Changes in urban mobility in Sapporo city, Japan due to the Covid-19 emergency declarations

Abstract

At the time of writing, the world is facing the new coronavirus pandemic, which has been declared one of the most dangerous disasters of the 21st century. All nations and communities have applied many countermeasures to control the spread of the epidemic. In terms of countermeasures, lockdowns and reductions of social activities are meant to flatten the curve of infection. Nevertheless, to date, there has been no evaluation of the effectiveness of these methods. Thus, the present study aims to interpret the change in the population density of Sapporo city in the emergency's period declaration using big data obtained from mobile spatial statistics. The results indicate that, in the time of refraining from traveling, the city's residents have been more likely to stay home and less likely to travel to the center area. This has led to a decrease of up to 90% of the population density in crowded areas. The study's outcomes partly explain the statement of reducing 70%–80% of contact between people in line with the purpose of the emergency declaration. Moreover, these findings establish the primary step for further analysis of estimating the efficiency of policy in controlling the epidemic.

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on mobility in ten countries and associated perceived risk for all transport modes

“…The mobility restrictions exerted a major impact on the way in which work is done and its availability. The work or school Commuting Distance (CD) prior to the pandemic (14.6 ± 25.0 km) was essentially evaporated for the largest part of the respondents as 87.1 percentage of the population sampled shifted to an online or remote environment (Work-From-Home, WFH), this is in good accordance with other studies quantifying the refraining from travelling [69,70]. The lowest WFH rate, although still a supermajority, was found in Ghana (73.2%), Norway registered the highest WFH rate (95.7%).…”

Impacts of COVID-19 on transportation: Summary and synthesis of interdisciplinary research

“…In the Netherlands, approximately 80% of the population reduced their activities because of the pandemic, leading to 55% reduction in number of trips and 68% decline in distance travelled, with the proportion working from home increasing from 6% to 39% ( de Haas et al, 2020 ). Similar findings in terms of overall travel with significant decreases in trips for school and work and increased use of private vehicles and active transportation modes (bicycling and walking) were reported across different countries ( Abdullah et al, 2020 , Arimura et al, 2020 , Chen and Pan, 2020 , Teixeira and Lopes, 2020 ).…”

Socioeconomic determinants of mobility responses during the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy: from provinces to neighbourhoods

“…Since the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in human mobility ensuing the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) adopted in many countries worldwide have been measured through the analysis of mobile phone data [6]. To mention a few examples, previous studies have investigated changes in human movements through mobile phone data in Austria, China, Japan, the UK, Germany, and the United States [7, 8, 9, 10]. Several of these studies suggested that mobility restrictions unevenly impact different socioeconomic strata and that income inequalities are associated to a different capacity to afford prolonged social distancing [11, 12, 13].…”