Matthew J. Beck

• The University of Sydney

Universities are major trip attractors and generators in large cities, and they have a significant influence on the transport network particularly in high-density areas. The trips to and from university campuses are made by staff, students, and visitors, with an important daily rotation of people (e.g., students who leave early, arrive later, etc.)...

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the way we live and travel, possibly for many years to come. The ‘New Normal’ seems to be one that is best associated with living with COVID-19 rather that ‘after COVID-19’. After a year or more since the pandemic spread throughout the world, we have amassed a significant amount of evidence on what this is likely...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the way we work and live, with working from home becoming more than the occasional desire but a regular feature of work and life. While an increasing number of research studies have promoted the virtues of what is often described as the positive unintended consequences of the pandemic, there are...

There exists a substantial amount of research on the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on significant changes in the location at which work takes place, especially working from home (WFH). There has been, however, very little systematic consideration given to the relationship between the substantial increase in WFH and the responses taken b...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the propensity to use public transport, with many countries seeing a decline in patronage to as low as 20% of the pre-pandemic levels. Although public transport use is recovering with 60% of pre-COVID-19 levels being a common statistic, there is a view that it could take many years to fully reco...

During the year 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic affected mobility around the world, significantly reducing the number of trips by public transport. In this paper, we study its impact in five South American capitals (i.e., Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, Quito and Santiago). A decline in public transport patronage could be very bad news for these cities in...

The year 2020 has been marked by the most extraordinary event we have witnessed since World War II. While other health threats and geographical disasters have occurred, none have been on the global scale of COVID-19. Although many countries have experienced more than one wave of the pandemic throughout 2020, Australia has been largely able to conta...

The decision to work from home (WFH) or to commute during COVID-19 is having a major structural impact on individuals’ travel, work and lifestyle. There are many possible factors influencing this non-marginal change, some of which are captured by objective variables while others are best represented by a number of underlying latent traits captured...

The need to recognise and account for the influence of working from home on commuting activity has never been so real as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given a recognition that WFH activity during the pandemic has reduced the amount of commuting activity compared to pre-COVID-19, the inevitable question is raised as to what this might mean for...

The need to recognise and account for the influence of working from home on commuting activity has never been so real as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only does this change the performance of the transport network, it also means that the way in which transport modellers and planners use models estimated on a typical weekday of travel and e...

This paper draws on findings from an Australia-wide survey with data collected in three waves throughout 2020 to explore the impact of COVID-19 on public transport trends in metropolitan areas of Australia. Following consideration of the public transport sector response to the pandemic and the emerging literature context, we explore three principal...

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we go about our daily lives in ways that are unlikely to return to the pre-COVID-19 levels. A key feature of the COVID-19 era is likely to be a rethink of the way we work and the implications on commuting activity. Working from home (WFH) has been the ‘new normal’ during the period of lockdown, except for e...

Applications and demand for airborne drone operations, including urban air mobility, are growing rapidly in regional and metropolitan areas. However, the expected traffic volumes in cities will make it impossible to operate drones in uncontrolled airspace. Despite the wealth of literature on pricing transport infrastructure usage showing that varia...

This paper (Part 2 in the paper series), building on earlier studies examining the Australian response, extends on findings related to travel activity, commuting, and attitudes towards COVID-19 measures (Part 1 in the paper series). In this paper we focus in detail on the impact of, and experiences with, working from home (WFH), perhaps the largest...

While many countries have experienced more than one wave of the pandemic throughout 2020, Australia has been able to contain the virus in a way that makes it a stand out (with New Zealand) in the way that it has been contained, with an exception in Victoria linked to failed quarantine procedures for travellers returning from overseas. Through descr...

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we go about our daily lives in ways that are unlikely to return to the pre-COVID-19 levels. A key feature of the COVID-19 era is likely to be a rethink of the way we work and the implications this may have on commuting activity. Working from home (WFH) has been the ‘new normal’ during the period of lockdown...

With the onset of COVID-19 restrictions and the slow relaxing of many restrictions, it is imperative that we understand what this means for the performance of the transport network. In going from almost no commuting, except for essential workers, to a slow increase in travel activity with working from home (WFH) continuing to be both popular and pr...

The COVID-19 disease continues to cause unparalleled disruption to life and the economy world over. This paper is the second in what will be an ongoing series of analyses of a longitudinal travel and activity survey. In this paper we examine data collected over a period of late May to early June in Australia, following four-to-six weeks of relative...

When 2020 began, we had no idea what was to unfold globally as we learnt about the Novel-Coronavirus in Wuhan, in the Hubei province of China. As this virus spread rapidly, it became a matter of time before many countries began to implement measures to try and contain the spread of the disease. COVID-19 as it is referred to, resulted in two main ap...

While there is a well-developed body of academic literature on how to procure public ground transport services and how to integrate those services, there is virtually no literature on how to do this in the context of regional air services. This paper aims to contribute to the area of strategic management of integrated transport based on the concept...

Integrated mobility aims to improve multimodal integration to make public transport an attractive alternative to private transport. This paper critically reviews extant literature and current public transport governance frameworks of transport operators across a macro and micro spectrum. Our aim is to extend the concept of Mobility-as-a-Service (Ma...

While the study of choices focuses primarily on the individual decision maker, there is growing interest in the examination of the choices made by groups. Much of the research into the choices of multiple decision makers has revealed that they differ significantly to those of individuals. In this study of household vehicle choice we similarly compa...

The number of conventionally fuelled motor vehicles in use is increasing worldwide despite warnings about finite fossil fuel and the detrimental impacts of burning such fuels. While electric vehicles, the subject of much research, generate far less emissions and offer the potential for power from renewable sources, they are yet to significantly pen...

This article examines perceptions of how safe airline travel is and respondents’ level of concern over privacy and trust of authorities. These attitudes are then used to understand the choice to travel under passenger screening processes with differing levels of invasiveness. We find that travelers who are more trusting of authorities are more like...

Stated choice experiments are a preeminent method for researchers and practitioners who seek to examine the behavior of consumers. However, the extent to which these experiments can replicate real markets continues to be debated in the literature, with particular reference to the potential for biased estimates as a result of the hypothetical nature...

Attitudes play an important role in determining individual transit behaviour and the measurement of attitudes is relied on by public transit authorities’ world over. Given their role in behaviour and policy making, the accurate measurement of attitudes is of critical importance. Traditional satisfaction scales are prone to bias and on their own the...

In the stated choice literature, increasing attention has been paid to methods that seek to close the gap between the choices from these experiments and the choices experienced in the real world. Attempts to produce model estimates that are truer to real market behaviours are especially important for transportation, where many important policy deci...

Random utility maximisation is the pre-eminent behavioural theory used to model choices. An alternative paradigm, however, is random regret minimisation. While the majority of the literature examines the choices of individuals, this paper compares the choices of groups, as well as individuals, in both the utility maximisation and regret minimisatio...

Recently emerging in the stated preference literature as methods for better representing behaviour are choice certainty calibration and alternative acceptability. This paper finds that the amount of idiosyncratic error in the context of automobile choice is significant and can be explained by choice task certainty; which is a function of several re...

A growing global focus on environmental concerns, in particular the role of carbon emissions in global warming, has created an atmosphere where attitudes towards the environment are a pre-eminent focus. In particular, the role of the motor vehicle in climate change has become increasingly important. In this paper a stated preference experiment is u...

The development of more realistic choice experiments has taken on board a number of suggestions in the broader hypothetical bias literature. One issue, in particular, is the increasing interest in finding ways to bridge the gap between the stated choice response and real choosing, as a way of increasing the confidence with which an individual would...

Data is typically gathered from an individual respondent who represents the group or the household. This individual is often identified as the “primary decision maker” and is asked to provide responses as a proxy for the group given that the cost of interviewing each member individually is impractical and/or expensive. The collection of joint prefe...

Road pricing as an economic construct is not a new phenomenon in transportation research. Whilst fuel taxation and tolling of roads are common ways of raising revenue in many countries, these initiatives are primarily aimed at road infrastructure financing. Worldwide there has been growing interest in pricing structures designed to also manage the...

The choice of automobile purchases in households often involves participation of more than one household member, each of which exerts some degree of influence on the final choice outcome. The influence of more than one agent has been recognised for many years, and yet the majority of automobile choice studies develop choice models as if a single ag...

Many of the environmental problems that are both real and sensitive community issues stem from the use of transport infrastructure by passenger and freight vehicles, which are not only a source of congestion, but a source of local pollutants such as lead, carbon monoxide and noise. While there has been extensive literature on the concept of congest...

Road pricing as an economic construct is not a new phenomenon in transportation research. Whilst fuel taxing and toll roads are common within Australia, these initiatives are primarily aimed at road infrastructure financing. Worldwide there has been growing interest in pricing structures designed to aide in congestion management with a recent focus...