Skip to main content

One year later: How Covid-19 changed the landscape of transportation

We have now spent one whole year living and adapting through the historic COVID 19 pandemic. Over this year, we have seen a dramatic change in our day to day life and it’s needless to say that this shift have had an immense impact on transport systems. In this very special edition of Breakfast Webinars we invite ITRL researchers to present their work related to COVID-19. Join us as we explore the answer to the question: What REALLY changed in the transportation sector because of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Time: Tue 2021-05-04 15.00 - 16.30

Location: Zoom (Link will be sent out a few days in advance)

Export to calendar

In true ITRL fashion we take a multi-perspective lens to understand the effects of the pandemic on people, mobility and goods.

Join us on May 4th at 3 pm CEST for this exciting webinar.

Register at the bottom of this page.

Moderator: Prof. Philip E. Paré (Purdue University, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Philip E. Paré

Philip E. Paré is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018, after which he went to KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden to be a Post-Doctoral Scholar from 2019-2020. He received his B.S. in Mathematics with University Honors and his M.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University in 2012 and 2014, respectively. At the University of Illinois, he was the recipient of the Robert T. Chien Memorial Award for excellence in research and named a Mavis Fellow. His research focuses on networked control systems, namely modeling, analysis, and control of virus spread over networks.

Speakers

Portrait of Erik Almlöf
Erik Almlöf

Erik Almlöf will present "Who continued travelling by public transport during COVID-19? Socioeconomic factors explaining travel behaviour in Stockholm 2020 based on smart card data."

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed travel behaviour and reduced the use of public transport throughout the world, but the reduction has not been uniform. In this study we analyse the propensity to stop travelling by public transport during COVID-19 for the holders of 1.8 million smart cards in Stockholm, Sweden, for the spring and autumn of 2020. We suggest two binomial logit models for explaining the change in travel pattern, linking socioeconomic data per area and travel data with the probability to stop travelling.The first model investigates the impact of the socioeconomic factors: age; income; education level; gender; housing type; population density; country of origin; and employment level. The results show that decreases in public transport use are linked to all these factors.

The second model groups the investigated areas into five distinct clusters based on the socioeconomic data, showing the impacts for different socioeconomic groups. During the autumn the differences between the groups diminished, and especially Cluster 1 (with the lowest education levels, lowest income and highest share of immigrants) reduced their public transport use to a similar level as the more affluent clusters.The results show that socioeconomic status affect the change in behaviour during the pandemic and that exposure to the virus is determined by citizens’ socioeconomic class. Furthermore, the results can guide policy into tailoring public transport supplyto where the need is, instead of assuming that e.g. crowding is equally distributed within the public transport system in the event of a pandemic.

Portrait of Elisa Bin
Elisa Bin

Elisa Bin will present "The Trade-Off Behaviours between Virtual and Physical Activities during COVID-19 Pandemic Period".

This study investigates how individuals have changed their activity-travel patterns, during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The roles of the digitalisation solutions in replacing physical activities, and which behavioural changes that may be kept after the pandemic period are investigated. Case studies from Sweden, Italy and India are in particular analysed and compared in order to investigate the plausible impacts of the restriction measurements to the behavioural changes observed. The results show that the opportunity and possibility to change the behaviour matter. The ones who made conscious decisions not to travel for certain activities (whether it was imposed on them by external actors or by self-conscience) are the ones who consistently had a significant reduction in their trips. This is where different levels of restrictions of movement matter during the restriction period. However, the estimation results do not show any strong indicationof countries’ influence (and their restriction policy) on one’s likelihood to adopt the (new/online based) behaviours for all the activities after the restriction period. The acceptance and long-term adoption of using technology alternatives tie more to the personality and socio-demographic group of the given person, which highlights the importance of promoting alternatives as a part of longer-term behavioural and lifestyle changes.

Portrait of Claudia Andruetto
Claudia Andruetto

Claudia Andruetto will present "Transition from physical to online shopping alternatives due to the COVID-19 pandemic".

This study aims to investigate the transition from physical to online shopping alternatives during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic period at the individual level. The focus areas of the study are Sweden and Italy, two European countries that implemented contrasting prevention measures. This study analyses the impacts of the pandemic to the shopping behaviour and identifies, among the respondents, who have changed the behaviour the most, how respondents have adopted different shopping strategies, what the main differences between Italian and Swedish responses are and the influence of population density on the behavioural change. Multivariate statistical analyses, including linear and binary logistic regressions and multinomial logit models were used to analyse the dataset. The results confirm the differences between Italy and Sweden in terms of social distancing measures, social structures and technology readiness. Moreover, the socio-demographic and household structures of the respondents were found instrumental in influencing the amount and the direction of change in shopping behaviour during the first wave of the pandemic period. The output of this studyhighlights the impact that contrasting policies have on citizens, and also the importance of having policies that are adaptable to different situations.

Portrait of Liselotte Mulder
Liselotte Mulder

Liselotte Mulder will present "Resilient and sustainable goods transportation system in an uncertain and changing future".

Covid-19 has uncovered many vulnerabilities in the logistics system. A shift from an efficient and optimised system to a resilient and sustainable transport system is evident. This talk will introduce some tools and methods which are new for the transport industry. The tools can be used to achieve the desired shift by identifying immediate as well as long term actions targeting deep rooted mental models. In addition some observations on what happened during the pandemic and identified directions for future research as results of the Resilient E2E  project, will also be presented.

Register here