Natalia Zuniga-Garcia

Using over a thousand Americans’ population-weighted responses to a long-distance travel survey, this paper examines reductions in trips over 75-miles (one-way) in 2020, during the pandemic, versus behaviors in 2019. Negative binomial models of trip counts suggest that people age 25 to 64 took 0.20 fewer annual long-distance business trips during the pandemic, but people age 65 and older took 0.45 fewer business and 0.57 fewer non-business long-distance trips, on average. Household income was not a key predictor for long-distance non-business-trip-making during the pandemic, but was important in predicting long-distance trip rates for business purposes (both before and during the pandemic) and for non-business trips pre-pandemic.

By March of 2020, most cities worldwide had enacted stay-at-home public health orders to slow the spread of COVID-19. Restrictions on nonessential travel had extensive impacts across the transportation sector in the short term. This study explores the effects of COVID-19 on shared e-scooters by analyzing route trajectory data in the pre- and during-pandemic periods in Austin, TX, from a single provider. Although total shared e-scooter trips decreased during the pandemic, partially owing to vendors pulling out of the market, this study found average trip length increased, and temporal patterns of this mode did not meaningfully change. A count model of average daily trips by road segment found more trips on segments with sidewalks and bus stops during the pandemic than beforehand. More trips were observed on roads with lower vehicle miles traveled and fewer lanes, which might suggest more cautious travel behavior since there were fewer trips in residential neighborhoods. Stay-at-home orders and vendor e-scooter rebalancing operations inherently influence and can limit trip demand, but the unique trajectory data set and analysis provide cities with information on the road design preferences of vulnerable road users.