Exploring the Public Health of Travel Behaviors in High-Speed Railway Environment during the COVID-19 Pandemic from the Perspective of Trip Chain: A Case Study of Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Urban Agglomeration, China

Abstract

The outbreak and spreading of COVID-19 since early 2020 have dramatically impacted public health and the travel environment. However, most of the studies are devoted to travel behavior from the macro perspective. Meanwhile, few researchers pay attention to intercity travel behavior. Thus, this study explores the changes in the travel behavior of intercity high-speed railway travelers during the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the individual. Using the smartphone data, this study first extracts the trip chains by proposing a novel method including three steps. The trip chain can describe the whole process of traveling, including individual characteristics, travel time, travel distance, travel mode, etc. Then, a Multinomial Logit model is applied to analyze the trip chains which verified the validity by using studentized residual error. The study finds that intercity travel behavior has changed in gender, age, travel mode choice, and travel purpose by comparing the trip chains between May 2019 and May 2021 in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei urban agglomeration. The method proposed in this study can be used to assess the impact of any long-term emergency on individual travel behavior. The findings proposed in this study are expected to guide public health management and travel environment improvement under the situation of normalized COVID-19 prevention and safety control.