A Floating Car Data Application to Estimate the Origin-Destination Car Trips Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic due to an unprecedented health crisis by COVID-19. In the first stage, all the Countries applied strict policies to limit the spreading of the virus, significantly reducing the mobility trips (reduction over than the 90% for the public transport modes), and possibly by structurally modifying mobility habits of citizens. With respect to the study of how (and how much) mobility habits are changing during the pandemic, the new technologies and the real-time traffic data for monitoring the travel demand can play a significant role, and this research tries to contribute in this sense. Within this issue, the aim of this research was twice: i) verify the applicability of the Floating Car Data (FCD) for the origin-destination (OD) car trips (OD matrices) estimation, proposing an ad-hoc methodology for the scope; ii) estimating and comparing the OD car trips before and during COVID-19 pandemic within the Campania Region in south of Italy, investigating both seasonal and yearly impacts of the pandemic on the mobility habits (e.g. lock-down periods vs. recovery periods; summer vs. winter periods). Estimated results confirm the ability of FCDs to reproduce OD car trips. With respect to the impacts produced by the pandemic on car mobility, the estimation results underline that during the periods of the main mobility restrictions, the structure of the regional demand has significantly changed with respect to a pre-pandemic period: extra-provincial car trips have decreased (between 23% and 42%) than the intra-provincial ones, which have even increased (up to +5%); the distance travelled was reduced up to the 24%.