Longitudinal Study of the COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Activity Travel Using Connected Vehicle Data

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a once-in-a-century impact on human life on the planet. As of June 30, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 194 million people have been infected and more than 4 million have succumbed. Our goal is to study and analyze the potential for structural long-term changes in activity travel behavior caused by this global disruption. We rely on a longitudinal panel of 308 drivers who provided high-frequency connected vehicle data (once per second up to 10 times per second) covering more than one year before the onset of the pandemic (January 2019) and one year and three months after the national state of emergency was first declared in the U.S.A. (June 2021). We combine this dataset with land-use data to produce a comprehensive activity travel database for studying the impact on personal vehicle trips made and their spatial dispersion, time spent traveling and on activities, time spent at home, and vehicle miles traveled (VMT). We find that the number of trips made to reach work and nonwork activities is reverting to pre-COVID-19 trends. Travel time and VMT in personal vehicles are steadily increasing as well. At this pace, granting the absence of new variants warranting travel restrictions, these activity travel measures are expected to reach pre-COVID-19 levels by the second half of 2021 or early 2022. The spatial dispersion of activities, after increasing during the opening phases, seems to stabilize at levels comparable with those experienced before the state of emergency was declared.