Hyeyoung Sim et al. (2023)
Journal
DOI
Journal of Korea Planning Association
https://doi.org/10.17208/jkpa.2022.08.57.4.94
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the mobility behavior of urban people. To prepare a prompt response to the post-COVID era and to improve city resilience for the next generation, this study seeks to understand the mobility changes and analyzes the factors that affected the change. This study assumes that mobility changes on weekdays and weekends, and internal and external mobility will occur differently due to COVID-19. The dependent variable is a difference in Living Population (LP) in 2020 compared to 2019, and the explanatory variables are factors in population density, car ownership density, land use, temperature, precipitation, and COVID-19-related policy factors, including the frequency of emergency texts, the number of confirmed cases, and daily press releases. Since the data are approximately one-day units for two years and 25 districts in Seoul, panel Generalized Least Squares was applied to control heterogeneity and time-series autocorrelation in the panel data. The result indicates that news frequency increases internal mobility and decreases external mobility regardless of weekdays or weekends, which means long-distance mobility was substituted by mobility in the nearby areas. The COVID-19-related policy factors are effective in controlling urban mobility, and alternatives to provide COVID-19 information transparently should be considered at a more detailed level, depending on the measures taken by different districts to manage the post-COVID era changes.