Transit station mobility recovery in Latin American cities during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic sharply reduced public transport use, but the recovery of transit mobility across Latin American cities and its relation to policy stringency remain unclear. Methods: Ecological panel study combining Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports with the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, March 2020 to September 2022. The sample comprised 924 municipalities in 8 countries and a country-month panel of 14 countries. Monthly transit station mobility, percentage change from a pre-pandemic baseline, was modeled against the monthly StringencyIndex, crude and adjusted for country and calendar month or for a linear time trend. Results: Regional transit mobility reached a trough of −69.9% below baseline in Apr 2020. By the third quarter of 2022 the median country stood 9.1% above baseline (IQR 3.4 to 13.5); 52.5% of cities were at or above baseline. Each ten-point increase in stringency was associated with changes of −8.6 percentage points in the crude analysis (95% CI −9.9 to −7.4) and −9.0 after adjustment (95% CI −10.2 to −7.8), attenuating to −3.2 (95% CI −4.1 to −2.2) after accounting for the secular trend. Mean stringency was not correlated with late-pandemic recovery (rho = 0.09; p = 0.76). Conclusions: Transit mobility collapsed deeply in 2020 and recovered to or above baseline by late 2022. Contemporaneous stringency was strongly associated with lower transit mobility, but average stringency was not associated with the eventual level of recovery.