We carried out an international online survey about changes in everyday mobility during the COVID-19 outbreak in 21 languages, collecting more than 11,000 responses from more than 100 countries. In this paper, we present our analysis about commuting travels of the responses between 23 March and 12 May 2020 from the fourteen countries with 100 or more responses, namely Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, and the UK. Home office is used typically by between 40% and 60% of working respondents. Among people with workplaces with possibility for home office, the percentage is between 60% and 80%. Among people with workplaces where presence is essential, the percentage does not typically go beyond 30%. This result potentially implies an ultimate magnitude of a strong home office measure. Among those who continued to commute but switched commuting transport modes from public transport to others, the COVID-19 infection risk in public transport is the reason that is most often referred to, but many of those who changed to private cars and to bicycles report reduced travel time, too. Measures to encourage the use of active travel modes where possible are strongly recommended, as this would potentially mitigate undesirable modal shift towards private motorized modes triggered by perception of infection risks while travelling with public transport.
The ever-increasing popularity of bike-sharing schemes has added an additional mode to the transport regime in many cities. The data produced by lending and returning bicycles at geographically diverse stations has stimulated numerous studies. We focus on the City of Vienna bike-sharing system (CityBike Wien; CBW) and its relationship with the public transport system, asking whether bike-sharing serves as competitor, relief or supplement. We approach the question by surveying the total CityBike Wien trip data from 2015about 1 million records. We cleanse and route all bicycle trips and compare them with routed alternative public transport (PT) journeys in terms of travel time ratios and detour factors. After calculating and plotting the cumulative frequencies of travel times and distances of both modes of transport as well as comparing the current PT and CBW usage levels, we conclude that CityBike functions as a supplement to Vienna's public transport.
This research aims to give an overview of Japan's national-level transport planning schemes, and to discuss interplays between them and recoveries from natural disasters. In the first part, Japan's national spatial development plans and long-term planning schemes for railway, road, port and airport infrastructures are reviewed and compared. In the second part, imbalance embedded in the current planning scheme for different modes are demonstrated making use of recent post-disaster reconstruction processes. A literature-based desktop research is carried out focusing on Japanese literature. These include, but not limited to, official government reports and planning documents, statistical data, and handbooks for experts in the field. All of the long-distance modes have their planning schemes with different levels of comprehensiveness and robustness for each mode. Expressways and high-speed railways have the most comprehensive and robust network plans, while conventional railway, airports and seaports have ones with limited extent. Because of this, post-disaster reconstruction processes from damages to the infrastructure work differently in particular for conventional railways and for expressways in rural areas, which are competitors against each other. Strong framework for intermodal and multimodal transport is still in lack in Japan. Important structural imbalance between modes, in particular between conventional railway and expressway exist, and it becomes obvious in case of a natural disaster. Multimodal planning, frameworks for flexible adjustment of once-made long-term plans, and addressing imbalances regarding robustness between railways and expressways are identified as future challenges of the country's planning schemes.
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