Repo supporting paper: Lockdown lifted: measuring spatial resilience from London's public transport demand recovery.
Abstract The disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly shifted how individuals navigate in cities. Governments are concerned that travel behaviour will shift towards a car-driven and homeworking future, shifting demand away from public transport use. These concerns place the recovery of public transport in possible crisis. A resilience perspective may aid the discussion around recovery – particularly one that deviates from pre-pandemic behaviour. This paper presents an empirical study of London's public transport demand and introduces a perspective of spatial resilience to the existing body of research on post-pandemic public transport demand. This research defines spatial resilience as the rate of recovery in public transport demand within census boundaries over a period after lockdown restrictions were lifted. The relationship of spatial resilience with urban socioeconomic factors was investigated by a global spatial regression model and a localised perspective through Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model. In this case study of London, the analysis focuses on the period after the first COVID-19 lockdown restrictions were lifted (June 2020) and before new restrictions in mid-September 2020. The analysis shows that outer London generally recovered faster than inner London. Factors of income, car ownership and density of public transport infrastructure were found to have the greatest influence on spatial patterns in resilience. Furthermore, influential relationships vary locally, inviting future research to examine the drivers of this spatial heterogeneity. Thus, this research recommends transport policymakers capture the influences of homeworking, ensure funding for a minimum level of service, and advocate for a polycentric recovery post-pandemic.
Keywords: Spatial resilience； demand recovery； public transport； COVID-19； pandemic； London