Urban Travel Transition and New Mobility Behaviours in Light of Covid-19 Working Group Meeting

The Working Group on travel transitions and new mobility behaviour aims to identify how we can better anticipate travel transitions to inform expectations about future travel demand and policymaking and planning.  

By “travel transitions”, the Working Group means to address those changes that induce a break from existing and habitual patterns of behaviour and lead from one state or condition to another. These changes may involve directive action, as in the case of voluntaristic policies like those aiming to induce the clean energy transition or France, or reactive, as in the uptake of many new mobility services. Such transitions have occurred in the past and may be occurring today. These transitions involve far-reaching structural changes in socio-technical systems that enable particular desirable societal functions (e.g., mobility, energy, healthcare). In this respect, transitions are multi-dimensional processes that often include technological, material, organizational, institutional, political, economic, and socio-cultural changes. As such, transitions typically involve a broad range of actors, institutions, and technological elements. 

The Working Group focuses both on how to become aware of transitions that are in the process of unfolding and how to anticipate transitions which might occur in the short to medium-term, recognising that transitions in the longer term are almost impossible to predict and to a large extent dependent on decisions that society makes in the interim.  In particular, the group will look at these questions through the lens of the Covid-19 pandemic and how it may cayalyse many changes already underway. The Group aims to push forward the research agenda on new mobility behaviour and produce recommendations on how to better anticipate travel transitions to inform expectations about future travel demand and policy making and planning.