Using pedestrian modelling to inform virus transmission mitigation policies: A novel activity scheduling model to enable virus transmission risk assessment in a restaurant environment

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a large impact on the world. The virus spreads especially easily among people in indoor spaces such as restaurants. Hence, tools that can assess how different restaurant settings can impact the potential spread of an airborne virus and that can assess the effectiveness of mitigation policies are of high value....

Growing evidence that physical activity-supportive neighbourhoods can mitigate infectious and non-communicable diseases

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, dubious assertions that population density increased spread of the virus led to premature and dangerous recommendations promoting suburban sprawl. In 2020, we published a commentary in Cities & Health to refute these recommendations. We hypothesized that features of activity-supportive...

Working from home: Should we stimulate it for transport reasons?: Analysis of travel behaviour during COVID-19 in the Netherlands

The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management is committed to enhancing the accessibility and sustainability of the Dutch mobility system. Working from home (WFH) has been discussed as a policy lever to decrease commute travel and, thereby, congestion for decades. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this discussion regained momentum. WFH...

Analysis of the capabilities of Pedestrian Dynamics for reproducing physical distancing during COVID-19 in bidirectional flows

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed people's lives in greater or lesser degree since the outbreak back in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Due to the high transmissibility of the virus and with the aim of preventing the virus from continue spreading, several measures have been applied during the last two years, which now have become part of people's...

Post-pandemic office real estate: A pilot study of using scenario planning to develop scenarios with quantitative office space demand for corporate real estate

The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic is profound and enduring to the entire world. A ‘recovery’ to go back in time is unlikely to happen due to the lack of uncertainty in the future. The darkest time will eventually pass, whereas post-pandemic, the era in which the pandemic is perceived to have subsided, can still accelerate existing trends...

An activity-based modeling approach to assess the effects of activity-travel behavior changes and in-home activities on mobility: Estimations based on different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Rotterdam-The Hague Metropolitan Area

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting corona crisis has had a profound impact on mobility in the Netherlands and in the entire world. This study aims at predicting, modeling, and analyzing changes in the activity-travel behavior of individuals in the Rotterdam-The Hague Metropolitan Area, the Netherlands, during different...

COVID-19 and its long-term effects on activity participation and travel behaviour: A multiperspective view

This paper discusses possible long-term effects of COVID-19 on activity-travel behaviour. Making use of theories and concepts from economics, psychology, sociology, and geography, this work argues that lasting effects can be expected, and specifically that peak demand among car and public transport users may be lower than if the pandemic...

Ethics of digital contact tracing and COVID-19: who is (not) free to go?

Digital tracing technologies are heralded as an effective way of containing SARS-CoV-2 faster than it is spreading, thereby allowing the possibility of easing draconic measures of population-wide quarantine. But existing technological proposals risk addressing the wrong problem. The proper objective is not solely to maximise the ratio of...