COVID-19 Safety Protocols: Do Commuters Prefer Public Transport after Relaxation of Safety Protocol Enforcement?

Abstract

There is a current discourse on how COVID-19 will impact future use of public services by people. At the time of writing this paper, most countries around the globe have relaxed safety protocol enforcement. This may change individual use of public transport, and policy implementations. The study mainly used Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) to examine the use of public transport ridership after the relaxation of COVID-19 safety protocol enforcement. A survey was used to collect data from 1692 respondents across Ghana partly online and partly face-to-face interviews from April 20^th, 2022 to June 5^th, 2022. The preliminary findings show that the use of private cars declined during the enforcement of safety protocols. However, after relaxation of safety protocol enforcement, the use of private transport increased more than public transport. The Relative Importance Index revealed that 'facemask wearing covering both nose and mouth', 'reduction in the number of occupants per vehicle', 'the use of alcohol-based hand sanitizer', and 'vehicles cleaned after every trip' were the most important safety protocols perceived to prevent infection of virus. However, the MLR model shows that largely, relaxation of mandatory facemask wearing, social distancing, hand hygiene, and disinfection of transport could decrease public transport ridership. These findings suggest that the COVID-19 infection anxiety has not faded and could decrease public transport ridership. To relieve the anxiety regarding virus infection through the use of public transportation, the government needs to take appropriate measures to lower the perceived risk of infection.