IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v14y2022i14p8809-d865975.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Assessing Spatial Variations of Traffic Congestion Using Traffic Index Data in a Developing City: Lessons from Johannesburg, South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Thembani Moyo

    (Centre for Applied and Research Innovation in the Built Environment (CARINBE), Department of Construction Management and Quantity Surveying, University of Johannesburg, Corner Siemert & Beit Streets, Doornfontein, Johannesburg 0184, South Africa)

  • Siphiwe Mbatha

    (Sustainable and Smart Cities and Regions Research Group, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Johannesburg, Corner Siemert & Beit Streets, Doornfontein, Johannesburg 0184, South Africa)

  • Oluwayemi-Oniya Aderibigbe

    (Sustainable and Smart Cities and Regions Research Group, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Johannesburg, Corner Siemert & Beit Streets, Doornfontein, Johannesburg 0184, South Africa)

  • Trynos Gumbo

    (Sustainable and Smart Cities and Regions Research Group, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Johannesburg, Corner Siemert & Beit Streets, Doornfontein, Johannesburg 0184, South Africa)

  • Innocent Musonda

    (Centre for Applied and Research Innovation in the Built Environment (CARINBE), Department of Construction Management and Quantity Surveying, University of Johannesburg, Corner Siemert & Beit Streets, Doornfontein, Johannesburg 0184, South Africa)

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unforeseen effects in public transport and the mobility of people in cities globally. Johannesburg, being a developing city in one of the most affected countries in Africa during the pandemic, has experienced severe changes in traffic management and travel patterns as a result of the restrictions imposed on movement. Hence, this study examined the spatial variations in traffic during the pandemic. The study utilized data obtained from the TomTom Traffic Index for the city of Johannesburg from 2019 to 2021, with 2019 representing the period pre-COVID-19 with no lockdown restrictions, 2020 representing the period with restricted movement to limit spread of COVID-19, and 2021 representing a period of relaxed and minimized restrictions on movement. Our findings revealed that there was a variation in congestion levels between 2019–2021 with year 2020 having the least congestion from the beginning of the COVID-19 restrictions due to regulations enforced in movement and reduced travel. Our findings further revealed that traffic congestion was higher during weekdays than weekends during the three periods, with mini-bus taxis as the major contributors to congestion. Consequently, there is a need to discourage the use of single occupancy vehicles and invest in more sustainable means of transportation to ease the mobility of people and reduce traffic on major roads.

Suggested Citation

  • Thembani Moyo & Siphiwe Mbatha & Oluwayemi-Oniya Aderibigbe & Trynos Gumbo & Innocent Musonda, 2022. "Assessing Spatial Variations of Traffic Congestion Using Traffic Index Data in a Developing City: Lessons from Johannesburg, South Africa," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(14), pages 1-16, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:14:p:8809-:d:865975
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/14/8809/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/14/8809/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Christina Kakderi & Eleni Oikonomaki & Ilektra Papadaki, 2021. "Smart and Resilient Urban Futures for Sustainability in the Post COVID-19 Era: A Review of Policy Responses on Urban Mobility," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(11), pages 1-21, June.
    2. Sergejs Gubins & Erik T. Verhoef, 2012. "Dynamic Congestion and Urban Equilibrium," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 12-137/VIII, Tinbergen Institute.
    3. Panayotis Christidis & Juan Nicolás Ibanez Rivas, 2012. "Measuring road congestion," JRC Research Reports JRC69961, Joint Research Centre.
    4. Nora Harris & Tripp Shealy & Leidy Klotz, 2016. "Choice Architecture as a Way to Encourage a Whole Systems Design Perspective for More Sustainable Infrastructure," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(1), pages 1-16, December.
    5. Luetian Sun & Rui Song, 2022. "Improving Efficiency in Congested Traffic Networks: Pareto-Improving Reservations through Agent-Based Timetabling," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(4), pages 1-24, February.
    6. Gubins, Sergejs & Verhoef, Erik T., 2014. "Dynamic bottleneck congestion and residential land use in the monocentric city," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 51-61.
    7. Noor Ullah Khan & Munam Ali Shah & Carsten Maple & Ejaz Ahmed & Nabeel Asghar, 2022. "Traffic Flow Prediction: An Intelligent Scheme for Forecasting Traffic Flow Using Air Pollution Data in Smart Cities with Bagging Ensemble," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-23, March.
    8. Tanzina Afrin & Nita Yodo, 2020. "A Survey of Road Traffic Congestion Measures towards a Sustainable and Resilient Transportation System," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(11), pages 1-23, June.
    9. Nie, Qifan & Qian, Xinwu & Guo, Shuocheng & Jones, Steven & Doustmohammadi, Mehrnaz & Anderson, Michael D., 2022. "Impact of COVID-19 on paratransit operators and riders: A case study of central Alabama," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 161(C), pages 48-67.
    10. Chengpeng Wan & Zaili Yang & Di Zhang & Xinping Yan & Shiqi Fan, 2018. "Resilience in transportation systems: a systematic review and future directions," Transport Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(4), pages 479-498, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Maasago Mercy Sepadi & Vusumuzi Nkosi, 2023. "Health Risk Assessment of Informal Food Vendors: A Comparative Study in Johannesburg, South Africa," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(3), pages 1-15, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chen, Hengrui & Zhou, Ruiyu & Chen, Hong & Lau, Albert, 2022. "A resilience-oriented evaluation and identification of critical thresholds for traffic congestion diffusion," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 600(C).
    2. Rawan Rajha & Shino Shiode & Narushige Shiode, 2024. "Improving Traffic-Flow Prediction Using Proximity to Urban Features and Public Space," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 17(1), pages 1-21, December.
    3. Veronika Harantová & Ambróz Hájnik & Alica Kalašová & Tomasz Figlus, 2022. "The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Traffic Flow Characteristics, Emissions Production and Fuel Consumption at a Selected Intersection in Slovakia," Energies, MDPI, vol. 15(6), pages 1-21, March.
    4. Xu, Xiangdong & Qu, Kai & Chen, Anthony & Yang, Chao, 2021. "A new day-to-day dynamic network vulnerability analysis approach with Weibit-based route adjustment process," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 153(C).
    5. Kenneth Small, 2015. "The Bottleneck Model: An Assessment and Interpretation," Working Papers 141506, University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics.
    6. Chan, Ho-Yin & Ma, Hanxi & Zhou, Jiangping, 2024. "Resilience of socio-technical transportation systems: A demand-driven community detection in human mobility structures," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 190(C).
    7. Knockaert, Jasper & Verhoef, Erik T. & Rouwendal, Jan, 2016. "Bottleneck congestion: Differentiating the coarse charge," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 59-73.
    8. Raffaele Mauro & Andrea Pompigna, 2022. "A Statistically Based Model for the Characterization of Vehicle Interactions and Vehicle Platoons Formation on Two-Lane Roads," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(8), pages 1-22, April.
    9. Takayama, Yuki, 2018. "Time-varying congestion tolling and urban spatial structure," MPRA Paper 89896, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Narayanan, Santhanakrishnan & Antoniou, Constantinos, 2022. "Electric cargo cycles - A comprehensive review," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 278-303.
    11. Hörcher, Daniel & Graham, Daniel J., 2020. "MaaS economics: Should we fight car ownership with subscriptions to alternative modes?," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 22(C).
    12. Wandelt, Sebastian & Sun, Xiaoqian & Zhang, Anming, 2023. "Towards analyzing the robustness of the Integrated Global Transportation Network Abstraction (IGTNA)," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 178(C).
    13. HOSSAIN, Niamat Ullah Ibne & Amrani, Safae El & Jaradat, Raed & Marufuzzaman, Mohammad & Buchanan, Randy & Rinaudo, Christina & Hamilton, Michael, 2020. "Modeling and assessing interdependencies between critical infrastructures using Bayesian network: A case study of inland waterway port and surrounding supply chain network," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 198(C).
    14. repec:osf:socarx:tk93y_v1 is not listed on IDEAS
    15. Ma, Wenxin & Lin, Shichao & Ci, Yusheng & Li, Ruimin, 2024. "Resilience evaluation and improvement of post-disaster multimodal transportation networks," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 189(C).
    16. Surya Michrandi Nasution & Emir Husni & Kuspriyanto Kuspriyanto & Rahadian Yusuf & Bernardo Nugroho Yahya, 2021. "Contextual Route Recommendation System in Heterogeneous Traffic Flow," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(23), pages 1-21, November.
    17. Shenghan Zhou & Chaofan Wei & Chaofei Song & Yu Fu & Rui Luo & Wenbing Chang & Linchao Yang, 2022. "A Hybrid Deep Learning Model for Short-Term Traffic Flow Pre-Diction Considering Spatiotemporal Features," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(16), pages 1-14, August.
    18. Xu, Shu-Xian & Liu, Ronghui & Liu, Tian-Liang & Huang, Hai-Jun, 2018. "Pareto-improving policies for an idealized two-zone city served by two congestible modes," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 117(PB), pages 876-891.
    19. Feng, Hailin & Lv, Haibin & Lv, Zhihan, 2023. "Resilience towarded Digital Twins to improve the adaptability of transportation systems," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 173(C).
    20. Przemysław Śleszyński & Amir Reza Khavarian-Garmsir & Maciej Nowak & Paulina Legutko-Kobus & Mohammad Hajian Hossein Abadi & Noura Al Nasiri, 2023. "COVID-19 Spatial Policy: A Comparative Review of Urban Policies in the European Union and the Middle East," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(3), pages 1-30, January.
    21. Cayetano Medina-Molina & María de la Sierra Rey-Tienda & Eva María Suárez-Redondo, 2022. "The Transition of Cities towards Innovations in Mobility: Searching for a Global Perspective," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(12), pages 1-17, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:14:p:8809-:d:865975. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.