Abstract
Large-scale population movements can turn local diseases into widespread epidemics. Grasping the characteristic of the population flow in the context of the COVID-19 is of great significance for providing information to epidemiology and formulating scientific and reasonable prevention and control policies. Especially in the post-COVID-19 phase, it is essential to maintain the achievement of the fight against the epidemic. Previous research focuses on flight and railway passenger travel behavior and patterns, but China also has numerous suburban residents with a not-high economic level; investigating their travel behaviors is significant for national stability. However, estimating the impacts of the COVID-19 for suburban residents’ travel behaviors remains challenging because of lacking apposite data. Here we submit bus ticketing data including approximately 26,000,000 records from April 2020–August 2020 for 2705 stations. Our results indicate that Suburban residents in Chinese Southern regions are more likely to travel by bus, and travel frequency is higher. Associated with the economic level, we find that residents in the economically developed region more likely to travel or carry out various social activities. Considering from the perspective of the traveling crowd, we find that men and young people are easier to travel by bus; however, they are exactly the main workforce. The indication of our findings is that suburban residents’ travel behavior is affected profoundly by economy and consistent with the inherent behavior patterns before the COVID-19 outbreak. We use typical regions as verification and it is indeed the case.
Highlights
The immediate impact of the COVID-19 outbreak has brought significant problems to people’s health, safety, and critical supply chains, which has produced many other social and economic impacts [1]
We found that the travel behaviors of suburban residents in the post-COVID-19 phase are mainly affected by economic and historicalcultural elements rather than COVID-19
The 19 provinces involved in the dataset are divided into 5 regions depending on the geographical status and economic level
Summary
The immediate impact of the COVID-19 outbreak has brought significant problems to people’s health, safety, and critical supply chains, which has produced many other social and economic impacts [1]. Younger and low-income people are not affected by external conditions, more likely because they are captive and have a limited capacity to do differently, so they have to maintain the present situation This is still a social phenomenon and population characteristic that is very worthy of attention. As a country with numerous suburban residents, investigating their travel behaviors is essential for protecting the achievement of fighting the COVID-19 epidemic and maintaining national stability. Suburban residents may seldom take airplanes, high-speed rails, and other high-fare vehicles due to limited income or other reasons It results in the flight and railway data not fully cover the population we want to investigate. We found that the travel behaviors of suburban residents in the post-COVID-19 phase are mainly affected by economic and historicalcultural elements rather than COVID-19. Grasping suburban residents’ travel behavior and travel patterns is crucial to maintaining the current anti-COVID-19 results and national stability
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