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Alireza Dianat and Saeed Shakib present “Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Travel Behaviour and Demand in the GTHA”

October 16, 2020 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

This week’s seminar features presentations by two University of Toronto PhD students, Alireza Dianat and Saeed Shakib.


head shot of Alireza Dianat
Alireza Dianat

Title: “Do we need to redesign our activity-based travel demand models after COVID-19? A survey to collect data on changes and adaptations in daily activity-travel patterns during and post COVID-19 scenarios.”

The COVID-19 pandemic affects people’s lifestyle and activity-travel behaviour. People may reassess daily routines and find potential alternatives and methods for most of their activities (e.g., teleworking, e-shopping, online social/religious activities, etc.). However, this raises the concerns that many of our usual/habitual activity-travel behaviour may be altered once and forever. Unprecedented contexts (during the COVID-19 lockdown) of flexible office hours, telecommuting, and online social/religious gatherings/events will have long-lasting effects on the way we lead our lives in post-COVID-19 era. If so, past predictions of any activity-based travel demands model will be doubtful, if not totally wrong. It is essential to assess how and to what extent the COVID-19 lockdown has affected the core assumptions of our daily activity-travel schedules. Therefore the primary goal of this project is to capture the short-term and the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on activity-travel demand and scheduling behaviour. Such data will not only reveal the changes in activity-travel behaviour but also help to assess and retrofit the assumptions and the flexibility of current travel/activity scheduling models.

Alireza Dianat is a PhD student in Civil Engineering at University of Toronto. He earned his MSc from the Sharif University of Technology in transportation planning. His research interest is travel demand modelling and he is currently working on activity-based models (activity-travel scheduling) for his PhD under the supervision of Professor Khandker Nurul Habib.


Title: “Assessment of the impacts (temporary and long-lasting) of COVID-19 lockdown/restraints on households’ preferences of dwelling type, home location, and neighbourhood choices for residences”

head shot of Saeed Shakib
Saeed Shakib

For most Greater Toronto Area residents, COVID-19 has changed the way we live drastically. There have been significant changes in our social lives and daily activities. Nowadays, many of us are exposed to new activities such as telecommuting, online grocery shopping, food and drink pick up services, and so on. All of these new activities, combined with imposed restrictions, have shaped our new lifestyles. Our pandemic lifestyles have a strong potential to affect our “normal” lifestyles in lasting ways. In the short-term, we might decide to adopt some of these new activities and add them to our typical daily routine. This will cause a change in our society’s activities and travel behavior. Once our short-term routine changes, we start to reconsider our long-term choices. The choice of residence location and dwelling types are long-term choices and the primary interest of this survey. Will these choices change in response to demand shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic? The objective of this study is to model location choice changes by collecting data on people’s location choice behavior when they are exposed to different possible scenarios.

Saeed Shakib is a PhD student in Civil Engineering at University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor Khandker Nurul Habib. His research focuses on integrated land use and transportation models. He earned his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees at the Sharif University of Technology.


Read more about the results of research projects initiated by UTTRI associated faculty Professor Khandker Nurul Habib to explore the impacts of COVID-19 on the travel demand and travel behaviour of residents of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA).

Online via Bb Collaborate: https://ca.bbcollab.com/guest/f8cfce9ea5134715b9b095fc9bc9f4d7

Presented by University of Toronto ITE Student Chapter, UT-ITE. All welcome.