Sustainable response strategy for COVID-19: Pandemic zoning with urban multimodal transport data

In the post-COVID-19 era, the pandemic response is increasingly difficult and entails a high cost to society. Existing pandemic control methods, such as lockdowns, greatly affect residents' normal lives. This paper proposes a pandemic control method, consisting of the scientific delineation of urban areas based on multimodal transportation data. An improved Leiden method based on the gravity model is used to construct a preliminary zoning scheme, which is then modified by spatial constraints. The modularity index demonstrates the suitability of this method for community detection. This method can minimize cut-off traffic flows between pandemic control areas. The results show that only 24.8% of travel links are disrupted using our method, which could reduce both the impact of pandemic control on the daily life of residents and its cost. These findings can help develop sustainable strategies and proposals for effective pandemic response. •This paper is the first to use Leiden method to delineate pandemic control areas.•The modularity is 0.4185, which demonstrates the suitability for pandemic zoning.•Only 24.8% of resident travel links are disrupted in our method.•This study reduces policy costs and achieves sustainable response to COVID-19.