Exploring the Public Health of Travel Behaviors in High-Speed Railway Environment during the COVID-19 Pandemic from the Perspective of Trip Chain: A Case Study of Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Urban Agglomeration, China

Shuai Yu (), Bin Li and Dongmei Liu
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Shuai Yu: Research Institute of Highway Ministry of Transport, Beijing 100088, China
Bin Li: Research Institute of Highway Ministry of Transport, Beijing 100088, China
Dongmei Liu: Research Institute of Highway Ministry of Transport, Beijing 100088, China

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 2, 1-22

Abstract: The outbreak and spreading of COVID-19 since early 2020 have dramatically impacted public health and the travel environment. However, most of the studies are devoted to travel behavior from the macro perspective. Meanwhile, few researchers pay attention to intercity travel behavior. Thus, this study explores the changes in the travel behavior of intercity high-speed railway travelers during the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the individual. Using the smartphone data, this study first extracts the trip chains by proposing a novel method including three steps. The trip chain can describe the whole process of traveling, including individual characteristics, travel time, travel distance, travel mode, etc. Then, a Multinomial Logit model is applied to analyze the trip chains which verified the validity by using studentized residual error. The study finds that intercity travel behavior has changed in gender, age, travel mode choice, and travel purpose by comparing the trip chains between May 2019 and May 2021 in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei urban agglomeration. The method proposed in this study can be used to assess the impact of any long-term emergency on individual travel behavior. The findings proposed in this study are expected to guide public health management and travel environment improvement under the situation of normalized COVID-19 prevention and safety control.

Keywords: travel behavior; trip chain; COVID-19; intercity travel; urban agglomeration; public health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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