The COVID-19 pandemic led to a substantial increase in the number of people working from home (telecommuting), in turn leading to unprecedented changes in mobility patterns worldwide. Due to the changing context of the pandemic, there is still a significant gap in knowledge regarding the effects of working from home on workers' travel patterns. The main goal of this work is to unravel the interrelationship between telecommuting during the COVID-19 pandemic, the frequency of active travel for non-work utilitarian purposes, and local accessibility levels around workers' homes. This study uses a longitudinal approach by analyzing travel and telecommuting behavior data from a two-wave survey administered in Montreal in 2019, pre-pandemic, and 2021, during COVID-19 (n = 452). Through a set of weighted multi-level linear regressions, we study the effects of telecommuting on the frequency of active travel for non-work utilitarian purposes, mediated by local accessibility around the household. Results show that the effect of telecommuting on non-work active travel for utilitarian purposes is highly dependent on local accessibility levels around the person's household. For workers living in high local accessibility areas, an increase in telecommuting during the pandemic has induced an increase in active trips for non-work utilitarian purposes. On the other hand, for workers residing in low local accessibility neighborhoods, the effect is the opposite. This research provides insights into the effects of telecommuting on non-work active travel, an area that is currently of interest to policy-makers and practitioners working towards increasing the level of physical activity among individuals through travel.
Investment in light-rail transit (LRT) has been one of the main strategies of large metropolitan areas in the last decade to tackle environmental, economic, and social issues. In Montreal, Canada, a C$7 billion LRT system is currently under construction and is expected to significantly affect mobility patterns across the metropolitan region. It is crucial to identify how the impacts of such large public investments vary across societal groups to assess whether the distribution of benefits is fair and equitable. Using data from an online survey and a binary logistic modeling approach, we investigated the ways in which intentions to use this new LRT system differ across gender identities. First, we found that women are less likely than men to have an intention to use LRT. Our modeling results show that there are statistically significant differences across gender identities in the effect of certain sociodemographic and travel-behavior characteristics that explain the intention to use the LRT system. In respect of trip purpose, while women and men intend to use LRT for work trips to the same extent, men intend to use LRT for leisure and discretionary travel more than women. Our findings can help in guiding further research into gender gaps in transport studies and inform practitioners on how gender can be considered in LRT policy decisions so that the benefits of major public-transit investments are more equitably distributed.
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