Abstract
This paper aims to evaluate the impacts of the economic context on traffic congestion and its consequential effects on private vehicle accessibility. We conduct a long-term analysis of spatiotemporal traffic congestion patterns in Madrid (Spain), comparing two urban realms: the 2008 economic crisis and the following post-crisis situation. We apply TomTom Speed Profiles data to assess daily variations in traffic congestion and their changes between both periods, and Twitter data to capture spatial patterns of the daily pulse of the city. Increased traffic, a by-product of economic recovery, resulted in higher congestion, particularly during peak hours. Nevertheless, these changes are spatially uneven. In the city core, an increase in congestion is relatively temporally homogeneous, while in the peripheral suburban zones, there has been only a marginal increase in travel times. On the other hand, in the urban outskirts, increased traffic congestion is more severe but visibly different between north and south. These differences have strong social connotations: over 40% of the population experienced a dramatic increase in travel times (more than 25%) during peak hours. Moreover, low-income groups are more likely to live in the more affected southern districts, suffering most the negative consequences of increased congestion.
Highlights
Traffic congestion management has always been a key issue for transport planning, especially in urban and metropolitan scales
As considered in the previous hypothesis, the post-crisis situation presents longer travel times compared to the crisis period: in all the temporal scenarios considered, travel time mean values are higher in the post-crisis, especially during the morning and afternoon peak hours
Spatiotemporal analysis of congestion variations between crisis and post‐crisis periods. In analysing these differences both temporally and spatially (Fig. 5), we find that travel times (WTT) in the crisis period are less than 20 min for the four times of the day in almost all Transport Zones in the city centre, while in post-crisis the central area increased its WTTs to between 20 and 30 min, except at 00:00 h in Free-Flow Speed (FFS)
Summary
Traffic congestion management has always been a key issue for transport planning, especially in urban and metropolitan scales. Different studies in the transport literature have focused on the analysis of changes in urban mobility patterns during periods of economic decline They show changes in household strategies to reduce their costs, especially in transportation (Cascajo et al 2018). The reduction in private vehicle travel generally translates into an increase in the use of public transport, even in cases where the cost of tickets has increased (Efthymiou and Antoniou 2017). All these studies detail the impact of the economic crisis on the mobility model of each family or individual and the modal choice and transport alternatives. The scientific literature has not focused so extensively on the influence of the economic situation on private vehicle accessibility, especially during the post-crisis period
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