Ride-hailing, a newly emerging mobility service that is popular worldwide, has become an efficient new mode of transportation. Nonetheless, the use and value of ride-hailing remain unclear for newly developed areas in the suburbs. We crawled through the usage data of 10 ride-hailing apps from Wuhan, China, and used Spatial Autocorrelation and Geographic Weighted Regression (GWR) to explore the role of ride-hailing in suburban new towns. We found that: (1) There is variability between urban and suburban in the use of ride-hailing, and residents in suburban new towns are more inclined to complete travel activities by ride-hailing. (2) In suburban new towns, ride-hailing has a complementary effect on public transportation, and this complementary role has differences in regional and demographic attributes. This effect is greater for high-tech industrial areas and is more in women and young people than in men and elderly people. Overall, this study confirms from a geospatial perspective that residents of suburban new towns are more likely to use ride-hailing compared to central urban areas and that ride-hailing can supplement the lack of public transportation services (PTS) in suburban areas and improve transportation services in such new towns where development and construction are not yet complete. Therefore, the integration of online taxis with traditional public transportation is expected to promote multi-modal transportation options in newly developed areas and help realize the development of suburban new towns. In addition, the study also found the effectiveness of using big data from mobile phones in studying residents’ temporal and spatial behavior.

High-speed information technology development has made virtual social networking (VSN) a social interaction trend. Studies have been carried out to investigate the spatial clustering characteristics of the locations where there is online social interaction, but they have not yet concentrated on the geographic phenomenon associated with the distribution of occupational and residential locations of citizens who use VSN. According to usage statistics gathered from China Unicom for people living in the Wuhan metropolitan development area, there are geographical characteristics for the sites of employment and residence of virtual social application (VSA) users. Compared with people who live or work in the central city, suburban citizens are more willing to conduct virtual social networking, and those who are most likely to do so are concentrated in the suburbs 20–30 km from the main city. Additionally, we used geographically weighted regressions to evaluate the relationship between the density of physical social facilities and the possibility of the usage of VSAs, revealing the influence of various conventional social conveniences on the propensity to use the VSA. Residents are more inclined to engage in VSN in places where traditional social interaction is inconvenient, particularly in suburbs, indicating that VSN is an addition to traditional social interaction. Nonetheless, neither an improvement in, nor the replacement of, VSN activities is apparent in places where conventional socializing is practical. This study identified the clustering of virtual social users’ places of employment and residence in metropolitan areas and concluded that virtual social interaction offers new social channels for people who lack access to adequate physical social facilities; that is, it complements traditional social interaction. These results can deepen the understanding of the relationship between traditional social interaction and VSN. They also offer a fresh viewpoint on facility planning for the potential future creation of a more balanced and diverse social interaction environment through the joint planning of virtual and physical social facilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic, a significant public health emergency, has underscored the criticality of jobs–housing proximity. Static statistical research, however, struggles to uncover the mechanisms underlying jobs–housing balance, providing limited guidance for urban management. This paper adopts the concept of jobs–housing dynamic balance, analyzing the trends in jobs–housing balance in the metropolitan development area of Wuhan in the early and later period of the pandemic from the perspective of individual jobs–housing migration. Using mobile phone signaling data, we identified a stable population of 161,698 residents in June 2019, June 2021, and June 2023, and calculated jobs–housing synchronization and migration impact indices across seven regions. The study finds the following: (1) there is a pronounced misalignment of jobs–housing in the new cities of Wuhan’s suburbs, with clear asynchronous in-migration and out-migration; (2) COVID-19 initially led to a unidirectional exodus of the local population for job purposes, significantly contributing to regional jobs–housing imbalance, followed by a partial rebound in the later stages; and (3) the stability of jobs–housing balance in suburban new cities lacking policy support and comprehensive urban functions is worse, primarily due to insufficient employment resilience and the out-migration of the employed population. This paper puts forward a set of recommendations for the sustainable development of suburban new cities. It offers insights into the theoretical advancement of jobs–housing balance and the dynamic, refined transformation of urban studies, enhancing urban managers’ understanding of human–place interactions and new city construction.