In this week’s UC Davis LIVE: COVID-19, an engineer and an environmental economist will talk about the profound impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on mobility and travel. Some people transitioned to work-from-home situations, while other essential workers had to continue showing up for work in person — and many people have lost their jobs entirely.
In addition, the pandemic has affected people’s travel habits. But how do wealth and social class intersect with plans to travel, and what might be the long-term impacts of a large reduction in travel plans? Join us to hear how the research of these two UC Davis professors offers insight into these and other questions.
The guests:
- Giovanni Circella is director of the 3 Revolutions Future Mobility Program and the Honda Distinguished Scholar for New Mobility Studies at the UC Davis Institute for Transportation Studies and a senior research engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His team has surveyed travel habits in major cities across North America both before and during the pandemic.
- Michael Springborn is an environmental economist and associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy. Springborn and colleagues used anonymized mobile phone data to assess how people’s mobility changed during the pandemic.