Connected vehicles can not only help improve the safety and mobility of our transportation system but generate valuable data that can help transportation agencies plan and respond to unexpected events, such as the COVID0-19 pandemic.
Led by Sisinnio Concas, Ph.D., CUTR’s Autonomous-Connected Mobility Evaluation (ACME) program has recently published the article “A Longitudinal Study of the COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Activity Travel Using Connected Vehicle Data” in the TRR.
In this study, researchers relied on a longitudinal panel of 308 drivers who provided high-frequency connected vehicle data (once per second up to 10 times per second) covering more than one year before the onset of the pandemic (January 2019) and one year and three months after the national state of emergency was first declared in the U.S.A. (June 2021). The team combined this dataset with land-use data to produce a comprehensive activity travel database for studying the impact on personal vehicle trips made and their spatial dispersion, time spent traveling and on activities, time spent at home, and vehicle miles traveled (VMT).
