The 20th and 21st joint COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP 2020-21)

In order to ensure traffic safety, a lot of related works have been done to avoid travelers get injured during their trips. In recent months, public health security threatens the security of traffic safety as a new challenge that travelers might get ill during their trips. The more people infected by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the more unsafe urban traffic would become. This paper aims to verify whether COVID-19 has negative impacts on urban traffic recovery or not. Based on 30 city data in China, robust fixed-effects (within) regression was adopted to analyze the impacts above mentioned based on linear regression method. The regression results suggest that: (1) Urban Traffic Activity Index (UTAI) were positively associated with UTAI itself with short-term effect, which means that UTAI could recover by itself; (2) New Confirmed COVID-19 Case (NC) were negatively associated with UTAI with long-term effect, which means that NC would prevent UTAI from recovering. The findings also suggest that it is better for the governments of cities around the world to eliminate the outbreak of COVID-19 before restarting the economy. Future directions could be improving models, grouping cities and expanding data.

Urban Transportation;COVID-19;Statistical Analysis;Relationship Analysis;Transportation Recovery