論文

査読有り 本文へのリンクあり 国際共著 国際誌
2023年4月26日

Twitter mobility dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study of London

PLOS ONE
  • Chen Zhong
  • ,
  • Robin Morphe
  • ,
  • Mitsuo Yoshida

18
4
開始ページ
e0284902
終了ページ
記述言語
英語
掲載種別
研究論文(学術雑誌)
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0284902
出版者・発行元
Public Library of Science (PLoS)

The current COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted people’s lifestyles and travel behaviours, which may persist post-pandemic. An effective monitoring tool that allows us to track the level of change is vital for controlling viral transmission, predicting travel and activity demand and, in the long term, for economic recovery. In this paper, we propose a set of Twitter mobility indices to explore and visualise changes in people’s travel and activity patterns, demonstrated through a case study of London. We collected over 2.3 million geotagged tweets in the Great London Area (GLA) from Jan 2019 –Feb 2021. From these, we extracted daily trips, origin-destination matrices, and spatial networks. Mobility indices were computed based on these, with the year 2019 as a pre-Covid baseline. We found that in London, (1) People are making fewer but longer trips since March 2020. (2) In 2020, travellers showed comparatively reduced interest in central and sub-central activity locations compared to those in outer areas, whereas, in 2021, there is a sign of a return to the old norm. (3) Contrary to some relevant literature on mobility and virus transmission, we found a poor spatial relationship at the Middle Layer Super Output Area (MSOA) level between reported COVID-19 cases and Twitter mobility. It indicated that daily trips detected from geotweets and their most likely associated social, exercise and commercial activities are not critical causes for disease transmission in London. Aware of the data limitations, we also discuss the representativeness of Twitter mobility by comparing our proposed measures to more established mobility indices. Overall, we conclude that mobility patterns obtained from geo-tweets are valuable for continuously monitoring urban changes at a fine spatiotemporal scale.

リンク情報
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284902 本文へのリンクあり
URL
https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284902 本文へのリンクあり
ID情報
  • DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0284902
  • eISSN : 1932-6203

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