This text is part of the special booklet 90th Acfas Congress
A transport demand modeling specialist, Catherine Morency is used to predicting the future. Thanks to usage data from OPUS cards, bicycle counters on cycle paths, inventories of car traffic on bridges and various other sources of information, the researcher can draw curves predicting how the population will use these various means of transport in the future.
Finally, all of this was true until the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. “People needed to completely change the way they move. They have taken on new habits,” explains the woman who is a full professor in the Department of Civil, Geological and Mining Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal. Result: all its forecasts, which were based on trends observed over several years, have become obsolete.
It is to reflect on ways to adapt their methods of analysis that Catherine Morency and her colleague Martin Trépanier, full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering at the same university, will hold a symposium entitled Challenges of transport demand modeling in a post-COVID world within the framework of the next Acfas congress.
Irregular movements
The recent abandonment of the automobile portion of the controversial third link project demonstrated beyond any doubt the relevance of the data collected by the two researchers. These allow the various governments to plan the development of the road network.
One of the main tools for measuring mobility is origin-destination surveys, in which between 5% and 15% of households in the province are asked about their weekly travel habits. Conducted every five years, these surveys provide a portrait of “typical” days in terms of transportation. Before the pandemic, the survey allowed for the creation of three main categories: weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays. “Now, we can no longer ask people, ‘What did you do yesterday?’, because behavior changes from day to day,” observes Catherine Morency. Maybe the day before the person was teleworking. »
The symposium will allow experts to discuss the modernization of these survey methods. “We have to change the way we ask our questions to have a representative portrait of mobility over a week,” explains the researcher. The survey, which until then was conducted by telephone, will now be done on the Web, which will make it possible to reach a more varied segment of the population. Catherine Morency also hopes that these surveys can be held on an annual basis to obtain more granular data.
Longitudinal data
To make sense of all these changes, researchers also have a mountain of data collected continuously. Car sharing, Bixi, motorway travel… “We have metering data for each hour, sums up Catherine Morency. We don’t know who travels, we don’t know why, we don’t know how old people are or where they are going, but we have a view of the intensity of use of certain services. These data make it possible, for example, to understand the effects of the pandemic on public transport. “During the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about people not taking public transit anymore. But we did not wonder if people were still moving in the same corridor. We are beginning to identify the systemic effects of telework. »
All this work has a goal: “The Minister of Transport, Geneviève Guilbault, said she wanted to encourage people to give up solo driving,” recalls Catherine Morency. Thanks to his work and that of his colleagues, we better understand the mechanisms that make it possible to achieve this. “In-station car sharing, where a car is available for rental at a pre-determined location, makes it possible to replace a vehicle,” she confirms. For the moment, this approach is the only one that really allows households to get rid of a second car.
“We are still working a lot with pre-COVID data,” says Martin Trépanier. Models must be adapted to incorporate our new habits: online shopping, off-peak travel, moving outside major centers. “We are seeing a historic break,” concludes Catherine Morency. We can’t continue the trend [établie avant la pandémie]. »
This special content was produced by the Special Publications team of the Duty, pertaining to marketing. The drafting of Duty did not take part.