How is everyone doing under the threat of COVID 19? Although living in China with relatively low counts of positive cases, the extent to which COVID 19 has impacted my life is still substantial. In terms of transportation, one still has to wear face masks when taking subways, trains (normal and high-speed trains alike), and air planes. With nose and mouth cover, I can no longer enjoy as much food and drink as I want to during my journey, which makes long haul trips much less fun and enjoyable.

Transportation world-wide has also taken a hard hit as well (Arellana et al., 2020), as academics and governments around the world have taken transportation as one of the most heavily relied means for the virus to spread (Vrabac et al., 2022). Although domestic railway and vehicle transportation industries have also been in downfall, the aviation industry have almost been put to the ground. Previously, the most important means to tie the world together and make the world the “village” as we know today, international aviation have almost always been on the rise before the start of 2020. Now amid the fear of COVID 19, many countries have severed its aviation connection with countries with running-away case counts, leading to almost complete halt in commercial international aviation, especially passenger flights (Dube et al., 2021). Take one of the largest airline groups, the Air France-KLM for example, this group has been reporting massive job losses since July 2020, and is even considering a break-up between the two formerly independent airlines: Air France and Royal Dutch Airlines, known as KLM (Air France KLM, 2021).

However, the sudden attack of COVID-19 does not pose only negative externalities to the transportation industry (Grewe et al., 2021). As the aviation world comes to a halt (if not a full stop), climatologists around the globe are eager to find out the impact of so many grounded planes on global carbon budget and climate change. Although may not be comparable in scale as industrial burning of fossil fuel on the ground, planes do emit CO2, NOx and other pollutants directly into upper troposphere, sometimes into stratosphere, together with formation of contrail-cirrus clouds that alter regional albedo in the top of the troposphere (Minnis et al., 2013). Condensation cores and greenhouse gases stay in stratosphere for extended time because - as its name implies - there is not much convection or advection of air in stratosphere. Because the last time there was seldom any airplane over North America was 11 Sept. 2001, climatologists have got another chance for comparison between congested airspace and empty air space. Might be good news amid all these down times!

However, it must also be noted that even with the help of COVID-19 (although it sounds weird), it is still considerable possibility that the emission reduction goal for aviation industry set forth during the Paris Agreement will not be met (Grewe et al., 2021), because of base volume of air transportation before the outbreak. As global aviation has already been on the recovery since 2021, the fact has become obvious that we cannot rely on the virus to cancel out previous green house gas emissions.

Other unexpected externalities arise from the gloomy days with COVID-19 on the ground as well. Fearing infection from public transportation, residents autonomously avoid usage of public transport, while many residents were not able to leave home at all because of strict lockdown measures. Urban lockdown measures have generated noteworthy results in air quality improvement as well as reducing green house gas emissions (Bergantino et al., 2021). In certain regions, it is also likely that temporary lockdown measures and pausing of public transportation systems have triggered a long-term paradigm shift among residents in favour of more environmental friendly transportation measures such as cycling.

Of course things on the ground may still be more troubling and worrying for participants of long-haul passenger and cargo transportation. It is in next week's post that we will talk about road transportation amid this pandemic and unfortunate truck drivers. In England.

References

Air France KLM. (2021, July 30). Results. Retrieved August 16, 2021, from https://www.airfranceklm.com/en/finance/publications/results

Arellana, J., Márquez, L., & Cantillo, V. (2020). COVID-19 Outbreak in Colombia: An Analysis of Its Impacts on Transport Systems. Journal of Advanced Transportation, 2020, e8867316. https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/8867316

Bergantino, A. S., Intini, M., & Tangari, L. (2021). Influencing factors for potential bike-sharing users: an empirical analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research in Transportation Economics, 86, 101028. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.retrec.2020.101028

Dube, K., Nhamo, G., & Chikodzi, D. (2021). COVID-19 pandemic and prospects for recovery of the global aviation industry. Journal of Air Transport Management, 92, 102022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2021.102022

Gaskin, D. J., Zare, H., & Delarmente, B. A. (2021). Geographic disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths: The role of transportation. Transport Policy, 102, 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2020.12.001

Grewe, V., Gangoli Rao, A., Grönstedt, T., Xisto, C., Linke, F., Melkert, J., et al. (2021). Evaluating the climate impact of aviation emission scenarios towards the Paris agreement including COVID-19 effects. Nature Communications, 12(1), 3841. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24091-y

Minnis, P., Bedka, S. T., Duda, D. P., Bedka, K. M., Chee, T., Ayers, J. K., et al. (2013). Linear contrail and contrail cirrus properties determined from satellite data. Geophysical Research Letters, 40(12), 3220–3226. https://doi.org/10.1002/grl.50569

Sahraei, M. A., Kuşkapan, E., & Çodur, M. Y. (2021). Impact of Covid-19 on Public Transportation Usage and Ambient Air Quality in Turkey. Promet - Traffic&Transportation, 33(2), 179–191. https://doi.org/10.7307/ptt.v33i2.3704

Vrabac, D., Shang, M., Butler, B., Pham, J., Stern, R., & Paré, P. E. (2022). Capturing the Effects of Transportation on the Spread of COVID-19 With a Multi-Networked SEIR Model. IEEE Control Systems Letters, 6, 103–108. https://doi.org/10.1109/LCSYS.2021.3050954