Quantifying the Post-Pandemic Urban Activity & Mobility Regime: Implications for Adaptation and Future Planning of Cities and Public Transit Systems

Abstract

Between 2019 and 2022, a pattern break during the COVID-19 pandemic introduced consequential changes to the trajectory of urban activity and mobility patterns. This thesis advances both theoretical and practical understandings of this evolving post-pandmemic regime of activity and mobility, as well as its implications for the future of cities and public transit systems, using high-resolution location-based services data and a case study within the Washington, DC metropolitan area. First, a custom analysis framework is developed where geographical units - subcenters and neighborhoods - are designed to provide insight at an interpretable scale that corresponds to policy and business decision making. Second, a custom suite of twelve mobility metrics are curated to distill the applicability of post-pandemic changes in travel patterns to business problems (site selection, network planning, and operations planning) and societal outcomes (social fabric, quality of life, and environmental sustainability). To complement spatial analysis, these metrics are also regressed on socio-economic attributes to provide greater explanatory power. Lastly, key trends in post-pandemic activity and mobility are distilled into eight mega-trends, and their implications for the adaptation of public transportation systems and future urban development are discussed, including complexity from divergent definitions of success among different stakeholders.