Many people have been vaccinated and many restrictions have been lifted. Still, in the second late summer of the pandemic, life still feels different than it used to be. This can also be seen in traffic.
Berlin – The corona pandemic has caused almost a third of adult Germans to either travel less or not at all by bus and train. This is shown by the results of a survey by the opinion research institute YouGov on behalf of the German Press Agency.
According to this, eleven percent of adults have not used public transport at all since the beginning of the corona pandemic in spring 2020. 19 percent of the participants in the representative survey stated that they have been traveling by bus and train less often since then.
For 28 percent of Germans, nothing has changed in terms of mobility as a result of Corona. They use public transport as often as they did before the pandemic. Only two percent of those surveyed told the polls that they had been traveling by bus and train more often than before since the beginning of the Corona crisis.
After all, 36 percent of adults stated that they generally did not use public transport – regardless of Corona. Three percent of the respondents were unable to make any concrete statements about their mobility behavior.
In the past few months, buses and trains have often been emptier than before the pandemic. An exception, however, was the time of the strikes on the railways, when travelers were sometimes crowded on the few trains that ran. The fact that to this day there are sometimes fewer passengers on the buses and trains is not only due to the concerns of some people about being infected with the corona virus. Home office, short-time work, job loss and limited private contacts mean that some people simply have fewer reasons to leave their own neighborhood.
Because according to the survey, the majority of Germans live more withdrawn due to the pandemic in late summer 2021 than before the spread of Covid-19. Around 29 percent of those surveyed stated: “I am extremely cautious in public and reduce my contacts to a minimum.” Almost as many people (30 percent) also take special precautions in their private lives. When asked about their current behavior, they answered: “I am cautious in my private life and consciously restrict my behavior and my contacts.” Almost a third (31 percent) of the respondents said, however, that he or she behaved as far as this In view of state restrictions, it is possible again in full or at least almost as it was before the corona pandemic. Six percent of the participants in the survey did not find themselves in any of the three answer options. Four percent of those questioned answered “don’t know”.
According to the survey, people over 60, who overall have a higher risk of becoming seriously ill from an infection, tend to behave a little more cautiously than younger people. Women pay a little more attention to reducing their contacts than men. Among those who state that they are largely behaving in the same way as they did before the pandemic, voters who ticked the AfD in 2017 are more represented than supporters of other parties. dpa
