Impact of COVID-19 on city-scale transportation and safety: An early experience from Detroit.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented levels of disruption to the local and regional transportation networks throughout the United States, especially the Motor City---Detroit. That was mainly a result of swift restrictive measures such as statewide quarantine and lock-down orders to confine the spread of the virus and the rising number of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths. This work is driven by analyzing five types of real-world data sets from Detroit related to traffic volume, daily cases, weather, social distancing index, and crashes from January 2019 to June 2020. The primary goals of this work are: i) figuring out the impacts of COVID-19 on the transportation network usage (traffic volume) and safety (crashes) for the City of Detroit, ii) determining whether each type of data (e.g. traffic volume data) could be a useful factor in the confirmed-cases prediction, and iii) providing an early future prediction method for COVID-19 rates, which can be a vital contributor to life-saving advanced preventative and preparatory responses. In addressing these problems, the prediction results of six feature groups are presented and analyzed to quantify the prediction effectiveness of each type of data. Then, a deep learning model was developed using long short-term memory networks to predict the number of confirmed cases within the next week. The model demonstrated a promising prediction result with a coefficient of determination ( ) of up to approximately 0.91. Furthermore, six essential observations with supporting evidence are presented, which will be helpful for decision-makers to take specific measures that aid in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and protecting public health and safety. The proposed approaches could be applied, customized, adjusted, and replicated for analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on a transportation network and prediction of the anticipated COVID-19 cases using a similar data set obtained for other large cities in the USA or from around the world.