Associations between socio-demographic factors and change in mobility due to COVID-19 restrictions in Ontario, Canada using geographically weighted regression

Transportation research has shown that socio-demographic factors impact people's mobility patterns. During the COVID-19 pandemic, some of these effects have changed in accordance with changing mobility needs adapting to the pandemic, including restrictions on in-person gatherings, closure of in-person businesses, and working from home. We investigate two gaps in current knowledge in this area of transportation research: to what extent the associations between socio-demographic factors and mobility metrics have changed, and how these associations vary across geographic space. We used aggregate deidentified cell tower location data to measure two mobility metrics-movement time and radius of gyration-and socio-demographic data from the 2016 Canadian Census to model these associations across Ontario, Canada in 2020 using a linear model and a geographically weighted regression model. We find that certain associations between socio-demographics and mobility have changed from what we previously observed before the pandemic, and we can see the variation of these associations across space. These findings will improve our understanding of how socio-demographic factors affect mobility patterns in different communities and demonstrate the importance of measuring these associations at a more fine-grained level using models that consider spatial variation to best reflect the nature of these associations. Les recherches sur les transports ont montre depuis longtemps que les facteurs sociodemographiques ont des effets sur les patrons de mobilite des personnes. Au cours de la pandemie de COVID-19, certains de ces effets specifiques ont change, notamment a cause des restrictions sur les rassemblements, de l'arret des rencontres d'affaires en presentiel et du teletravail. Nous etudions ici deux lacunes dans les connaissances actuelles de la recherche sur les transports en contexte pandemique: dans quelle mesure les liens entre les facteurs sociodemographiques et les parametres de mobilite ont change, et comment ces relations varient a travers l'espace geographique. Sur le plan methodologique, nous avons utilise des donnees agregees de localisation de tours cellulaires depersonnalisees pour mesurer deux elements de la mobilite, soit le temps de deplacement et le rayon de giration. Des donnees sociodemographiques tirees du recensement canadien de 2016 ont aussi ete employes. Ces informations ont permis de modeliser les liens entre ces deux elements de mobilite en Ontario (Canada) en 2020, a l'aide d'un modele lineaire et d'un modele de regression geographiquement pondere. Comme resultat, nous constatons que certains liens entre les donnees sociodemographiques et la mobilite ont change par rapport a ce que nous avions observe avant la pandemie. Nous pouvons egalement observer la variation de ces associations dans l'espace, en particulier, dans les modeles de mobilite. Geographically weighted regression was used to study associations between mobility and five socio-demographic factors in Ontario, Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic.All five variables exhibited positive and negative associations with mobility change for at least one period of analysis, highlighting the complexity of these relationships.Our results provide new information on the geographical relationships between mobility change during COVID-19 and neighbourhood-level socio-demographic variables.