Recreational mobility prior and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession negatively affected many people’s physical, social, and psychological health and has been shown to change population-level mobility, but little attention has been given to park visitations as an indicator. Estimating the frequency of park visitations from aggregated mobility data of all the parks in Washington State (USA), we study trends in park use one year prior to and two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that the gravity model is a robust model for the park visitation behavior in different spatial resolutions of city level and state level and different socio-economical classes. Incorporating network structure, our detailed analysis highlights that high-income level residents changed their recreational behavior by visiting their local parks more and a broader recreational options outside of their local census area; whereas the low-income residents changed their visitation behavior by reducing their recreational choices.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number55
Number of pages12
JournalCommunications Physics
Volume7 (2024)
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 14 Feb 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-5956-3137/work/173053564

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas