Using Bus Ticketing Big Data to Investigate the Behaviors of the Population Flow of Chinese Suburban Residents in the Post-COVID-19 Phase

Yanbing Bai, Lu Sun, Haoyu Liu and Chao Xie
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Yanbing Bai: Center for Applied Statistics, School of Statistics, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Lu Sun: School of Statistics, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China
Haoyu Liu: Center for Applied Statistics, School of Statistics, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Chao Xie: China Transport Information Co., Ltd., Beijing 100007, China

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 11, 1-16

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.

Keywords: bus ticketing big data; spark distributed computing; population flow; chinese suburban residents; post-COVID-19 phases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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