Suggested Citation:
Handy, Susan L., Sarah Grajdura, Ran Sun, Elisa Barbour, Jesus M. Barajas, Miguel Jaller, Mollie D'Agostino, Giovanni Circella (2023)

Post-Covid Transportation Scenarios: Evaluating the Impact of Policies

The COVID-19 pandemic caused changes in how people travel. Whether these changes will persist, return to pre-COVID trends, or move in other directions is uncertain, creating an unprecedented challenge for transportation planners. This project explores several possible scenarios for transportation after the COVID-19 pandemic and assesses possible policies to improve outcomes. We develop four post-COVID scenarios for California: COVID trends persist, return to pre-COVID trends, urbanism returns, and urbanism bounces ahead. The scenarios are defined by assumptions for five key modalities: telecommuting, e-shopping, ride-hailing, public transit, and active travel. We use outputs from the state’s travel demand model and implement a postprocessing approach to model these scenarios. The results show increases in trips and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) compared to the pre-COVID forecast across the first three scenarios but a small decrease for the fourth scenario, which assumes the strongest shift toward alternatives to driving. An equity analysis of the model results provides additional insights. A wide array of policies could help the state to minimize the negative impacts while maximizing the positive impacts of post-COVID trends from the standpoint of both reducing GHG emissions and enhancing transportation equity.