Multimodality against coronavirus

How mobility platforms enrich public transport in times of crisis and beyond

Public transport is a sector highly affected by the pandemic. In our previous study Beyond the immediate crisis:The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and public transport strategy we identified integration of multimodal transport services as an important element of the strategy to cope with corona.

In this paper, we partnered with Jelbi to dive into the data to explore this hypothesis. We analyze the booking behavior in the multimodal Jelbi app and compare it to booking behavior in the purely PT apps of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) (FahrInfo and Ticket app).

Our key findings are:

• During the lockdown, booking patterns of PT and shared mobility offers on Jelbi reversed. In pre-pandemic times, around 80% of bookings were for PT services, and during the peak of the crisis, it dropped to 20%. Meanwhile, four out of five bookings were for shared mobility services.
• Customers switched to short-term PT tickets. After the lockdown, the purchase of short-term tickets recovered much faster than longer-term tickets.
• Customers returned faster to short-term PT products using multimodal platforms. Compared to other BVG apps (FahrInfo and Ticket app), bookings for short- and medium-term tickets in Jelbi recovered significantly quicker.

Read the full paper here