Impact of Social Media on Travel Behaviors during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from New York City

Qian Ye · Kaan M. A. Özbay · Fan Zuo

17 citations0/0 files storedTransportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis Transportation Planning and Optimization COVID-19 epidemiological studies

Abstract

During the outbreak of COVID-19, people's reliance on social media for pandemic-related information exchange, daily communications, and online professional interactions increased because of self-isolation and lockdown implementation. Most of the published research addresses the performance of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and measures on the issues impacted by COVID-19, such as health, education, and public safety; however, not much is known about the interplay between social media use and travel behaviors. This study aims to determine the effect of social media on human mobility before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, and its impact on personal vehicle and public transit use in New York City (NYC). Apple mobility trends and Twitter data are used as two data sources. The results indicate that Twitter volume and mobility trend correlations are negative for both driving and transit categories in general, especially at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in NYC. A significant time lag (13 days) between the online communication rise and mobility drop can be observed, thereby providing evidence of social networks taking quicker reactions to the pandemic than the transportation system. In addition, social media and government policies had different impacts on vehicular traffic and public transit ridership during the pandemic with varied performance. This study provides insights on the complex influence of both anti-pandemic measures and user-generated content, namely social media, on people's travel decisions during pandemics. The empirical evidence can help decision-makers formulate timely emergency responses, prepare targeted traffic intervention policies, and conduct risk management in similar outbreaks in the future.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

References

1991The theory of planned behavior 1977Normative Influences on Altruism 2011Twitter mood predicts the stock market 2012Optimal Detection of Changepoints With a Linear Computational Cost 2019Selective review of offline change point detection methods 2020Top Concerns of Tweeters During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Infoveillance Study 2020Tracking Social Media Discourse About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development of a Public Coronavirus Twitter Data Set 2020The Impact of Social Media on Panic During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Iraqi Kurdistan: Online Questionnaire Study

Cited by

2021Bir Arastırma Kaynagı Olarak Arsivlenen Sosyal Medya Verilerinin Kullanımı

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.