On the Sustainability of Shared Mobility Since COVID-19: from Socially Structured to Social Bubble Vanpooling

Public and shared transportation are among the sectors that have been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, as they were perceived to be risky environments for disease transmission. Given that the end of the pandemic is not certain and in order to anticipate future pandemics, attempts have been made to design public and shared mobility systems that are pandemic resilient, avoiding the social and economic burdens of disrupting transportation services. In this paper, we introduce a new ridesharing form based on a novel concept called social bubble vanpooling (SBV) which tries to provide a trade-off between minimizing the risk of exposure of riders to communicable diseases, minimizing the operational costs of ridesharing operators, and providing public health authorities with full contact-tracing capability in ridesharing-related cases, if needed. We propose a new clustering approach where riders are pooled into social bubbles composed of people who are spatio-temporally connected and have similar vulnerability levels with respect to a communicable diseases. We used individual agent-based simulation experiments based on a data sample collected from a real population of riders, and we compared the performance of the proposed SBV with trip-based and long committed ridesharing models. We found that (1) enforcing contact tracing and quarantine is more effective in controlling the spread of the disease when the bubble-based ridesharing scheme is adopted as a commuting mode and (2) it is possible to sustain transportation services without compromising the efforts to mitigate the spread of the pandemic. The proposed ridesharing model appears to be a viable solution when the mobility of individuals is subject to tight restrictions to stop the spread of a communicable airborne disease (such as COVID-19). The flexibility of the model allows maintaining transportation services with profitable operational costs while upholding the precautionary measures to fight the pandemic.