Review Reports - Mobility Patterns and Mode Choice Preferences during the COVID-19 Situation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript has some typos and grammatical errors. It is advisable to check the template for references.

In the introductory part it is necessary to explain the novelty of the research and to insert more bibliographical references considering the different modes of transport, both public, shared and private, and the relative trends in the various contexts.
We therefore recommend reading the following research papers
1)Politis, I., Georgiadis, G., Papadopoulos, E., Fyrogenis, I., Nikolaidou, A., Kopsacheilis, A., ... & Verani, E. (2021). COVID-19 lockdown measures and travel behavior: The case of Thessaloniki, Greece. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 10, 100345.
2)BASBAS, Socrates, et al. Factors Influencing Public Transport Demand in Sicily During COVID-19 Era: A Study of Commuters’ Travel and Mode Choice Behaviors. In: International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications. Springer, Cham, 2021. p. 339-353.
3)CAMPISI, TIZIANA, et al. A region-wide survey on emotional and psychological impacts of COVID-19 on public transport choices in Sicily, Italy. Trans. Transp. Sci, 2021, 2: 1-10.

Probably an initial flow chart could exemplify the understanding of the research steps adopted.
It is necessary to include more explanation related to the drafting of the questionnaire and the definition of the survey sample.
Considering that the questionnaire was addressed to various nations, is the figure of 636 cases congruent with the total populations of the states analyzed?
If yes, motivate the choice.
Through which online channel was the questionnaire administered?
A table with all the questions of the questionnaire and the possible answers could help in the comprehension of the acquired variables.
It is necessary to insert a greater commentary to accompany figures 1 and 2 and also 3 and 4 as well as tables 2 and 3.
It is necessary to insert a legend and in extended form all acronyms during their initial insertion in the text.
It is necessary to make more evident with a date or at least the definition of months the different pre and post pandemic periods included in the analysis.

On the whole, it is necessary to check the formatting of all tables in the text and to verify the motivation of some parts of the text inserted in bold.
It is necessary to include the limitations of the research in the final part of the manuscript.

Author Response

The manuscript has some typos and grammatical errors. It is advisable to check the template for references.

Thank you for this comment. We double-checked and proofread the paper once again to eliminate this.

In the introductory part, it is necessary to explain the novelty of the research and to insert more bibliographical references considering the different modes of transport, both public, shared, and private, and the relative trends in the various contexts.

We included one more paragraph dealing with the research gap and make novelty more explicit.

We, therefore, recommend reading the following research papers
1)Politis, I., Georgiadis, G., Papadopoulos, E., Fyrogenis, I., Nikolaidou, A., Kopsacheilis, A., ... & Verani, E. (2021). COVID-19 lockdown measures and travel behavior: The case of Thessaloniki, Greece. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 10, 100345.
2)BASBAS, Socrates, et al. Factors Influencing Public Transport Demand in Sicily During COVID-19 Era: A Study of Commuters’ Travel and Mode Choice Behaviors. In: International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications. Springer, Cham, 2021. p. 339-353.
3)CAMPISI, TIZIANA, et al. A region-wide survey on emotional and psychological impacts of COVID-19 on public transport choices in Sicily, Italy. Trans. Transp. Sci, 2021, 2: 1-10.

Thank you for this very important comment and suggestions. We strengthen the introduction part with some more information and suggested references.

The online questionnaire was distributed in each country through national partners, and the channel was the available social networks of them. It began with a few people, sending them the link to the questionnaire, and each one was asked to distribute it through their social networks so that the selection procedure was random, but obviously non-probabilistic since it was not possible to have a complete census of residents in each country.
To solve possible deficiencies in the representation of the sample, a random block design was used. This design allows to obtain representativeness with small and not very representative samples since the total sample is divided into small groups (in our case the national samples) and the same procedure is applied in each one so that all the groups go through the same effects or conditions (in our case the situations "before", "during" and "after" the health crisis). The effects were consistent in all groups. The study is separated by countries, and the comparison between them, we leave it for another article; here we present the global results. In addition, we have used non-parametric statistics, precisely because it does not assume or estimate any parameter, which would force the data to conform to some known distribution. This approach is applied when the samples are small or it is suspected that they will not fit distribution models, a situation that occurs when events are not frequent, such as accidents or the effects of therapies in patients with rare diseases.

A table with all the questions of the questionnaire and the possible answers could help in the comprehension of the acquired variables.

We can add as an annex the questionnaire, but the extent will be huge.

It is necessary to insert a greater commentary to accompany figures 1 and 2 and also 3 and 4 as well as tables 2 and 3.

We Thank you for this comment. Though, we believe that commentary is included in the text extensively. We believe repetition would be of no use.

It is necessary to insert a legend and in extended form all acronyms during their initial insertion in the text.

We deleted codes from the tables (which we used during the data collections), all other acronyms are very well known (e.g. N, St. Dev).

It is necessary to make more evident with a date or at least the definition of months the different pre and post-pandemic periods included in the analysis. Moreover, the numbers of months were more or less determined by the duration of the different phases of the pandemic.

We discussed this with all the authors in detail. This information is included in the text (section 2.1 Sample)

On the whole, it is necessary to check the formatting of all tables in the text and to verify the motivation of some parts of the text inserted in bold.

Thank you for this comment. We revised the whole text including tables and formatted text without bold use.

It is necessary to include the limitations of the research in the final part of the manuscript.

A short limitations part was included.

Reviewer 2 Report

In this study, the authors presented the results of a questionnaire survey regarding the variations in mobility patterns during the COVID-19 situation. This study included the data collected from ten countries through snowball sampling. The author used non-parametric tests, including the Friedman Test and Wilcoxon tests, to analyze the data. The authors have tried their best to convey some information. However, the paper suffers lack of generalized findings and insufficient data. Merely 636 cases are not sufficient to represent the mobility patterns of ten different countries. Further, the final data contains only 456 cases to generate findings for ten countries’ mobility patterns. The women's representation (419) in the data is almost double that of men's representation (214). About the occupation, (351+127+56+46 = 586 why not 636?) the something is missing. Probably removed the invalid responses?

Due to these major limitations, the results and findings of this study cannot be generalized to such a large context (ten countries). The findings may also lead to the wrong interpretation of the mobility patterns, suggesting ineffective mobility management plans. The authors may redesign the questionnaire survey to ask about mobility modes and patterns describing the different phases of the COVID-19 in the survey to increase the number of survey responses from each country.

Author Response

The greater participation of women than men is one of the characteristics common to online surveys. Here we can simply say that the difference in percentages has been expected.

However, considering the great diversity of gender that is currently recognized (difference between sex and gender), the data on gender is offered only to characterize the sample, in its description, since we have not established any differentiation in the answers to the questions related to the objectives of this study. We wanted to analyze the changes that the threat of COVID-19 has caused in people, regardless of sex, gender, or sexual orientation with which they identify. We have found no reasons to look for differences by gender in this study. We do not say that there cannot be, simply that we have not cared (there are already some questionnaires on fears of COVID-19 [“Coronavirus Anxiety Scale-CAS” (Lee, 2020); the FCV-19S (Ahorsu et al., 2020)], where it would make sense to differentiate by gender, but we have not measured this variable, because it does not meet the objectives of this study).

Regarding the fact that the number of respondents does not agree with the size of the sample (example: employment status), it is because some left some questions unanswered, which is also a frequent situation in all surveys, whether they are administered online or in person. No mandatory condition was introduced in the questionnaire, except for those questions that allowed us to obtain a personal code to be able to match the responses in the three periods, and others that were necessary for the development of this study.

Thank you for this comment. You are perfectly right: We cannot generalize the data. But on the other hand, we could not find a single study that produced data that could be generalized. We have a large sample of answers from all over Europe and get an impression of the reactions of people to the prevailing situation as far as their mobility behavior is concerned. Our results may and can be seen in the concert of all the studies carried out on this subject. In the discussion, we have inserted references that can help to put our results in a perspective.

Reviewer 3 Report

This article studies how mode choice has evolved through the COVID-19 crisis. The novel aspect from other research is that it also questions whether these changes will last on the long term.

From a formal point of view, it is well organised and clearly written. I have not noticed any grammatical or orthographic errors.

The methodology is sound and properly defined, and results are presented in a comprehensible and detailed manner.

The authors acknowledge the limitations of their paper: it does not delve into the motives of the travellers for their decisions, and their memory of habits several months in the past is likely to be not very reliable.

There are 3 self-citations, but they are relevant to the content of this work.

As a very minor comment for the publication of the paper: it is probably a problem that happens only in the review copy of the paper, but if possible tables should be kept in a single page (e.g., tables 6 and 8).

Probably a future study could evaluate with more data how closely user preferences followed the trends observed in this paper.

Thanks to the authors for their good work, and to the editor for providing me with the opportunity to review it.

Author Response

Thank you for this comment. In the final version of the manuscript all the tables will be kept in a single page.

Reviewer 4 Report

Overall, I found the article to be interesting and relevant to the current pandemic situation. I have some comments and suggestions to further improve the manuscript:

A brief description of Randomized Block Design and how it was applied in this study could be added into the "Design" section.
Since the sample was collected from 10 countries, there needs to be some discussion on this aspect. How does it affect the sample representativeness? and could there there be any biases in the results?
I could not understand the terms "B2b", "D2b" etc. in the tables.
The volume of results is not sufficient for a full length article, however, the article does have the originality factor considering that it is not easy to collect repeated-measures data.
Some more discussion is needed on why several other reported that walking frequency increased during the pandemic, whereas this study reported that it reduced during the pandemic.
I believe the literature review and discussion section can be further strengthened by citing some more articles. Some suggestions are given below. Note that these are not mandatory, the authors can cite other articles if they find relevant.
- Javid, M. A., Abdullah, M., Ali, N., & Dias, C. (2021). Structural Equation Modeling of Public Transport Use with COVID-19 Precautions: An Extension of the Norm Activation Model. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 100474.
- Muley, D., Shahin, M., Dias, C., & Abdullah, M. (2020). Role of transport during outbreak of infectious diseases: evidence from the past. Sustainability, 12(18), 7367.
- Jenelius, E., & Cebecauer, M. (2020). Impacts of COVID-19 on public transport ridership in Sweden: Analysis of ticket validations, sales and passenger counts. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 8, 100242.
etc. etc.

Author Response

A brief description of Randomized Block Design and how it was applied in this study could be added into the "Design" section.

Thank you for this comment, we added this part.

Since the sample was collected from 10 countries, there needs to be some discussion on this aspect. How does it affect the sample representativeness? and could there there be any biases in the results?

Thank you for this comment. There can always be biases in the studies, even if the sample is probabilistic (knowing the previous probabilities that each person in the population is selected, which implies making the selection on the census and that the chosen people decide to answer.

We have tried to obtain a quick result on an issue that involves great social costs, and we have used the methodological resources most in line with the characteristics of the samples obtained.

Replication, carrying out other studies with the same objectives, is what will provide us with confirmation of the validity of our results, but for such replication to be possible, our study must be known.

As said, our study needs to be seen as part of the concert of studies, as we have discussed in our paper. We strengthen this part in the paper.

I could not understand the terms "B2b", "D2b" etc. in the tables.

The terms "B2b", "D2b" etc. in the tables are references to the analysed questionnaire questions. The extreme difficulty of organizing the database of this study (in which it is necessary to match the answers that each person gave to the same questions in each of the three stages or periods of time) led us to include this type of references in the variable names considering the possibility of making the database available to other researchers in a repository (a trend already required by some journals) and thus facilitate its understanding and reduce errors in the variables selection for statistical treatment. In our case, the first letter indicates whether that variable or measurement corresponds to B (efore), D (uring) or A (fter), followed by the number that the question had in the questionnaire.

However, the reviewer's observation is very proper, so we are going to eliminate these references, which do seem to introduce confusion, and we will leave the text.

Some more discussion is needed on why several other reported that walking frequency increased during the pandemic, whereas this study reported that it reduced during the pandemic.

Thank you for this comment. We included some more information on this topic in the discussion part.

I believe the literature review and discussion section can be further strengthened by citing some more articles. Some suggestions are given below. Note that these are not mandatory, the authors can cite other articles if they find relevant.
- Javid, M. A., Abdullah, M., Ali, N., & Dias, C. (2021). Structural Equation Modeling of Public Transport Use with COVID-19 Precautions: An Extension of the Norm Activation Model. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 100474.
- Muley, D., Shahin, M., Dias, C., & Abdullah, M. (2020). Role of transport during outbreak of infectious diseases: evidence from the past. Sustainability, 12(18), 7367.
- Jenelius, E., & Cebecauer, M. (2020). Impacts of COVID-19 on public transport ridership in Sweden: Analysis of ticket validations, sales and passenger counts. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 8, 100242.
etc. etc.

Thank you for this very important comment and suggestions. We strengthen the introduction part with some more information and suggested references.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript still contains grammatical errors and typos.
Please check the formatting of the acknowledgments and references.
COVID in the title and text/tables should be standardised using the uniform COVID-19 or COVID-19 wording.

Sub-paragraphs need to be numbered
Naming of the axes in the figures/graphs should be done, and the formatting of the axes should be standardised where possible (figures 1-2-3-4).

Reviewer 2 Report

Again, due to the small sample size, the study is not recommended for publication.

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors have addressed the comments properly.