Investigating The Role of Emotional Well-Being During The Mobility Restriction Policy Into People’s Intention to Travel After The Policy is Lifted: Learning From The COVID-19 Outbreak In Indonesia

Abstract

The policy of mobility restriction, as a response to the outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), had substantial implications for our daily lives and consequently affected our emotional well-being (EWB). While some Indonesian cities, especially Greater Jakarta as the epicenter of COVID-19 in Indonesia, planned to relax their mobility restriction policy in the last quarter of 2020, there is a question of how the EWB changes during the mobility restriction will influence activity participation after the lifting of the policy. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how EWB affected the intention to travel after the mobility restrictions were lifted. An online questionnaire survey was conducted in Indonesia in May of 2020 to collect respondents’ personal and spatial characteristics, travel characteristics during and after the mobility restriction policy, their attitude towards the pandemic, and EWB. In investigating their relationship, a structural equation modeling was performed. The result showed that the number of days of isolation/quarantine had the effects of reducing EWB, reducing out-of-home activities, and increasing the intention to participate in out-of-home activities after lifting of the mobility restrictions. The decrease of out-of-home activities most likely reduces EWB and consequently the decrease of EWB is found to tend to influence people to travel more after the ending of the mobility restriction policy. In addition, the behavior required to prevent COVID-19 disease was also found to explain the attitude towards COVID-19. This study proposes several policies to mitigate the increase of travel demand following the mobility restriction period, which might reduce the possibility of more spreading of the COVID-19 disease.