Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on travel mode choices and predicting the modal shift after the pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the measures taken by authorities to contain the virus and the fear of being infected resulted in reduced human mobility. Even though studies have made an effort to understand the changes in human mobility patterns resulted due to the pandemic, their findings are inconclusive for totally relying on aggregated data collected at ridership level rather than information at the individual-level. Our study uses four waves of travel survey data collected before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, in Montreal, to assess the determinants of mode choice and to analyse changes in travel behavior and mode choices. We had 2933 work-related trips from 1275 participants, of which only 290 participants responding in both wave 1 and wave 4 qualified for the mode prediction analysis. We applied a multinominal multilevel analysis to explore predictors of travel behaviour, and a classical multinominal model to analyse mode choice change. Our study’s findings show a huge decline in public transit use during COVID-19 and that it gradually increased after COVID-19, even though it was not comparable to the pre-pandemic level. The odds of public transit users shifting back to public transit after the pandemic was 22.54 (95%CI: 7.29, 69.66) times higher than choosing private motorized vehicles, while the rebound of active transport users was relatively higher (OR: 52.71, 95%CI: 8.68, 320.20). Our study implies that not all the sustainable mode users have returned to using the modes after COVID-19, and it stands as a challenge for transport authorities to develop appropriate strategies to encourage them to rebound.