Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has impacted numerous areas of people’s work and free-time activities. This article aims to present the main impacts of the COVID-19 movement restrictions on the road traffic in the Czech Republic, measured during the first epidemic wave, i.e., from 12 March to 17 May 2020. The state of emergency was imposed by the Czech government as a de jure measure for coping with the perceived crisis, although the measure eventually resulted only in a quite liberal de facto form of stay-at-home instruction. Unique country-scale traffic data of the first six months of 2020 from 37,002 km of roads, constituting 66% of all roads in the Czech Republic, were collected and analyzed. For the prediction of the prepandemic traffic conditions and their comparison with the measured values in the period of the state of emergency, a long-term traffic speed prediction ensemble model consisting of case-based reasoning, linear regression, and fallback submodels was used. The authors found out that the COVID-19 movement restrictions had a significant impact on the country-wide traffic. Traffic density was reduced considerably in the first three weeks, and the weekly average traffic speed in all road types increased by up to 21%, expectedly due to less crowded roads. The exception was motorways, where a different trend in traffic was found. In sum, during the first three weeks of the state of emergency, people followed government regulations and restrictions and changed their travel behavior accordingly. However, following this period, the traffic gradually returned to the prepandemic state. This occurred three weeks before the state of emergency was terminated. From a behavioral perspective, this article briefly discusses the possible causes of such discrepancies between de jure and de facto pandemic measures, i.e., the governmental communication strategy related to loosening of movement restrictions, media reality, and certain culture-related traits.
Highlights
Introduction e COVID19 pandemic crisis has resulted in an unprecedented impact on societies all over the world. e majority of the world population has been forced to dramatically change their patterns of behavior with regard to the number of daily activities they had previously thought of as automatic or common
Main Findings. is article provides an overview of the impact of the COVID-19 antiepidemic measures on road traffic in the Czech Republic. e presented analysis uses unique traffic data, which were measured on the different types of roads, reflecting the situation in the entire territory of the Czech Republic
The article demonstrates that the declaration of the state of emergency and the restriction of movement initially had a significant impact on the increase of achieved speeds in most road segments in the Czech Republic
Summary
In the Czech Republic, the first three COVID-19 cases were confirmed on 1 March 2020. E disease continued to spread over the country and 3,314 cases were reported by the end of March 2020 [9]. E response of Czech government officials was extremely rapid, following the steady growth of COVID-19 cases. To further outline in more detail how the antiepidemic measures gradually unfolded, the key milestones are summarized in Table 1 based on the official, continuously published measures adopted by the Government (G) and the Ministry of Health (MH) of the Czech Republic [10]. E number of detected cases of COVID-19 infection decreases rapidly around 11 April 2020, as this is the period of the Easter holidays, and so fewer people get tested. E disadvantage of Apple data is that they do not distinguish among different road types. ese data are incomplete for some regions of the Czech Republic, which may be due to the low penetration (only 25%) of Apple
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