Social inequality and the changing patterns of travel in the pandemic and post-pandemic era

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on mobility patterns resulting in a significant literature investigating travel behaviours over the course of the pandemic. Missing from much existing work on pandemic mobility is an explicit handling of the time-of-day of travel, which in previous literature has been shown to be an important factor in understanding mobility and, importantly, in understanding the impact on transport networks. In this article, we present a novel analysis of anonymised individual daily mobility patterns in the UK over a 30-month period covering the COVID-19 pandemic using privacy-preserving mobile phone GPS data, collected via integration of software development kits (SDKs) into mobile apps. Our analysis is based on time series clustering of mobility profiles at an hourly level of resolution and enables us to characterize five distinct daily mobility patterns. This typology appears remarkably robust over time, albeit with varying levels of each pattern during the course of the study period. We analyse the relative frequency of these patterns in relation to two dimensions of neighbourhood deprivation in England, with a particular focus on understanding mobility post-lockdown and for over a year after the final restrictions were lifted in the UK. Our results show that although overall mobility patterns have largely returned to their pre-pandemic levels, there remain persistent inequalities in relation to ‘traditional commute’, ‘highly mobile’ and ‘out in the evening’ activity patterns. This finding is expected to have important ongoing policy implications.