UCLA

Travel behavior is affected by myriad social, economic, cultural, demographic, and psychological factors, in addition to the transportation system and built environment. Changes in external factors, including exogenous shocks, can prompt temporary or long-lasting behavioral changes. Transportation scholars have typically (and quite understandably) paid more attention to the nearer-term effects of these exogenous shocks on personal travel, with more uneven focus on the longer-term effects. The COVID-19 pandemic was an extraordinary global shock that affected every sphere of life. One of the biggest impacts of the pandemic was the significant increase in remote and hybrid work. Employers and employees anticipate that these changes will persist in the months and years ahead. How does the changing nature of work affect travel patterns post-shock? While a growing body of research examines the travel behavior effects of the pandemic, this question has not received much attention from scholars. Research on the travel impacts of the pandemic mostly focuses on the early and mid-pandemic travel responses. To date, studies on the longer-term effects of the pandemic mostly rely on stated preference surveys, even though observed behaviors often deviate from stated preferences. Given this gap in the literature on the relationships among the nature of work, shocks, and travel behavior, this dissertation examines various aspects of the post-pandemic travel behavior of U.S. workers in three distinct yet related essays. In the first essay, I draw on data from the 2022 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) to infer causality between flexible work arrangements and travel. Using propensity score matching, I find that working from home for the entire workweek results in fewer trips overall and fewer miles traveled. In contrast, the travel behavior of those in hybrid work arrangements varies based on whether they commute to work on a particular day. On the days they commute, hybrid workers tend to make more trips and travel longer distances than traditional commuters. On the days they do not commute, the travel behavior of hybrid workers is similar to that of the fully remote workers: they make fewer trips overall and travel fewer miles but make more shopping and social/recreational trips than traditional commuters. In essay 2, I examine the timing of travel of workers in various work arrangements in the post-pandemic era using the same NHTS 2022 data. The results indicate that remote and hybrid workers exhibit lower rates of trip-making during the morning and afternoon peak periods in the post-pandemic era and a higher rate of trip-making in the middle of the day compared to traditional commuters, which is consistent with the findings of pre-pandemic studies. In essay 3, I examine the revealed behavior of commuting and departure time choices using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) data from before (2019) and after (2021) the peak pandemic shutdowns in 2020. The analysis shows that commute trips starting during morning peak periods declined in 2021 compared to before the pandemic. Workers were more likely to commute during the late morning or early afternoon in 2021 compared to 2019, and jobs that previously had traditional 9-to-5 schedules were more likely to offer more flexibility to their workers in 2021. Together, these three essays contribute to the scholarship on the longer-term effects of exogenous shocks on travel behavior. Understanding these pandemic-induced changes in travel behavior can help planners and policymakers prioritize transportation infrastructure and service investments to better reflect post-pandemic patterns of travel in the months and years ahead.