Telemobility through the pandemic: Longitudinal tracking, modeling and outlook

Tahlyan, Divyakant

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-eje8-9c67

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Telemobility through the pandemic: Longitudinal tracking, modeling and outlook

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The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the status quo of the telemobility landscape in the United States, forcing millions of Americans into lock down, significantly changing the way we work, travel, and spend our time and money for an extended period of time. After several months of adaptation, adoption, learning, and unlearning, while it would be immature to expect that all these pandemic-forced changes in the telemobility landscape will persist as cities open up and a large percentage of population is vaccinated, it is not inconceivable that there is a strong inertia for at least some proportion of these changes to stay with us in the post-pandemic era. This is because the COVID-19 pandemic induced disruption was forced and abrupt, leading to a system wide change for an extremely long duration, making it unprecedented and unlike anything we have seen in the recently history, and as a result, the pandemic potentially led to long-lasting change in human behavior, attitudes and cultural acceptability of this new way of life; along with economic and procedural streamlining of the relevant technology that can assist this change. While an increase in telemobility adoption have significant quality of life benefits at the individual level, if the trends that we saw at the height of the pandemic are to continue at the same levels, this will likely have strong implications at the urban living and mobility front and this needs a deeper re-thinking of our urban systems that are typically located and optimized taking the historic demand patterns into consideration. Two aspects of our lives that probably saw the most upheaval during the pandemic are how we work and how our daily needs for food and other essential items are fulfilled. In this regard, there are two big unanswered questions here. First, as the cities were lock downed and then later the restrictions were relaxed, how did remote work and e-commerce evolve over time and to what extent the pandemic accelerated trends in remote work and e-commerce will sustain in the post-pandemic world? Second, if the pandemic accelerated trends in remote work and e-commerce are to sustain (even if to some extent, compared to pre-pandemic levels), what does these trends mean for the future of large metropolitan cities in the US, which are highly optimized based on the idea of weekday commute hours or presence of large number of individuals at the same place and time. This dissertation is an effort to answer the above questions using data from multiple waves of online consumer, employee and employer surveys conducted in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic. To bring out important insights, using the data collected, I undertake a collection offour studies. I dedicate a majority of this dissertation to remote work and its evolution, because, in my opinion, this telemobility dimension is where I see big changes happening with potential for major societal implications. I study telework from three angles: 1. understanding the factors impacting satisfaction with telework during the pandemic using a multiple indicator multiple cause (MIMIC) model 2. analyzing individual level trajectories of remote work adoption through and beyond the pandemic using hierarchical clustering and other predictive models 3. understanding the employer side perspective on the evolution of remote work through and beyond the pandemic using data from C-suite level employers from 129 North American organizations On the end of e-commerce, I present: 4. a latent transition analysis with random intercepts (RI-LTA) using consumer spending data on various product categories (grocery, cooked food and non-food items) and acquisition channels (in-person, pick-up and delivery) across 4 different time points pre- and during the pandemic; which captures the nature and dynamics of household spending behavior in an omni-channel environment. I rely on two longitudinally collected data sets for the four studies above, collected using multi-month and multi-wave online surveys conducted in the United States: 1. an online survey with 7 waves of data collection conducted between December 2020 and March 2022 with 1877 unique respondents from United States, and focused on collecting data on evolving consumer spending, telework, and activity participation behavior associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. 2. an online survey with 5 waves of data collection between October 2021 and August 2022 amongst top executives of 129 unique North American companies, focused on collecting data on employer side approach to remote work since the beginning of the pandemic and in the future.

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