Source data for the publication Changes in car-bus mobility in the context of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine in Rzeszów, Poland (2018–2024) (dataset)

Abstract

The dataset deposited in the repository contains processed and harmonized empirical data used in the article examining changes in the hourly profiles of car traffic and demand for bus transport in Rzeszów (Poland) over the full study period 2018–2024. The input data come from two complementary sources: (1) the municipal ITS system, providing hourly traffic counts from monitoring locations (e.g., inductive loops and measurements on junctions and key corridors), and (2) automatic passenger counting (APC) in public transport, providing stop-based records of boardings and alightings that were originally collected at high temporal resolution and were subsequently aggregated to hourly intervals to ensure full comparability with the ITS data. The repository includes analysis-ready, quality-controlled and aggregated tables prepared consistently for the entire investigated period, covering three time profiles aligned with the study design—pre-pandemic (2018–2019), pandemic (2020–2021), and post-restriction (2022–2024)—with a clear distinction between weekdays and weekends and with complete 24-hour diurnal profiles. As part of the preparation workflow, standard quality-control procedures were applied throughout the study period, including completeness checks for hourly observations, removal of erroneous series and atypical/holiday days, and harmonization of temporal resolution and spatial referencing across sources. The deposited files therefore provide the key inputs required to reproduce the empirical steps of the study at the temporal and spatial-structure level, including hourly diurnal profiles, period-mean summaries, spatial aggregations for the monitoring network and public-transport stops included in the analysis, and change indicators used in comparative analyses (including inputs for statistical testing and spatial classification). In terms of metadata, the ITS component consists of processed hourly traffic-count tables organised by monitoring location (junction/corridor), approach/entry leg, movement relation and hourly timestamp, with traffic volume expressed as vehicles per hour, while the APC component consists of processed passenger-count tables derived from stop-level operational records organised by public-transport line/trip identifiers, stop identifiers and timestamps, with boardings and alightings aggregated to hourly intervals. Due to data-sharing conditions imposed by the system owners, the repository provides only processed and aggregated data limited to what is necessary to replicate the reported findings, while the original raw ITS and APC records remain with the respective source institutions; however, the same type of data is available and was prepared in a consistent manner for the full study period covered by the analyses (2018–2024).