Publication Detail

The Pulse of the Nation on 3 Revolutions: Annual Investigation of Nationwide Mobility Trends

UCD-ITS-RR-22-08

Research Report

National Center for Sustainable Transportation

Suggested Citation:
Circella, Giovanni, Keita Makino, Grant Matson, Jai Malik (2022) The Pulse of the Nation on 3 Revolutions: Annual Investigation of Nationwide Mobility Trends. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis, Research Report UCD-ITS-RR-22-08

This study investigates the disruptive changes brought to transportation by emerging technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of repeated cross-sectional datasets that were collected with multiple survey waves administered in various regions of the United States and Canada. The first data collection was administrated in 2019 through the recruitment of respondents with an online opinion company. As the COVID-19 pandemic started to disrupt the world starting in 2020, two additional rounds of data collection were carried out in Spring 2020 and Fall 2020, to study the disruptions in activity and travel patterns that were caused by the pandemic. Starting in 2020, the data collection was extended to 15 U.S. regions: Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco in California; Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, New York, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Tampa and Washington D.C. in other U.S. regions. In addition, the study covered also Toronto and Vancouver in Canada. Several thousands of respondents participated in the various waves of surveys. Some of these respondents were part of the longitudinal component of the dataset, built through inviting previous survey respondents to participate in the new waves of data collection. Additional respondents were recruited using online opinion panels and convenience sampling. The study enabled by the analysis of the data collected with this series of surveys helps understand how mobility patterns are evolving in the country as new technologies disrupt the transportation sector and they evolve from the pre-pandemic to the post-pandemic era. It helps make planning decisions and guide policymaking through an annual data collection that allows us to collect critically-needed information on the evolution of travel patterns and the adoption of new transportation technologies and trends in the selected regions, every year. In this report, the researchers briefly describe the series of data collection and present some summary findings from the analysis of the data collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key words: Longitudinal Data Collection, Individual Lifestyles, Shared Mobility, Travel Behavior, Vehicle Ownership, COVID-19