Commuting before and after COVID-19

Thomas, Francene M.F.; Charlton, Samuel G.; Lewis, Ioni; Nandavar, Sonali

Major life events like COVID-19 have the potential to change how people think about and use transport systems. The COVID-19 pandemic has created an extended period of disruption in peoples’ lives and could result in long-term changes towards travel attitudes, and use of transport services. There has previously been little research available on changes towards travel attitudes and use of domestic travel as a result of pandemics. To investigate the changes in attitudes to travel resulting from COVID-19 we distributed a survey to 787 respondents in Australia and New Zealand asking about car use, car sharing, public transport, and air travel before, during, and after COVID-19 travel restrictions. The results showed attitudes towards travel were negatively affected, particularly attitudes towards public transport and international air travel. Further, although respondents indicated some recovery in attitudes when asked to consider when travel restrictions were removed, they did not recover to the levels of positivity seen pre-COVID. There were slight differences between the two countries in their post-COVID attitudes, possibly due to their different experience of travel restriction. Both countries, however, may be useful as a preview for the rest of the world given the early cessation of the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of the survey.