The Outbreak of COVID-19 Pandemic in Relation to Sense of Safety and Mobility Changes in Public Transport Using the Example of Warsaw

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript still has some typos and grammatical errors.
The extended names of the acronyms must be entered in capital letters in the legend 
The template for bulleted lists needs to be standardised 
Unit of measurement needs to be inserted in the y-axis of figures 1 and 2 
The source of figure 3 needs to be specified 
We need to check the formatting of references.
I think it is a good idea to put the last part of the conclusions in discursive form (no questions). 

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your second revision and more time spent on reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate the additional and valuable comments provided on our resubmitted manuscript. We believe that this version of our paper addresses further concerns in detail, as we made sure that each one of the your comments has been addressed carefully and this paper is revised accordingly.

In what follows the reviewers’ comments are in black and the authors’ responses are in red.

1. The manuscript still has some typos and grammatical errors

Our manuscript will undergo extensive English revision with the use of MDPI editing services.

2. The extended names of the acronyms must be entered in capital letters in the legend 

 We have explained all of the abbreviations on the very beginning of the manuscript – lines 27-33. It was made according to formatting standards.

3. The template for bulleted lists needs to be standardised .

Thank you for that comment. We have standardised bulleted lists.

4. Unit of measurement needs to be inserted in the y-axis of figures 1 and 2 

We have added units in the figures 1 and 2

5. The source of figure 3 needs to be specified.

We have added the source of Figure 3.

6. We need to check the formatting of references

The formatting was prepared, after the changes of first round of reviews, due to MDPI formatting standards.

7. I think it is a good idea to put the last part of the conclusions in discursive form (no questions).

We would like to keep it as a questions. First of all – because we have no answers yet, as we are still in the pandemic time. Second of all – those questions give us a possibility to undergo further research.

Please let us know if you still have any questions or concerns about the manuscript. We will be happy to address them, now in timely manner.

Sincerely,

The authors of paper “sustainability-1482975”

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I had the opportunity to read the revisited version of the paper "The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in relation to sense of safety and mobility changes in public transport on the example of Warsaw," and I found it improved.

However, you should pay attention to the formatting of the additions made. For example, in table 2, the writings in the second column are not read entirely.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your second revision and more time spent on reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate the additional and valuable comments provided on our resubmitted manuscript. We believe that this version of our paper addresses further concerns in detail, as we made sure that each one of the your comments has been addressed carefully and this paper is revised accordingly.

In what follows the reviewers’ comments are in black and the authors’ responses are in red.

1. you should pay attention to the formatting of the additions made. For example, in table 2, the writings in the second column are not read entirely.

We have made changes according to this advice. As this table is long it is hard to estimate how will it look in final version. But once again – we have made a glance at it and we hope it looks better now and more readable.

Please let us know if you still have any questions or concerns about the manuscript. We will be happy to address them, now in timely manner.

Sincerely,

The authors of paper “sustainability-1482975”

Reviewer 3 Report

At first glance, the article, submitted for review, makes a better impression than the previous version. The authors partially corrected the article with comments included in the reviews. This process, however, is difficult to assess completely positively. The article is still a description of a case study. Which does not mean that it was done according to art. In the introduction, the authors added a paragraph in which they inform that an in-depth review of the literature has been carried out. Definitely what we see in the article cannot be called an in-depth review of the literature, but at best a superficial one. Until this part of the work is properly corrected it will be difficult to publish it. The selection of countries that are taken into account in the literature analysis seems to be completely random. This has not been properly argued. The authors changed the description of the survey by extending its time scope and adding information that the survey will also be carried out in other cities in the future. It all seems rather chaotic. The statistical description of the survey results should be considered an added value. The discussion section has been added as 10 and should go before the results. First, discuss the research results, compare them to other studies, and then summarize your own results.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your second revision and more time spent on reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate the additional and valuable comments provided on our resubmitted manuscript. We believe that this version of our paper addresses further concerns in detail, as we made sure that each one of the your comments has been addressed carefully and this paper is revised accordingly.

In what follows the reviewers’ comments are in black and the authors’ responses are in red.

1. The article is still a description of a case study. Which does not mean that it was done according to art.

We have made a great effort to prepare and conduct research which was necessary for the manuscript. The first idea was to compare two countries (and their capital cities) with completely different approach to pandemic restrictions – Poland (strict with restrictions) and Sweden (very liberal with restrictions). But during the research we found great problems with completing the data from the side of Sweden. As we didn’t have any additional funding, that probably would allow us to undergo the study in Sweden – we have decided to do in-depth research in Warsaw with collaboration with public transport organiser. We took Warsaw as a case study. The main objective of the manuscript was to show the changes in mobility, travel behaviour and sense of safety in public transport in this city in the time of pandemic. We are a bit confused about your comment regarding that our article based on city of Warsaw, wasn’t made according to art. Due to theory of case study articles, they “tend to focus on qualitative data using methods such as interviews, observations, and analysis of primary and secondary sources (e.g. newspaper articles, photographs, official records). Sometimes a case study will also collect quantitative data.” And also “A case study is a research approach that is used to generate an in-depth, multi-faceted understanding of a complex issue in its real-life context. It is an established research design that is used extensively in a wide variety of disciplines, particularly in the social sciences”.

We did our best to add all of that issues in this manuscript. If not – please indicate what went wrong precisely. We went through most important articles in this field (literature covers 79 positions), analysed situation in Warsaw as our case study, analyse through other data in Europe available in this field (unfortunately not that much in Poland, but as indicated – we wanted to show capital city). According to other reviewers, after the changes we have made – we made great improvement and they find this research interesting.

2. The selection of countries that are taken into account in the literature analysis seems to be completely random. This has not been properly argued.

The article included research review from Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, The Netherlands and Hungary, as it included main data which related to the research undertaken in the article. As we did the proper literature review and went through most important research available (but I am also aware – not all of the research available – as there would be no space for that in one article) and for many reasons concentrate on Europe, we have gathered most important data we needed.

But to make it more clear – we have made additional changes underlining the decisions we made while choosing the countries described in the manuscript, especially in Table 1.

3. The authors changed the description of the survey by extending its time scope and adding information that the survey will also be carried out in other cities in the future. It all seems rather chaotic.

As it was explained during first round of reviews, the time scope was by mistake described, that it ended in June, where in fact it ended in March 2021. So it was not extended, it was rather shortened. The research covered the time of second and third wave of COVID-19 in Poland. It was indicated correctly in Table 2, but, by mistake, in text – saying that it took place until June. The start of the survey was at the end of second wave, when the restrictions have been loosened , through third wave, so we  came to the conclusion that this time is just right. As mentioned in my answers to your present review, due to funding, we were not able to undergo further research. But we are looking for to make such a research in other cities, especially, taking into consideration vaccination programme in correlation to still critical number of people getting infected and dying. And also our manuscript showing the city of Warsaw was a pilotage, and we are looking for using the same template of research for other major cities in Poland (with over 500k inhabitants).

4. The discussion section has been added as 10 and should go before the results. First, discuss the research results, compare them to other studies, and then summarize your own results.

We have described our research results in paragraph no. 7 and additional correlation statistics as 8.  Due to first round of reviews we have decided to separate conclusions from discussion, and so we did. But as you find it more clear, due to your suggestions – we rearranged the structure and hope it will be more readable after the changes.

Please let us know if you still have any questions or concerns about the manuscript. We will be happy to address them, now in timely manner.

Sincerely,

The authors of paper “sustainability-1482975”

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors,

I am glad I have the opportunity to review your manuscript. The paper is well composed, the structure is correct, the literature review is adequate and current, and the argument is very interesting.

My only recommendation is to enrich literature review (and conclusions) in order to describe the connection between mobility patterns and public policies.

I congratulate the authors for their research.

Author Response

We thank you for your time spent carefully reviewing the manuscript. We appreciate the thorough and thoughtful comments provided on our submitted manuscript. We believe that the revised version of our paper addresses reviewers’ concerns in detail, as we made sure that each one of the comments has been addressed carefully and this paper is revised accordingly

In what follows the reviewers’ comments are in black and the authors’ responses are in red.

1. to enrich literature review (and conclusions) in order to describe the connection between mobility patterns and public policies

We have added some additional papers that describe connection between mobility and public policies, including N. Askitas et al. and M. Herrera et al.

Sincerely,

The authors of paper “sustainability-1482975”

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

After two rounds of review, I think the article is on a much better level than at the beginning. You can still have some comments on the study and the selection of countries, but the added value of the article exceeds its shortcomings and I believe that it can be adopted in this version.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript focuses on a topical issue and emphasises some fundamental aspects of research in the field of mobility.
It is necessary to underline if the research methodology is applicable also in other contexts and to reformulate lines 57-59 if there are several hypotheses to be considered.
If there is only one hypothesis it is advisable to specify it without a bulleted list.
All acronyms should be included in an expanded form when they are mentioned for the first time in the text. 

We also recommend an extension of the literature in paragraph 2 by considering the following works :
1)Basbas, S., Georgiadis, G., Campisi, T., & Tesoriere, G. (2021, September). 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 (pp. 339-353). Springer, Cham.
2)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.
3)Abdullah, M., Ali, N., Dias, C., Campisi, T., & Javid, M. A. (2021). Exploring the Traveler's Intentions to Use Public Transport during the COVID-19 Pandemic While Complying with Precautionary Measures. Applied Sciences, 11(8), 3630.
4) Abdullah, M., Ali, N., Javid, M. A., Dias, C., & Campisi, T. (2021). Public Transport versus Solo Travel Mode Choices during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Self-reported Evidence from a Developing Country. Transportation Engineering, 100078.
5)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.

It is advisable to include Italy as a case study in Table 1 as it is the first European country to have found cases of COVID-19 positives.
I  recommend reading the following works
1) Murgante, B., Borruso, G., Balletto, G., Castiglia, P., & Dettori, M. (2020). Why Italy first? Health, geographical and planning aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak. Sustainability, 12(12), 5064.
2)Pepe, E., Bajardi, P., Gauvin, L., Privitera, F., Lake, B., Cattuto, C., & Tizzoni, M. (2020). COVID-19 outbreak response, a dataset to assess mobility changes in Italy following national lockdown. Scientific data, 7(1), 1-7.
It is necessary to define the limitations of the research and the possible steps of advancement in the final part.
All images should be included in high resolution.
It is necessary to review the formatting of the tables and in particular of table 2. 
It is necessary to insert the source of figure 3 
In the final part, it would be appropriate to mention the vaccination campaign and the hypotheses of restrictions considering the current status of a possible 4th wave of the pandemic. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I had the opportunity to read the paper "The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in relation to sense of safety and mobility changes in public transport on the example of Warsaw," and I found it very interesting.

The paper examines the changes that have occurred in travel behavior in the case of the capital city of Poland – Warsaw, concerning the measures undertaken to control the spread of the COVID-19 and the sense of safety among passengers that were supposed to be provided by the public transport organizers. 

However, there are some suggestions you should follow:

• I suggest submitting the paper to a proofreading service or having it read by an English mother tongue; there are many grammatical errors in the paper;
• Moreover, I suggest following the author guidelines for the citation in the text; the number of the citation should go in brackets. For example, [1-3], not [1]-[3] as in the paper;
• The introduction section should present the topic, declare the objective of the paper and present its structure. The research hypotheses should be postponed, after the literature review, in the methodology section and should derive from it;
• The methodology (case study) should declared both in abstract and introduction sections;
• In the conclusion section the results of the study confirming the research hypotesis should be made clearer and the discussion should be more linked to the results of the study.

Reviewer 3 Report

The article is part of the research on the communication behavior of residents in the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. I believe that any work of this type is important in terms of cognition. It allows for the formulation of changes in transport policies to encourage residents to use public transport, especially since the national authorities in Poland suggested in the media that public transport is easily transmitting the virus. As a result, many residents gave up using public transport.

The article is roughly correctly structured, although two things stand out right from the start. The first is about the ending. The discussion was combined with a summary. I consider this to be a mistake and suggest separating the two. In the discussion, one should reflect on the results obtained, indicate their weaknesses, what should be improved, which the results cannot tell about, refer to other studies on this subject in good foreign journals, and summarize the most important results of the research work.

The second important issue - the article concerns Poland and the functioning of public transport in Warsaw. The literature review shows that the Authors absolutely did not take care of reviewing the national literature on the impact of COVID-19 on the functioning of transport. Many articles or even issues of special trade magazines have been published on this subject. For example: https://www.ejournals.eu/PKGKPTG/2020/23(2)/.

The main scientific problem in the article is the question of the questionnaire research. The study was not shown to be representative. Although it is assumed that the distribution for the sample of 1000 answers is similar to the normal distribution, however, this was not emphasized in the article. In addition, the study was conducted over a very long period from November to June, where COVID-19 factors fluctuated. The restrictions have changed, and the fear of potential passengers has changed. Too long duration of the study is crucial for the obtained results and may undermine the sense of these studies.

The article has many editorial detriments. Has been incorrectly edited. The list of literature is not compliant with the editorial guidelines and contains many errors.