The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Distribution of Traffic Accident Hotspots in New York City

Hengyi Zhang, Yusheng Ci (), Yikang Huang and Lina Wu
Additional contact information
Hengyi Zhang: School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China
Yusheng Ci: School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China
Yikang Huang: School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China
Lina Wu: School of Automobile and Traffic Engineering, Heilongjiang Institute of Technology, Harbin 150050, China

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 8, 1-21

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a substantial impact on the lives of city residents and has reshaped working patterns, with a concomitant impact on traffic accidents. We correlated data from multiple sources to explore the impact of residents’ mobility and residents’ travel behavior on the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of urban traffic accident hotspots and its internal mechanism under the impact of the pandemic and subsequent policy measures. The results showed that the pandemic and policy measures inhibited the mobility of residents, had a significant impact on working patterns, and changed the composition structure of the purpose of residents’ travel behavior, which substantially impacted the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of urban traffic accident hotspots. The quantity of traffic accidents decreased significantly, and the spatial distribution characteristics of urban traffic accident hotspots changed substantially, with accident hotspots changing from the single-center spatial distribution before the pandemic to the multi-center spatial distribution during the pandemic; urban accident-prone areas changed from being mainly distributed in the central business district before the pandemic to being more widely distributed in public service areas during the pandemic. The results of this study may be helpful to better understand the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of urban traffic accident hotspots and their intrinsic mechanism.

Keywords: traffic accident hotspot; spatiotemporal distribution characteristic; land use; the mobility of residents; COVID-19 pandemic; geographic information system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/8/3440/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/8/3440/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:8:p:3440-:d:1379253

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().