COVID-19 has massively affected the lives of people all over the world. This paper presents first insights in current and potential future effects of the virus and the Dutch government's ‘intelligent lockdown’ on people's activities and travel behaviour. Findings are based on a representative sample of about 2500 respondents from the Netherlands Mobility Panel (MPN). We show that approximately 80% of people reduced their activities outdoors, with a stronger decrease for older people. 44% of workers started or increased the amount of hours working from home and 30% have more remote meetings. Most of these workers report positive experiences. Students and school pupils, however, are mostly not happy with following education from home. Furthermore, the amount of trips and distance travelled dropped by 55% and 68% respectively when compared to the fall of 2019. So-called ‘roundtrips’ (e.g. a walking or cycling tour) gained in popularity. People are currently more positive towards the car and far more negative towards public transport. Changes in outdoor activities seem to be temporal, with over 90% of people who currently reduced their outdoor activities not expecting to continue this behaviour in the future after corona. However, 27% of home-workers expect to work from home more often in the future. In addition, 20% of people expect to cycle and walk more and 20% expect to fly less in the future. These findings show that the coronavirus crisis might result in structural behavioural changes, although future longitudinal analyses are needed to observe these possible structural effects.@en

Residential self-selection (RSS) is the theoretical mechanism that explains that the impact of the built environment on travel behaviour is weaker than bivariate correlations suggest, because mode attitudes influence both the built environment and travel behaviour and therefore at least partially account for the bivariate relationship. Recently, the concept of travel-related reasons for residential choice has been introduced, which reflects the actual extent to which the travel-related characteristics of the built environment were considered during the relocation decision. In this paper, we hypothesize that travel-related location reasons are stronger predictors of the built environment choice than generic mode attitudes. This hypothesis is examined by estimating both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal Structural Equation Model using data gathered in the Netherlands. The results suggest that the travel-related location reasons are indeed stronger predictors for built environment location than travel mode attitudes and that the directions of causality between attitudes, travel-related location reasons, the built environment, and travel behaviour often run in both directions. Substantively, our findings indicate that public transport use is most strongly affected by the built environment (after controlling for both stated reasons and attitudes), while car and bicycle use are hardly affected. From a practical point of view, this suggests that transforming the built environment to be more friendly to public transport may increase the use of public transport, but that, at least in the Netherlands, such a strategy would not work well if the aim were to reduce car use or increase bicycle use.@en

To inform policies aimed at more sustainable travel behaviour, previous research has investigated the concept of multimodality. The notion underlying this line of research is that increasing the degree of multimodality will lead to less car dependence and therefore more sustainable travel behaviour. This paper investigates multimodality by inferring modality styles and revealing their response to exogenous variation in the form of the weather. The main idea of this paper is that travellers with a more multimodal modality style are more sensitive to exogenous variation, and that they are therefore more likely to resort to the use of the car when ‘car-favouring’ conditions present themselves. The results show that the effects of weather conditions on mode choices do indeed differ between three modality styles. The identified modality styles can be summarised as (1) bike + car; (2) car mostly and (3) multimodal. For the third class, which has the highest degree of multimodality, the use of the sustainable modes is more strongly affected by weather conditions when compared to the first, less multimodal, class. The least multimodal second class meanwhile is least affected by a change in weather conditions. More multimodal travellers thus seem to be more susceptible to exogenous variation, which might prevent the formation of sustainable travel habits or patterns. Based on these results, the claim that a higher degree of multimodality will lead to more sustainable behaviour and that policy makers should aim to realise a shift towards more multimodal modality styles needs to be nuanced. Policy makers should instead focus directly on increasing the attractiveness of sustainable travel modes, which will inadvertently lead to more multimodal modality styles.@en

Open Government efforts are criticized for providing limited value. Instead of looking at a value, we investigate the usefulness of web-based open government portals and apps. Specifically, we investigated the relationship between digital transparency and usefulness. We analyzed perceived digital transparency and usefulness in a survey of 112 respondents using Partial Least Square (PLS) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The results show that perceived functionality, transparency, and efficiency influence usefulness but that functionality of apps and efficiency are more important than transparency. Usefulness can be created without having high levels of transparency, as the public wants answers to their questions. Apps should be designed for efficient use, as users have limited time and resources. Apps having pre-defined functional views can be useful to provide quick insight but might limit transparency by not offering other views and insights. Opening raw data using portals can provide higher levels of transparency, although more time and effort are needed to analyze. Both portals providing access to raw data and apps having pre-defined views are needed for open government and transparency as they serve other stakeholder groups and purposes.@en

Like in many other countries, the Dutch government instructed people to work from home where possible during the COVID-19 pandemic to halt the transmission of the virus. This policy seems to have resulted in a structural increase in working from home and teleconferencing that will outlast the pandemic. However, the longer-term effects on travel behaviour are still unclear. Making use of panel data collected using the Netherlands Mobility Panel, this paper has two main aims. First, it analyses developments in working from home and teleconferencing since COVID-19. Second, it estimates the expected post-pandemic effects on travel behaviour. The results show that compared to before the pandemic, the average number of hours that people work from home has doubled and roughly two-thirds of respondents indicate that they teleconference more often. We estimate that structural, post-pandemic increases in working from home and teleconferencing will result in a negative effect on distances travelled by train (-3% to-9%), by bus, tram, and metro (-1% to-5%) and car (-1 to-5%). The estimated effect on the distance travelled by bicycle (-2% to 0%), and walking (0% to +1%) is smaller or even positive, due to people making more complementary trips for other purposes when working from home. When interpreting these results, we should keep in mind that due to various other factors, such as population growth, total travel demand will still grow in the near future.@en

Policies to increase the amount of time people spend working from home were widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since research suggests that the resulting increase in working from home will outlast these policies themselves, policymakers want to understand the relations between working from home and travel behaviour. We apply longitudinal modelling techniques to estimate the relations between working from home and travel behaviour using panel data from the Netherlands Mobility Panel spanning the years 2017 through 2021. This allows us to separate between-persons and within-persons relations and effects and to see whether these effects changed during the pandemic. We find a negative effect of working from home on commute travel time both before and during the pandemic and a positive effect on leisure travel time only before the pandemic. The sizes of these effects remained roughly similar during the pandemic, although the extent to which working from home affected commute travel time increased during the pandemic. The net effect of working from home on travel time is negative, indicating that working from home policies could be used to reduce travel time. The results also show that some of the relationships between working from home and travel behaviour have changed during the pandemic. As a result, policymakers and transport operators should be careful when estimating future travel demand based on extrapolations of relationships found only before or during the pandemic.@en