Abstract
This research examines how bus use impacts the transmission of the COVID-19 virus in urban areas, focusing on the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Los Angeles County. Using data from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority on station-level ridership in October 2019, April 2020, and October 2020, we impute station-level ridership for other months in our data and map these to 231 Countywide Statistical Areas (CSAs) in Los Angeles County, which are used by the Los Angeles Department of Public Health to report community COVID-19 transmission. We obtain CSA-specific COVID-19 case counts between March 16, 2020, and January 31, 2021, to create a monthly panel of bus ridership and COVID-19 cases. After using a dynamic panel regression, our findings provide no evidence that increased ridership levels or trip lengths are associated with a higher incidence of COVID-19 at the CSA level in Los Angeles County in the period between June 2020 and January 2021.
