Spatiotemporal Changeability of the Load of the Urban Road Transport System under Permanent and Short-Term Legal and Administrative Retail Restrictions

In Poland, in 2018, the act on Sunday retail restrictions was introduced, changing citizen’s spatial mobility (altered patterns of transport behaviour related to shopping on a weekly scale). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic (from 2020) on transport behaviour during this time has had an impact, since people were encouraged to stay at home and limit their mobility to an absolute minimum. As a result, the main aim of the article was to identify spatiotemporal changeability of the load of the urban road transport system under permanent and short-term legal and administrative retail restrictions and to determine its spatial and temporal nature on the example of Łódź (a big city in central Poland) during 2018–2021. For that purpose, the authors used three types of source data, i.e., official governmental normative data (acts, ordinances, etc.), informative data (official pandemic announcements issued during ministerial press conferences, governmental social media content, etc.), and objective empirical data (induction loops). The pandemic restrictions imposed on top of the existing permanent retail restrictions were shown to distinctly shape the weekly distribution of traffic. In weeks with non-trading Sundays, the percentage of vehicle traffic on weekdays was substantially higher than on weekends, which was particularly noticeable during the first year of the pandemic (2020). Long-term observations have also shown that people began to plan their weekends differently upon the initial implementation of Sunday retail restrictions.