Too wet? Too cold? Too hot? How does the weather affect the trips we make?

Professor Jonathan Corcoran, Director of the Applied Centre for Population Research and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Queensland’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, has been researching the relationship between the weather and daily travel behaviour in our cities.

We know that the weather conditions can change the way we go about our daily routines. A wet morning might mean we take the car rather than walking, cycling or taking public transport and this can lead to planned journeys being rescheduled, rerouted or cancelled. The consequences of these individual travel choices are important when we consider their impact in aggregate across an entire city. These shifts in daily travel choices have the potential to increase travel delays and road congestion, add to pollution and result in a general decrease in the overall travel experience.

Despite the importance of weather on daily travel choices, our understanding of these weather-travel behaviour relationships is still in its infancy. There is a compelling need to collect more evidence using emerging digital sources of data. Data automatically collected via transit smart cards (such as the GoCard in Brisbane) offer a new and promising source of information that can be used to better understand the weather-travel behaviour relationship and provide the necessary evidence for cities to develop planning and urban transport responses.

Reference: https://theconversation.com/too-wet-too-cold-too-hot-this-is-how-weather-affects-the-trips-we-make-93724

by Professor Jonathan Corcoran