Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Travel Mode Choice Behaviour – A Stated Preference Case in Wuhan, China

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel modes choice behaviour using a case study from Wuhan, China. A SP-experiment based survey was conducted in Wuhan, based on which an MNL model and a latent class MNL model were established, respectively. The model estimation results show the following conclusions. First, the attributes that are normally believed to significantly affect the residents’ travel mode choice behaviour turned out to be insignificant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, attributes such as age, gender, driving license, income trend, use frequency of public transit, currently most-frequent-used mode, household size, monthly household income, distance from metro station to home, number of confirmed/deaths cases, vaccination are significantly affecting the respondents’ travel preferences. Third, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic leads to a decline in the residents’ preferences toward public transit, but the promotion of vaccines can lead residents to return to the public transit system. Fourth, the respondents were divided into three latent classes: high-susceptible, medium-susceptible and low-susceptible classes. These conclusions are believed to provide a reference for the investigation of impact of the COVID-19 pandemic or other similar public health events on the transportation system, and also offer supports for policy-making to effectively deal with such pandemics.