in Chicago, Illinois

Mobility resilience refers to the ability of individuals to complete their desired travel despite unplanned disruptions to the transportation system. The potential of new on-demand mobility options, such as ridesourcing services, to fill unpredicted gaps in mobility is an underexplored source of adaptive capacity. Applying a natural experiment approach to newly released ridesourcing data, we examine variation in the gap-filling role of on-demand mobility during sudden shocks to a transportation system by analyzing the change in use of ridesourcing during unexpected rail transit service disruptions across the racially and economically diverse city of Chicago. Using a multilevel mixed model, we control not only for the immediate station attributes where the disruption occurs, but also for the broader context of the community area and city quadrant in a three-level structure. Thereby the unobserved variability across neighborhoods can be associated with differences in factors such as transit ridership, or socio-economic status of residents, in addition to controlling for station level effects. Our findings reveal that individuals use ridesourcing as a gap-filling mechanism during rail transit disruptions, but there is strong variation across situational and locational contexts. Specifically, our results show larger increases in transit disruption responsive ridesourcing during weekdays, nonholidays, and more severe disruptions, as well as in community areas that have higher percentages of White residents and transit commuters, and on the more affluent northside of the city. These findings point to new insights with far-reaching implications on how ridesourcing complements existing transport networks by providing added capacity during disruptions but does not appear to bring equitable gap-filling benefits to low-income communities of color that typically have more limited mobility options.