Policies, population and impacts in metro ridership response to COVID-19 in Changsha

Abstract To secure the city against the transmission of COVID-19, metro ridership control is an important task of the metro corporation on the premise of meeting the basic travel demand as far as possible. First off, this paper describes the influence mechanism of COVID-19 on metro ridership in Changsha, including an analysis into the correlation among policies, population, and metro ridership. Secondly, this paper verifies the influence of governmental macro-policy on population mobility and metro train working diagram, and thereby on metro ridership, based on the actual data during Jan 12th to May 6th, 2020 and year-ago data (2019). And then the Difference-in-Difference (DID) model is used to verify the effect of policies on metro ridership in Changsha. Results also show the effectiveness of policy chain on the limit of metro ridership, which bears a strong correlation to the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. A linear regression prediction model is built to predict metro ridership based on cumulative net inflow of population index, metro carrying capacity and confirmed COVID-19 cases. This paper is expected to provide reference for Metro Corporation to control ridership on the premise of meeting the basic travel demand amid the explosive outbreak of the epidemics.