Cities can enhance their sustainability planning by prioritizing accessibility as a performance metric for transportation planning. In this context, accessibility measures the ease of reaching opportunities and captures more characteristics of sustainable cities than the more conventionally used mobility metrics, focusing on the overall ability to move and generally recommending faster speeds to overcome distance. However, how cities can prioritize accessibility in planning is understudied. This research presents a case of Tempe, Arizona, putting accessibility into practice through a 20-min lens. Using a 20-min threshold for all modes, the city aims to promote travel for daily activities that is less reliant on private autos. The analysis presented here documents the challenges that planners face when planning for accessibility. The challenges range from technical points to decisions that need to be made about the quality of the built environment. The analysis also shows that Tempe, which is a classically suburban city of wide roads and single-family homes that was built around the automobile, is highly accessible by a 20-min metric by bicycling, walking and transit. These results suggest that planners focus on street network improvements that prioritize accessibility as part of a sustainability strategy.

Human behavior is notoriously difficult to change, but a disruption of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to bring about long-term behavioral changes. During the pandemic, people have been forced to experience new ways of interacting, working, learning, shopping, traveling, and eating meals. A critical question going forward is how these experiences have actually changed preferences and habits in ways that might persist after the pandemic ends. Many observers have suggested theories about what the future will bring, but concrete evidence has been lacking. We present evidence on how much US adults expect their own postpandemic choices to differ from their prepandemic lifestyles in the areas of telecommuting, restaurant patronage, air travel, online shopping, transit use, car commuting, uptake of walking and biking, and home location. The analysis is based on a nationally representative survey dataset collected between July and October 2020. Key findings include that the “new normal” will feature a doubling of telecommuting, reduced air travel, and improved quality of life for some.

Attitudes and habits are extremely resistant to change, but a disruption of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to bring long-term, massive societal changes. During the pandemic, people are being compelled to experience new ways of interacting, working, learning, shopping, traveling, and eating meals. Going forward, a critical question is whether these experiences will result in changed behaviors and preferences in the long term. This paper presents initial findings on the likelihood of long-term changes in telework, daily travel, restaurant patronage, and air travel based on survey data collected from adults in the United States in Spring 2020. These data suggest that a sizable fraction of the increase in telework and decreases in both business air travel and restaurant patronage are likely here to stay. As for daily travel modes, public transit may not fully recover its pre-pandemic ridership levels, but many of our respondents are planning to bike and walk more than they used to. These data reflect the responses of a sample that is higher income and more highly educated than the US population. The response of these particular groups to the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps especially important to understand, however, because their consumption patterns give them a large influence on many sectors of the economy.

This study identifies differences in COVID-19 related attitudes and risk perceptions among urban, rural, and suburban populations in the US using data from an online, nationwide survey collected during April-October 2020. In general, rural respondents were found to be less concerned by the pandemic and a lower proportion of rural respondents support staying at home and shutting down businesses. While only about half of rural respondents are concerned about getting severe reactions themselves from COVID-19 (compared to ~60% for urban and suburban respondents), all place types respondents are concerned about friends or family members getting severe reactions (~75%).

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted billions of people around the world. To capture some of these impacts in the United States, we are conducting a nationwide longitudinal survey collecting information about activity and travel-related behaviors and attitudes before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey questions cover a wide range of topics including commuting, daily travel, air travel, working from home, online learning, shopping, and risk perception, along with attitudinal, socioeconomic, and demographic information. The survey is deployed over multiple waves to the same respondents to monitor how behaviors and attitudes evolve over time. Version 1.0 of the survey contains 8,723 responses that are publicly available. This article details the methodology adopted for the collection, cleaning, and processing of the data. In addition, the data are weighted to be representative of national and regional demographics. This survey dataset can aid researchers, policymakers, businesses, and government agencies in understanding both the extent of behavioral shifts and the likelihood that changes in behaviors will persist after COVID-19.

This article uses data from the first wave of the COVID Future Panel study to evaluate attitudes towards COVID-19 and their influence on traveler behaviors. An exploratory factor analysis identified two underlying constructs based on the measured attitudes, namely “Concern about Pandemic Response” and “COVID Health Concern.” A cluster analysis based on the factor scores yielded four groups with distinct attitudes. Those primarily concerned about the pandemic response traveled the most using private vehicles, while those equally concerned about the response to the pandemic and the health effects of COVID-19 were found to use personal bicycles and transit the most.