Understanding changes in travel patterns during the COVID-19 outbreak in the three major metropolitan areas of Japan

Abstract

Unlike the lockdown measures taken in some countries or cities during the COVID-19 outbreak, the Japanese government declared a “State of Emergency” (SOE) under which people were only requested to reduce their contact with other people by at least 70%, while some local governments also implemented their own mobility-reduction measures that had no legal basis. The effects of these measures are still unclear. Thus, in this study, we investigate changes in travel patterns in response to the COVID-19 outbreak and related policy measures in Japan using longitudinal aggregated mobile phone data. Specifically, we consider daily travel patterns as networks and analyze their structural changes by applying a framework for analyzing temporal networks used in network science. The cluster analysis with the network similarity measures across different dates showed that there are six main types of mobility patterns in the three major metropolitan areas of Japan: (I) weekends and holidays prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, (II) weekdays prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, (III) weekends and holidays before and after the SOE, (IV) weekdays before and after the SOE, (V) weekends and holidays during the SOE, and (VI) weekdays during the SOE. It was also found that travel patterns might have started to change from March 2020, when most schools were closed, and that the mobility patterns after the SOE returned to those prior to the SOE. Interestingly, we found that after the lifting of the SOE, travel patterns remained similar to those during the SOE for a few days, suggesting the possibility that self-restraint continued after the lifting of the SOE. Moreover, in the case of the Nagoya metropolitan area, we found that people voluntarily changed their travel patterns when the number of cases increased.