Abstract Manager

Household travel surveys are widely used to measure travel behaviour in Canadian cities. Perhaps best known as the basis for calibrating travel demand forecasting models, these surveys are critical benchmarks for measuring changes in travel behaviour over time. These changes are used to assess progress towards sustainability, affordability and other goals. They also are key in tailoring transportation investments and policies to changing demographic and economic conditions. TAC’s Urban Transportation Indicators series and other trends studies have been key to assessing these changes.

The recent pandemic resulted in disruptions in travel behaviour that were unprecedented in their scale, breadth and speed. The switch to remote working and schooling, a transition to hybrid working, sharp drops in transit ridership and shifts to active transportation are among the best-known travel impacts. However, the pandemic also amplified pre-existing trends, notably a drop or stability in daily trip rates and growth in online shopping. These impacts will have profound influences on investment and policy decisions for years to come.

A new suite of surveys is helping to benchmark travel behaviour now that pandemic impacts have receded. However, travel behaviour is still evolving to a ‘new normal’ state, and new topics, like equity in transportation access, are of interest to policy makers. This continued uncertainty must also consider factors like global and domestic economic fluctuations, supply chain disruptions and inflation.

Transportation officials seek to understand what pandemic-influenced travel patterns mean for future travel demands while they struggle to meet today’s urgent needs. To move forward reliably with new benchmarks, it is important first to have an evidence-based understanding on what the new surveys are and are not telling us. This presentation reviews changes through the pandemic in key travel behaviour parameters like trip rates and working-from-home, and how these relate to changing demographic and other factors. The review is based on the authors’ work on several recent household travel surveys in cities across Canada, thereby enabling a comparison by geography and by city size and structure. While some trends can be tied directly to historical tendencies, new trends are emerging from the pandemic-induced changes. The presentation concludes with insights on the types of factors that should be measured in future surveys, and comments on emerging trends in surveys and how they can be deployed with ‘big data’ and other complementary data sources.