Transition of car-based human-mobility in the pandemic era: Data insight from a cross-border region in Europe

Many transport authorities are collecting and publishing almost real-time road traffic data to meet the growing trend of massive open data, a vital resource for foresight decision support systems considering deep data insights. We explored the spatio-temporal transitions in the cross-country road traffic volumes in the context of modelling behavioural transitions in car-based human mobility. This study reports on individual car-based daily travel behaviour detected, before (2018) and during the COVID pandemic (2020), between Germany and neighbouring countries. In the case of Luxembourg, the Bridges and Roads Authority has installed a large digital traffic observatory infrastructure through the adoption of sensor-based IoT technologies, like other European member states. Since 2016, they have provided high-performance data processing and published open data on the country's road traffic. The dataset contains an hourly traffic count for different vehicle types, daily for representative observation points, followed by a major road network. The original dataset contains significant missing entries, so comprehensive data harmonization was performed. We observed the decrease in traffic volumes during pandemic factors (e.g. lockdowns and remote work) period by following global trend of reduced personal mobility. The understanding the dynamic adaptive travel behaviours provide a potential opportunity to generate the actionable insight including temporal and spatial implications. This study demonstrates that the national open traffic data products can have adoption potential to address cross-border insights. In relevance to the net-zero carbon transition, further study should shed light on the interpolation and downscaling approaches at the comprehensive road-network level for identifying pollution hot spots, causal link to functional landuse patterns and calculation of spatial influence area.