Fewer cars on the streets, hardly any planes in the air – Corona restrictions meant recreation for nature anyway. A study now suggests that this is not necessarily permanent.
Karlsruhe – The corona pandemic has temporarily changed the mobility of Germans significantly, but according to a study, this will not lead to a real rethink.
“The results suggest that the great mobility revolution has not materialized,” writes the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI (Karlsruhe) with a view to a representative survey. In August 2020 and April 2021, residents of major German cities were asked how they wanted to change their behavior after the pandemic, for example with regard to travel and commuting.
Around 70 percent said in the past year that they wanted to return to the same modes of transport for commuting and business trips after the pandemic that they preferred before the pandemic. This proportion remained essentially constant in April of the current year.
The majority of those surveyed were therefore not prepared from the outset to position themselves differently after the pandemic than before, explained project manager Johannes Schuler. “People are creatures of habit.” However, in the surveys in both years, people wanted to slightly reduce business travel on average, as did the commute to work.
When it came to vacations or leisure-related trips, the trend reversed from 2020 to 2021: Initially, with a view to vacations, the respondents said on average that they wanted to limit their mobility in the future – that is, they wanted to travel less or at least fly less. In the following year, on the other hand, people answered the same question on average that they wanted to be even more mobile when traveling in the future than before the pandemic.
“There was little left of a reduction in mobility in April 2021,” the researcher continued. “If so many people say they want to return to old patterns during the pandemic, that is not a good sign for the mobility transition.” After all, in the 2021 survey, an average of 18 percent of the participants wanted to walk or cycle more than before the pandemic.
For the study, people living in large cities during the corona pandemic were asked whether they expected a decline in their leisure-related and work-related mobility in the period after the corona compared to the time before the pandemic. For this purpose, the data from two surveys were merged: In the first round in 2020, the researchers led by Schuler consulted 1,675 people in major German cities. In April of the following year, a representative nationwide survey, for which 1000 people were interviewed with the same questions, included the answers of 358 city dwellers. dpa
