COVID-19 and transport safety

Abstract

Transportation safety has substantially been impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic. To contain the spread of the virus, governments around the world released guidelines (e.g. stay-at-home orders), which reduced or eliminated peoples’ daily commutes. These travel restrictions introduced new safety challenges for roadways and drivers, transit riders, and pedestrians and cyclists. Many cities, states, and countries around the world reported more severe crashes despite fewer drivers on the road. Transit ridership reduced as the risk of infection with COVID-19 kept transit users away, and walking and biking became more popular as they could be done individually in open air. This paper conducts a structured critical review to summarise and discuss studies around the world on roadway, transit, and pedestrian and bicycle safety since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. For roadway safety, we further review studies that examine the direct measures of safety (e.g. crash statistics and models) as well as indirect or surrogate measures (e.g. speeding, aggressive driving, and reduced seatbelt usage). Surrogate measures, although indirectly, can affect the risk of crashes and contribute to the increase in frequency and severity of crashes. Findings are documented and discussed. We then provide suggestions on potential avenues for future research. Particularly, research studies show that the rate of severe injury crashes, as well as aggressive driving (e.g. speeding) increased in most places during the travel restrictions, and continued even after these restrictions were lifted. The safety of pedestrians and bicycles has also become increasingly important due to the increase in the number of users of these modes.