Assessing COVID-19 Impacts on Urban Travel and Activity Patterns Employing Cellphone Travel Data

COVID-19 impacts on travel are unprecedented, affecting virus-spread, transportation services delivery, and how people will eventually safely participate in economic, educational and social activities. These impacts vary substantially across neighbourhoods, often worsening existing inequities in Canadian cities. This project will accelerate research for deriving insights about COVID-19 from TELUS network location data. Specifically, it will develop new methods to use cellphone traces to measure, model, and evaluate our response to COVID-19’s disruption of daily activity/travel participation. The end product will be the largest mobility dataset ever created for use by Canadian transport researchers. This dataset, and associated modelling processes, will be a significant knowledge asset in Canada’s understanding of and response to the COVID-19 outbreak, and will be used to investigate COVID-19-related disruptions to travel and activity participation in the Greater Toronto Area. Special attention will be paid to the impacts on food accessibility, in-store shopping and online food deliveries.

Faculty Supervisor:

Eric J Miller;Steven Farber;Michael Widener;Jue Wang

Student:

Gozde Ozonder;Alex Tabascio

Partner:

Telus

Discipline:

Engineering - civil

Sector:

Information and cultural industries

University:

University of Toronto