COVID-19 has upended travel across the world, disrupting commute patterns, mode choices, and public transit systems. In the United States, changes to transit service and reductions in passenger ...volume due to COVID-19 are lasting longer than originally anticipated. In this paper we examine the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on individual travel behavior across the United States. We analyze mobility data from Janurary to December 2020 from a sample drawn from a nationwide smartphone-based panel curated by a private firm, Embee Mobile. We combine this with a survey that we administered to that sample in August 2020. Our analysis provides insight into travel patterns and the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on transit riders.
We investigate three questions. First, how do transit riders differ socio-demographically from non-riders? Second, how has the travel behavior of transit riders changed due to the pandemic in comparison to non-riders, controlling for other factors? And third, how has this travel behavior varied across different types of transit riders?
The travel patterns of transit riders were more significantly disrupted by the pandemic than the travel of non-riders, as measured by the average weekly number of trips and distance traveled before and after the onset of the pandemic. This was calculated using GPS traces from panel member smartphones. Our survey of the panel revealed that of transit riders, 75% reported taking transit less since the pandemic, likely due to a combination of being affected by transit service changes, concerns about infection risk on transit, and trip reductions due to shelter-in-place rules. Less than 10 percent of transit riders in our sample reported that they were comfortable using transit despite COVID-19 infection risk, and were not affected by transit service reductions. Transit riders were also more likely to have changed their travel behavior in other ways, including reporting an increase in walking. However, lower-income transit riders were different from higher-income riders in that they had a significantly smaller reduction in the number of trips and distance traveled, suggesting that these lower-income households had less discretion over the amount of travel they carried out during the pandemic. These results have significant implications for understanding the way welfare has been affected for transportation-disadvantaged populations during the course of the pandemic, and insight into the recovery of U.S. transit systems.
The evidence from this unique dataset helps us understand the future effects of the pandemic on transit riders in the United States, either in further recovery from the pandemic with the anticipated effects of mass vaccination, or in response to additional waves of COVID-19 and other pandemics.
•The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted travel for public transit users.•Transit riders reduced their travel more than non-riders.•Among transit riders, those of lower income reduced their travel less than others.•The majority of transit riders were hesitant to use transit due to infection risk.•Less crowding, and enforcing mask use, could increase willingness to use transit.
Despite the historically documented regularity in human mobility patterns, the relaxation of spatial and temporal constraints, brought by the widespread adoption of telecommuting and e-commerce ...during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a growing desire for flexible work arrangements in a post-pandemic work, indicates a potential reshaping of these patterns. In this paper, we investigate the multifaceted impacts of relaxed spatio-temporal constraints on human mobility, using well-established metrics from the travel behavior literature. Further, we introduce a novel metric for schedule regularity, accounting for specific day-of-week characteristics that previous approaches overlooked. Building on the large body of literature on the impacts of COVID-19 on human mobility, we make use of passively tracked Point of Interest (POI) data for approximately 21,700 smartphone users in the US, and analyze data between January 2020 and September 2022 to answer two key questions: (1) has the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated relaxation of spatio-temporal activity patterns reshaped the different aspects of human mobility, and (2) have we achieved a state of stable post-pandemic “new normal”? We hypothesize that the relaxation of the spatiotemporal constraints around key activities will result in people exhibiting less regular schedules. Findings reveal a complex landscape: while some mobility indicators have reverted to pre-pandemic norms, such as trip frequency and travel distance, others, notably at-home dwell-time, persist at altered levels, suggesting a recalibration rather than a return to past behaviors. Most notably, our analysis reveals a paradox: despite the documented large-scale shift towards flexible work arrangements, schedule habits have strengthened rather than relaxed, defying our initial hypotheses and highlighting a desire for regularity. The study’s results contribute to a deeper understanding of the post-pandemic “new normal”, offering key insights on how multiple facets of travel behavior were reshaped, if at all, by the COVID-19 pandemic, and will help inform transportation planning in a post-pandemic world.
This work investigates the hygrothermal cyclic aging of epoxy-based bonded assemblies. The focus is given here to severe long-term environmental conditions. The aging procedure is performed between ...70° C with a relative humidity of 90% and −40° C without humidity, over a cyclic period of 12 h and for a total exposure time of 2 months. The aim of this study is to highlight the consequences of such hygrothermal aging on physico-chemical and mechanical parameters at both the material scale (adhesive) and the structural scale (bonded assemblies). Evolution of water absorption and glass transition temperature with aging cycles are monitored on adhesive bulk specimens by gravimetric analysis and DSC analysis respectively. The evolution of the quasi-static mechanical behavior, strength and elongation at failure, is characterized on adhesive massive specimens and on Single Lap Joint assemblies. Results show a progressive and important degradation of physico-chemical and mechanical properties with the number of cycles, of greater amount than that observed during static aging (loss of SLJ strength by 30% after 56 aging days; loss of the adhesive
T
g
by 45% for around 5% water uptake after aging 21 days). This behavior is related with an embrittling effect at the adhesive scale very specific to water change of state involved in these aging conditions. This combined analysis at different scales ensures a deep understanding of physico-chemical phenomena induced by hygrothermal aging and provides significant information for the further modeling of bonded joints assemblies.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify the main factors influencing the adoption of Islamic banking services in Tunisia.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents primary data ...collected by self-administered questionnaires involving a sample of 239 respondents located in Tunis city. Respondents were conventional banks’ customers who were actually non-users of Islamic banking. A descriptive statistical analysis was conducted to determine consumers’ awareness of Islamic banking.
Findings
The results revealed that Islamic bank reputation, relative advantage of Islamic banking and its compatibility with consumer religious beliefs, values, lifestyle and banking habits influence positively the intention to use it. However, it seems that perceived complexity and risk impact negatively the consumer intention to adopt this new financing system. The major finding of this study is that there is a general lack of consumer awareness about Islamic banking in Tunisia.
Practical implications
By identifying the drivers and inhibitors of Islamic banking acceptance among potential adopters, this research aim to help banks’ managers to target their actions and strategies more effectively.
Originality/value
This study is one of the earliest to be conducted on customers’ perception and willingness to adopt Islamic banking services in Tunisia. It makes a contribution to the Islamic banking adoption literature by extending and testing the diffusion innovation theory (Rogers, 2003) in the context of Tunisia.
•The dynamics of stock market indices and commodity futures indices.•Exploring weekly hedging strategies.•Analysis of the behavior of stock market indices and commodity futures indices in terms of ...price volatility and hedging effectiveness.
The focus of this paper is on analyzing the behavior of commodity futures indices and stock market indices in terms of price volatility and hedging. Specifically, we explore the weekly hedging strategies generated by two types of asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) processes: return-based and range-based. We evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies for both short and long hedgers, using measures such as semi-variance, low partial moment, and conditional value-at-risk. Our findings reveal that, in general, the range-based DCC model is more effective than the return-based DCC model for hedging purposes.
Studying the toxicity of chemical compounds using isothermal microcalorimetry (IMC), which monitors the metabolic heat from living microorganisms, is a rapidly expanding field. The unprecedented ...sensitivity of IMC is particularly attractive for studies at low levels of stressors, where lethality-based data are inadequate. We have revealed via IMC the effect of low dose rates from radioactive β
-decay on bacterial metabolism. The low dose rate regime (<400 µGyh
) is typical of radioactively contaminated environmental sites, where chemical toxicity and radioactivity-mediated effects coexist without a predominance or specific characteristic of either of them. We found that IMC allows distinguishing the two sources of metabolic interference on the basis of "isotope-editing" and advanced thermogram analyses. The stable and radioactive europium isotopes
Eu and
Eu, respectively, were employed in monitoring
cultures via IMC. β
-emission (electrons) was found to increase initial culture growth by increased nutrient uptake efficiency, which compensates for a reduced maximal cell division rate. Direct adsorption of the radionuclide to the biomass, revealed by mass spectrometry, is critical for both the initial stress response and the "dilution" of radioactivity-mediated damage at later culture stages, which are dominated by the chemical toxicity of Eu.
This paper investigates the variation in nonperforming loans over the economic cycle and the effect of past returns based on a nonparametric quantile analysis of the largest Islamic banks in the ...United Kingdom and Turkey from 2010 to 2019. The findings show a weak variation in nonperforming loans that increases with an increasing return on assets and a decreasing return on equity and decreases in an inverse scenario. As a result, the credit risk of Islamic banks is countercyclical. We suggest that the inverse relationships evidence the existence of trade-offs within bank returns and credit risk. Thus, banks’ past profitability and risk mitigation are determinants of asset quality. These findings provide support for risk-taking and risk-sharing principles in which flight-to-safety mirrors the calibration of risk factors in a disruptive economy. Our estimates indicate that nonparametric quantile regression captures considerably more variation in a risk-return analysis.
In this paper, we introduce, implement, and assess a framework for jointly optimizing the pricing policy and the charging schedule of electric vehicles (EVs) by learning and shaping human behavior ...with pricing. The proposed methodology uses time-based pricing to incentivize user behavior at charging stations towards actions that achieve the station operator's objectives. The optimization framework incorporates endogenous human behaviors by explicitly accounting for the willingness to delay charging, as well as the plug-in duration of each session, as a function of the hourly prices. The approach also addresses the issue of overstay at EV charging stations by casting the problem as a trade-off between occupying resources and giving more flexibility to the station operator. We discuss the design and analysis of the behavioral experiments used to model the charging behavior of participants at the charging stations, and demonstrate the effectiveness of those learned behavioral models in an optimization framework aimed at minimizing the total cost of providing the charging service without sacrificing the user experience. Our simulations show that our framework increases total revenue, reduces utility cost, and increases net profit for the station operator, while maintaining a high level of service and consumer utility.
•We propose a framework for optimizing the pricing policy and charging schedule of EVs.•The framework incorporates endogenous behaviors of EV users at charging stations.•Real-time pricing experiments are used to model EV users' behavioral response to price.•Simulations show significant efficiency gains for the proposed framework relative to baseline.
•We study driver-pedestrian interaction using a driving simulator.•Crosswalks, reducing approach speed, and banning curbside parking increase safety.•Street sequence has no statistically significant ...effect on drivers’ behavior.•Results ascertain simulators are effective in studying driver-pedestrian interaction.
This paper presents the design, analysis and results of a driving simulator experiment conducted to study the interaction between drivers and pedestrians in a mixed-street environment. Ninety-six students of the American University of Beirut (AUB) participated in the experiment that took place in the Transportation and Infrastructure Laboratory of AUB. The study looked at the driver-pedestrian interaction from the driver's perspective, by quantifying the effects of different scenario variables on the driving behavior of the participants. Kruskall-Wallis test shows that drivers’ behavior in proximity of pedestrians tends to be statistically significantly less aggressive when their approach velocity is lower, curb-side parking is not allowed, a crosswalk exists, and the number of pedestrians crossing the street is higher. A discrete choice model for the yielding behavior of the drivers was also developed as a function of different predictor variables. Five out of the six predictors considered (except for gender) had a statistically significant effect on the yielding behavior, particularly the effects of curb-side parking, number of pedestrians crossing, and approach velocity. The model was then used to evaluate the effect of policy variables on the yielding probabilities of the drivers. The results of this study enrich current knowledge and understanding of drivers’ behavior and their interaction with pedestrians, especially with studying the effects of scenario variables that were not addressed before; this would help planners propose and evaluate safety measures and traffic calming techniques to reduce the risks on pedestrians. The study also confirms the effectiveness of driving simulators in studying driver-pedestrian interactions.
Telecommuting has risen to unprecedented levels in the past three years and remains one of the most disrupted aspects of transportation behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we ...investigate the transport impacts of telecommuting. We use a combination of passively collected Point of Interest (POI) data between January 2020 and December 2021 and five waves of actively collected surveys on a panel of participants to quantify the effects of changes in the frequency of telecommuting on the total number of daily and weekly trips that a telecommuter makes, as well as their total daily and weekly distance traveled. We overcome important limitations of related work in the literature by controlling for unobserved confounders using fixed-effect and first-difference regressions. Doing so, we find evidence that telecommuting results in the generation of new non-commute trips that offset a significant portion of the reduction in commute trips. We show that telecommuters make an average of roughly one additional non-commute trip on telecommute days relative to commute days. The additional trip is on average shorter than the commute trip, as we find that the total distance traveled on telecommute days is significantly shorter than on commute days for employees in our panel. At the weekly level, we also find that one additional day of telecommuting results in one additional non-commute trip. This suggests that the additional non-commute trip on telecommuting days is a newly generated trip, rather than a trip substituted from other days of the week. The weekly analysis also confirms that the non-commute trip is on average shorter than the two-way commute trips, as the total weekly distance traveled by workers in our sample decreases by about 15 km for every day of telecommuting. Our results suggest that the trip reduction effects of telecommuting could be overestimated if telecommuting-induced new trip generation is not properly accounted for.
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