Suggested Citation:
Gulhare, Siddhartha and Giovanni Circella (2025)

Brief: A Detailed Look at How the Pandemic Changed Travel Patterns Across Regions in Northern California Megaregion

Many studies have focused on the shifts in travel patterns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and how travel demand continues to evolve in the post-pandemic era. Key metrics such as trip volume–the total number of trips within a specific area–help explain the pandemic’s impact on travel demand over time. However, to fully understand changes in travel behaviors, it is also important to analyze where trips start and end—otherwise known as Origin-Destination (OD) demand.To better understand OD demand during and after the pandemic, our research team developed a data-driven methodology to analyze travel patterns across different regions, times of day, days of the week (weekday and weekend), and trip purpose. This study used passively collected location-based data from the StreetLight Data platform (StreetLight Data, 2022) in the form of weekly OD matrices of all vehicle modes, segmented by various relevant variables. We focused on the Northern California Megaregion, which includes 21 counties from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Sacramento region and the northern part of the San Joaquin Central Valley. The study period spanned from January 2019 to October 2021.

This  policy  brief  is  drawn  from  the  report  “The  “New  Normal”: Evaluating the Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Mobility Patterns in California Using Passively-collected Data” available at www.ucits.org/research-project/2022-07.