COVID Traffic Analysis
2021
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Did Korea's social distancing levels affect highway traffic? My first data analysis project.
The question
During COVID-19, Korea had tiered social distancing rules that changed how much people went out. I wondered: did those levels actually affect traffic?
Not exactly a novel research question, but I was curious and it seemed like something you could test with public data.
Data
Two sources:
- Highway tollgate traffic volume — from Korea’s Public Data Portal
- Daily COVID case counts — from Corona Live (코로나라이브)
I pulled both into CSV, cleaned them up in Python with Pandas, and started plotting scatter charts and bar graphs to see if any pattern jumped out.
What I found
No clean causal proof — correlation isn’t causation, and a million other things affect traffic. But there was some visible relationship between distancing tier changes and traffic dips. Enough to be interesting, not enough to publish in a journal.
More importantly, this was my first real data analysis project — collecting data, cleaning it, choosing chart types, accepting that your hypothesis might not pan out.
