Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a rapid change in travel behavior for different types of trips, including everyday social and recreational leisure trips. People have used adaptive travel behaviors to cope with the new circumstances for activities and transport. Due to the Swedish strategy focusing on more voluntary restrictions, people have had reason to consider which trips and activities to skip and which to keep. The overall aim of the study is to explore and deepen the knowledge about adaptive behaviors used and seek to understand its possible implications for future travel behavior change towards sustainable mobility through the use of qualitative interviews focusing on everyday leisure trips. The results illustrate how people have used a range of adaptive behaviors to cope with the implications of the pandemic, with cancellation and change of transport mode being the ones most reflected upon by the interviewees. Further, the results reveal how the overall label “everyday leisure trips” in fact includes a variety of trip purposes that differ in terms of flexibility and importance and must thus be approached in different ways in transport policy measures.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic, as an unplanned disruptive event, has forced rapid and changing adaptations to the new circumstances that it brought about
In the case of COVID-19, numerous studies have shown a substantial decrease in the overall number of trips and that change of transport mode is a commonly used adaptive behavior, changing from public transport to other transport modes (e.g., [7,8,9,10])
Even though there is a vast body of literature on the subject, it is not yet clear how COVID-19 is transmitted in public transport and if travelling by public transport increases the risk of infection [11,12]
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic, as an unplanned disruptive event, has forced rapid and changing adaptations to the new circumstances that it brought about. Individuals have responded to the varying conditions by changing travel behavior for different trip purposes, including everyday leisure trips for social and recreational purposes Such trips account for as much as a third of the total distances travelled by car [2,3]. Previous studies have demonstrated how people use a variety of adaptive travel behaviors in the case of planned or unplanned disruptive events (e.g., [4,5,6]) Such behavioral adaptations range from total cancellation to adaptations that enable people to still partake in the planned activities in some way, e.g., using a different transport mode, travelling at another time, or changing the destination.
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