The COVID-19 pandemic has presented numerous, significant challenges for elderly in their daily life. In order to reach a deeper understanding of the feelings and thoughts of the elderly related to their possibilities to travel and engage in activities during the pandemic, this study takes a qualitative approach to exploring the views of the elderly themselves. The study focuses on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. A number of in-depth semi-structured interviews with elderly aged 70 and above, were conducted in June 2020. Applied Thematic Analysis (ATA) was applied, as a first stage, to investigate meaningful segments of data. In a second stage these identified segments were combined into a number of themes. This study reports the outcome of the ATA analysis. More specifically we report experiences, motivations and barriers for travel and activity participation, and discuss how these relate to the health and well-being of elderly, and vice versa. These findings highlight the strong need to develop a transport system that to a higher extent addresses the physical as well as the mental health of old people, with a particular focus on facilitating social interactions. 

Background: Changes in modal choice is argued to be one way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Increasing modal choices in favour of more environmentally friendly travel modes requires a better understanding of how these choices are actually made. The first aim of this study is therefore to examine how modal choice is related to subjective experiences as perceived accessibility, perceived satisfaction , habit, both before , after an intervention promoting public transport. The second aim is to examine how modal choice is affected by the intervention. Finally, the third aim is to examine how subjective experiences as perceived accessibility, perceived satisfaction, and habit are affected by the intervention.Method: The design used is a before-and after-study with free public travel passes as the intervention (30-or 14-days free travel pass). Altogether, 52 travelers - distributed on two intervention groups and one control group - participated in the study. The 30-days free travel pass group constitutes 18 participants, the 14-days free travel pass group constitutes 19 participants while the control group constitutes 15 participants. During the before -period the participants were asked to register their modal choice using a digitalized application downloaded on their smart phones (the TravelVu app), to complete a short app-based questionnaire, and a web-based questionnaire. During the after-period, they were once again asked to register their modal choice and to complete a web-based questionnaire. All data collected were analyzed by variance or correlation analyses using the change between before-and after period as the dependent variable.Results: The results show that walking was more common than the use of public transport and car, which in turn were more common than the use of bicycle. Perceived accessibility, perceived satisfaction, general health, life quality as well as habit were all rated fairly high. Over time, the use of public transport increased while the use of car decreased overall. With increased use of public transport, the perceived accessibility decreased, but on the other hand, the life quality increased. There was no difference in perceived accessibility, perceived satisfaction, or habit between the three groups, but the participants became overall more satisfied with the standard of their experiences of their everyday travel (cognitive evaluation). At the same time, they became less reflective of their choice of travel mode and less interested in trying out new alternative travel modes during the after-compared to the before period.Conclusion: The intervention did not affect the modal choice or the subjective experiences. Over time, the participants did however increase their use of public transport and their cognitive evaluation of their everyday travel overall, while they decreased their use of car and became less reflective and less interested in trying out new alternative travel modes. These changes might be attributed to their participation in the present study.

Accessibility is commonly assessed using indicators calculated from spatial data. Comparatively perceived accessibility cannot be adequately reflected by these calculated measures because it involves the perception to participate in spatially dispersed opportunities. This highlights the need to understand and consider perceived accessibility for planning and evaluation of transport systems from a complementary perspective. Therefore, this study aims to offer a systematic review concerning the interpretations of perceived accessibility in transport, its concept, major social drivers, barriers, evaluation methods and key influencing factors. This review also highlights the importance of perceived safety and service quality in public transport and their relationship with perceived accessibility in daily travel. The paper argues that perceived accessibility with due consideration of perceived safety and service quality will contribute to the development from mobility-based to accessibility-based planning.

The ability to live the life one wants with public transport is one of the key factors of sustainable and inclusive societies. Given the current trend in the transport domain, providing accessible public transport is necessary in order to allow people to participate in their day-to-day activities without using a car. Using survey data obtained from Sweden, this study investigates factors that may have a negative effect on the perceived accessibility of public transportation in major city areas and other areas. Overall, regression analyses show that time and economic resources, organizational and temporal functions, frequent travel by public transport, and geographical context all act as accessibility barriers. These findings highlight the need not only to target increased mobility in urban environments, but also to turn the focus to the citizenry's perceived accessibility. These findings point to implications for policies, planning and interventions targeted at accessible public transport. Adopting an accessibility-oriented approach to urban development, including the individual perspective, could be a pathway for creating a socially sustainable transport system.

Previous findings have established that satisfaction with public transport service quality attributes (reliability/functionality, information, courtesy/simplicity, comfort, safety) relate to overall travel satisfaction. Recent studies propose that the importance of these attributes for travel satisfaction varies in different contexts and call for new approaches for enhancing the understanding of these relationships. We address this call by using a configurational perspective and applying fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), to explore how satisfaction with service quality attributes relate to high travel satisfaction. By analyzing user survey data before and after an intervention in public transport services in a Swedish city, we: 1) find that high travel satisfaction occurs in the interaction between service quality attributes; 2) identify different configurations of satisfaction with service quality attributes leading to high travel satisfaction; and 3) show how context alters overall travel satisfaction. We conclude that using a configurational approach is useful for understanding the complexity of travel satisfaction.

In order to constitute a realistic option to existing travel modes, carpooling needs to be able to offer adequate levels of accessibility. Insights into how carpooling services affect perceived accessibility up until now remain unexplored. In this study we explore carpooling experiences of 122 users in Sweden and examine a number of possible determinants of the perceived accessibility of carpooling. Results show that carpooling is not perceived by the users as particularly accessible with low levels across the sample. Moreover, multiple linear hierarchical regression analyses show that simplicity of travel, population density, years of education, and school and work-trips appear to affect perceptions of accessibility of carpooling, whereas travel time and cost appear not to. The final model explains a third of the variance in perceived accessibility of carpooling, thus nearly two thirds of the variation is still unaccounted for. Future research should explore further possible determinants of perceived accessibility of carpooling in order to explain, understand, and counteract the low levels of accessibility that appear to be linked to this specific travel mode.

Service quality in public transport is proposed as a key determinant of perceived accessibility, the ease to live the life one wants with the help of the transport system, as low service quality may be a barrier for use, decreasing the ease to participate in daily activities. The first aim was to validate the direct relationship between public transport quality and perceived accessibility. Secondly, we analyzed the mediating role of safety perceptions to better explain the link between service quality and perceived accessibility. Public transport travelers (n = 4944) from five northern European cities were surveyed. Results from PLS-SEM modeling show that service quality has a significant and direct relationship with perceived accessibility, especially regarding functionality. An indirect relationship through travel safety perceptions was also observed, highlighting information and comfort as main drivers. High car use, low public transport use, increasing age, and being a woman were also associated with greater perceived accessibility. City comparisons yielded a number of significant differences. Our results contribute to the research literature by highlighting the importance of service quality in public transport for perceptions of accessibility in daily travel. In particular, we argue that functionality is the core attribute to focus on, and that attributes related to travel safety perceptions should be carefully considered when planning for sustainable transport.

In order to plan for, and achieve, a sustainable and accessible transport system, research and policies alike recognize a need to implement and enhance alternative transport options in favor of the private car. Moreover, these sustainable alternatives need to offer sufficient levels of accessibility regardless of where people live or work. We present and discuss an approach for capturing and evaluating perceived accessibility, with the ability to differentiate between individuals. Levels of perceived accessibility are compared before and after a fictive car use restriction, and between residential areas, using data from 2711 residents of Malmö, Sweden. A main conclusion is that levels of perceived accessibility become significantly lower for car users when they are limited in their options for daily travel. The difference is more substantive for frequent car users, who already travel less by sustainable modes today. There are also significant differences in levels of perceived accessibility in the restricted scenario, depending on where individuals live. These novel findings may not come as a surprise, but they emphasize the importance of including and analyzing perceptions of car users when designing accessible and sustainable transport systems. The paper ends with a discussion on how to facilitate the transition from current transport systems to an inclusive and accessible system.

How to drive modal shift is one of the primary issues in creating a sustainable society. By encouraging people to migrate from private car use to public transport, city planners can prepare for a super-aged society, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigate negative externalities of private car use such as congestion, accidents, and noise. To achieve these goals, city planners are required to understand whether public transport usage can be increased by improving the service quality and what roles user satisfaction and loyalty play in the process. The relations between service quality, user satisfaction, loyalty, and user frequency have been studied for a long time. However, most of the studies are based on cross-sectional analysis. Cross-sectional analysis is less powerful in detecting causality as it does not show pre-post relations or lagged effects between variables. To investigate causal and non-simultaneous relations among quality, satisfaction, loyalty, and user frequency of public transport, we used data of theBenchmarking in European Service of Public Transportsurvey from 2001 to 2015 in four European cities, and applied vector auto regressive (VAR) analysis. The result shows that improvement of service quality has positive effects on user's satisfaction, loyalty, and user frequency and that better satisfaction leads to higher loyalty and user frequency. More importantly, the result also shows that behavioral modification (change in user frequency) occurs with time lag while psychological modifications (changes in satisfaction and loyalty) occur immediately after changes in service quality. The findings suggest that city/transport planners ought to keep improving the service quality of public transport and monitoring the achievement from a long-term perspective.

Introduction: The aim of the present study was to examine differences in public transport use, quality perceptions, and travel satisfaction and their relation to life satisfaction across five generations. Methods: Self-report questionnaires (online or by phone) were collected from 3257 respondents (aged 16-90) with varying degree of public transport use, across five cities in northern Europe (Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo, Copenhagen, Bergen). The data were analyzed in three steps: (i) explorative using Kruskal-Wallis Anovas, (ii) conceptual model testing using PLS-SEM, and (iii) analyses of generational differences regarding public transport quality dimensions, travel satisfaction and life satisfaction through Analyses of variance. Results: In line with our hypothesis and previous research, we find that satisfaction with travel had a positive relationship with life satisfaction, showing once again the importance of acknowledging people's travel satisfaction. Levels of satisfaction linearly increased with generation, but the effect of travel on life satisfaction did not, thus indicating that travel satisfaction is equally important to all. Security/safety was furthermore an important quality attribute directly related to both satisfaction with travel and to life satisfaction. We observed, using multigroup analyses, that the youngest generations are very similar with respect to the importance of quality attributes. People in these generations also travel frequently and have active lifestyles, and are hence very dependent on the transport system. Conclusions: It is concluded that, we need to improve travel experiences and emphasize secure and safe travel, especially for the young, as this is related to their life satisfaction.

Corrigendum to article published in Journal of Transport and Health (2021), Article nr: 100997. DOI: 10.1016/j.jth.2020.100997