Facing the future of transit ridership: which riders bought a car; who is planning on riding less?

Public transit agencies face a transformed landscape of rider demand and political support as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. We explore people’s motivations for returning to or avoiding public transit a year into the pandemic. We draw on a March 2021 follow up survey of over 1,900 people who rode transit regularly prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, and who took part in a prior survey on the topic in May, 2020. We model how transit demand has changed due to the pandemic, and investigate how this relates to changes in automobile ownership and its desirability. We find that pre-COVID frequent transit users between the ages of 18-29, a part of the so-called “Gen Z,” and recent immigrants are more attracted to driving due to the pandemic, with the latter group more likely to have actually purchased a vehicle. Getting COVID-19 or living with someone who did is also a strong and positive predictor of buying a car and anticipating less transit use after the pandemic. Our results suggest that COVID-19 heightened the attractiveness of auto ownership among transit riders likely to eventually purchase cars anyways (immigrants, twentysomethings), at least in the North American context. We also conclude that getting COVID-19 or living with someone who did is a significant and positive predictor of having bought a car. Future research should consider how the experiencing of having COVID-19 has transformed some travelers’ views, values, and behaviour.

Trends and evolution of automobile ownership in the municipalities of Chile

The automobile has played a fundamental role in the development of cities in the daily movement of people. This paper analyzes the explosive increase in the number of motorized vehicles in the municipalities of Chile. Additionally, due to its national relevance, a disaggregated analysis of the Metropolitan Area of Santiago is presented. Through statistical data of the last 20 years, the analysis evidenced an explosive but differentiated increase of the automotive fleet. Results show the poorest municipalities with a lower dynamism, while those of the more affluent sectors experience exuberant increases. Particularly in the Metropolitan Area of Santiago, the results follow the same pattern, dynamics that jeopardize the planning and sustainability of national urban areas. A reflection is made focusing on the type of city that is being planned and built throughout the country and the urgency of a strategic public policy in urban public transport.

Postcolonial Automobility

Postcolonial Automobility discusses how the automobile, with its promise of autonomous, unfettered mobility is a paradigmatic object through which one can assess the pleasures, dangers, and limits of global modernity in West Africa. Though automobile ownership is among the lowest in the world and accident rates are some of the highest, automobility in West Africa remains a powerful discourse about the construction of the modern self and about the ways that global African citizens inhabit their world. Exploring an array of cultural texts –plays, novels, films and videos – the author makes palpable the complex ways that automobility in West Africa is, at once, an everyday practice, an ethos, a fantasy of autonomy and mobility, and an affective experience intimately tied to modern social life. This study is the first to address mobility explicitly within an African context and it is one of only a handful of examinations that bring together issues of physical mobility and questions of postcoloniality. Furthermore, Postcolonial Automobility is part of what might be called the infrastructural turn in postcolonial studies, a turn that moves postcolonial studies beyond the much discussed tropes of hybridity, exile, migration, and displacement and towards discussions of how postcoloniality is experienced given the material realities of uneven modernity.

Mickey’s Trailer and Environmental Thought: Disney Cartoons and Countryside

The influence of popular cartoons on environmental cognition is explored in this essay through readings of Mickey’s Trailer, a 1938 cartoon directed by Ben Sharpsteen for Walt Disney. Other materials considered include Ford Motor Company’s 1937-38 film coproduced by Wilder Pictures, Glacier International Park, which promotes motor-tourism and automobile ownership, and Ben Sharpsteen’s other work for Walt Disney. The article also examines the ideas of physical and “illusional” zoning in the city, especially the way that they were applied in the mid-twentieth century. Physical zoning involved separating incompatible land uses, whereas illusional zoning entailed seeing what you wanted to see. What does Mickey’s Trailer say about how people can live, and can it inform where people choose to live? The essay muses that appreciations of nature and the environment are influenced by popular culture.