Where Is Everyone? The Global Impact of COVID on Road Traffic

Slides from a 4 minute lightning talk at FOSS4G2022 in Firenze, IT.

HERE Traffic Analytics provide the data for this presentation. Data is collected from multiple GPS sensors globally. The traffic data was aggregated from hourly counts aggregated by day for 2019 to 2021. Congestion is calculated from data, a congestion score of .3 is considered congestion. To put the score in perspective, if you travel time is 10 minutes, a .3 congestion score adds three minutes to trip (10 x 0.3).

Data was collected from the 10 largest cities in the USA, Singapore, India, Australia, UK, Germany, and France. Only the two largest and two smallest cities were compared.

For western countries, traffic congestion follows a similar pattern with an initial drop in congestion in April and May of 2020 and fluctuations anecdotally following COVID surges. Overall, congestion has declined.

For India, we see a variation between Delhi and Jaipur compared to Mumbai and Pune. Singapore follows the general pattern of an initial drop in congestion with drops corresponding with surges.

Australia presents a different pattern where there is a marked deviation in traffic congestion between the more populous cities of Sydney and Melbourne and the smaller cities of Perth and Brisbane. Note that congestion in Perth and Brisbane is greater in 2021 than in 2019.

This initial exploration of the data leads to more questions. Variations in population, road network, and also COVID response could help explain differentials in traffic congestion.