Analysis of Road Transport Response to COVID-19 Pandemic in Nigeria and its Policy Implications

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a serious global health challenge to humanity in recent times. It has caused fundamental disruptions to the global transportation system, supply chains, and trade. The impact on the transport sector resulting from lockdowns has led to huge losses in revenue. At the moment there are limited studies of the road transport sector response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper fills this gap using Nigeria as a case study area. A mixed method involving both qualitative and quantitative research was employed. Principal Component Analysis and Multiple Criteria Analysis were used to analyze the data. The results suggest that road transport operators strongly (90.7%) believe that 51 adopted new technologies/innovations, processes, and procedures will keep them and passengers safe from the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria. A breakdown shows that observing the lockdown directive is perceived by road transport operators as the most effective response to the pandemic. The breakdown continues in descending order thus: COVID-19 safety protocols, environmental sanitation, and promotion of hygiene, information technology, facemask, and social distancing. Others are public enlightenment, palliative, inclusion, and mass media. This indicates that non-pharmaceutical measures are very effective in the fight against the pandemic. This finding leverages support for the application of non-pharmaceutical guidelines in containing the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria.

Study on the Impact of Population and Economic Activities on Environmental Indicators through Pca

“…These principal components are linear combinations of the original features and they are arranged in decreasing order of importance in explaining the variance of the data. Principal component analysis helps us to reduce the dimensionality of the data while retaining as much information as possible [10]. With PCA, we can better understand the relationships between datasets, identify underlying patterns and structures, and provide valuable insights in tasks such as data visualisation, feature selection and predictive modelling.…”

Urban expansion and transportation interaction: Evidence from Akure, southwestern Nigeria

“…Road transport is the most widely used form of mobility, which provides high flexibility, requires low capital investments, and is suitable for short-distance journeys (Sorensen et al, 2021; Kurenkov et al, 2019; He et al, 2019). It offers a greener, more efficient, and safer future through the use of intelligent transport technologies (Faiyetole and Fulani, 2020; Faiyetole and Jegede, 2019; Skeete, 2018; Wang et al, 2022a) and channels the spread of infectious diseases through interstates, state-wide, and intra-community trips (Okeke et al, 2022; Faiyetole, 2022; Rojas-Rueda and Morales-Zamora, 2021; Gaskin et al, 2020; Carrington, 2020). Unique accessibility, such as door-to-door transportation services, includes various means of alternatives, such as cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and others (Tchanche, 2019; Fremont and Franc, 2010).…”

Quantifying Road Transport Resilience to Emergencies: Evidence from China

“…Overall, the impact of COVID-19 on transportation is significant [34,35] and negative [36][37][38], which is agreed generally. Meanwhile, the existing research has also observed that (1) the impact of the pandemic on transport varies by region [39,40]; (2) external intervention in the prevention and control of the pandemic can produce positive temporal and spatial effects [3,6,41]. Among the studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on transport, the studies in the field of road transport are few, and the studies that have quantified the resilience of road transport to the COVID-19 pandemic are even fewer.…”

“…It has the characteristics of time concentration and space aggregation. The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted many studies to understand the interplay between road transport and pandemics [5][6][7]. Most findings show that the pandemic and road closure have harmed road transport [8,9].…”