A study on the use of public transportation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Civil Engineering Department, Engineering Faculty, Andalas University, Indonesia

^* Corresponding author: titi@eng.unand.ac.id

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public transportation occupancy has decreased significantly. In addition to the sluggish economy, the COVID-19 health protocol rules require that only 50 percent of passengers can be transported for public transportation. This study tries to identify the use of public transportation and the factors that influence this use during the adaptation period for the new habits of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data on the frequency of using public transportation before and during the pandemic was processed with the index formula. Before the pandemic period, using public transportation was often, with an index value of 60.8%. During the pandemic period, 10.1% of respondents did not do activities outside the home. Respondents who moved outside their homes (89.9%) used private vehicles (88.3%) and 11.7% public transportation for their trips. The type of public transportation often used is online transportation (motorbike and car) by 62.1%. The frequency of use of public transportation is rare (44.9%) and very rarely (40.8%); the rest are often (9.7%) and very often (4.5%). This value will produce an index value of 44.5% with a sparse interval interpretation. A hypothesis test was conducted between the respondent's characteristics (gender, age, occupation, and vehicle ownership) and the frequency of using public transportation. The result shows that the factor influencing the frequency of using public transportation is the respondent's occupation.