Divyakant Tahlyan
PhD Candidate
Northwestern University

Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the status quo of the telemobility landscape in the United States (and around the world). The extent to which the pandemic forced adoption behavior of telemobility options reverts to its pre-pandemic levels will have implications for the extent to which we need to re-configure our physical mobility systems to cater to these changing trends. Building upon a framework of looking at cities from a socio-technical systems perspective, I will present results from a multi-year study with two longitudinal surveys, with 7 and 5 waves of data collection each, focused at understanding the evolution of telemobility landscape in the United States through and beyond the pandemic.
I will dedicate a majority of the talk to the evolution of the remote work landscape from both the employee as well as the employer perspective; and will also share insights on the future of remote work going forward. I will briefly also touch upon how consumer spending behavior on groceries, cooked food and non-food items evolved through the pandemic in an omni-channel retail environment. I will conclude the talk by presenting how much physical mobility and urban systems have recovered over time – especially transit systems and urban third places, and the implications of these changing trends for the future of urban mobility systems.

Bio:

Divyakant Tahlyan is a 5th year PhD Candidate in the CEE department at the Northwestern University specializing in transportation systems analysis and planning. His research focuses on the use of statistical, econometric and machine learning methods for transportation data analysis, travel behavior analysis and travel demand modeling. More specifically, his research focuses on understanding the changing mobility and urban landscape in light of the emerging mobility