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There has been a growing interest in the association between online activities and daily activity-travel patterns. An analysis of this relationship is even more crucial considering the major disruptions to out-of-home activity participation and travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study contributes to the literature by exploring the relationships between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use (focusing on telework and online shopping) and time spent traveling using different transportation modes. Using Tobit regression models, we investigate the impacts of ICT use on three travel alternatives: (1) automobile, (2) public transit, and (3) active travel. The results show that the effects of ICT use vary across these three travel modes. For example, all else being equal, respondents with higher durations of telework tend to spend less time on auto and transit. Respondents with higher durations of online shopping spend more time walking and bicycling. This study also explores whether the effects of ICT use on travel durations vary across groups with different socio-demographics and residential location characteristics. For instance, the study finds the greater the level of land-use mixture, the stronger the association between online shopping and time spent bicycling and walking. The research findings can inform planners and decision-makers on the relationships between ICT use and overall travel behavior in order to assess travel demand under different levels of ICT use.

Background Contemporary higher education requires that all midwifery students have insight and understanding of global health practice and demonstrate intercultural sensitivity. However, the mobility models currently offered do not often fit the lives of large numbers of midwifery students. Objectives To investigate midwifery students' international physical mobility activities and factors that affect mobility; to determine midwifery students' learning needs and preferences for related e-learning packages. Design Multi-centre, descriptive quantitative survey. Settings Four European Higher Education Institutions based in the United Kingdom, Estonia, Italy and the Netherlands offering an undergraduate midwifery programme. Participants The sample included 205 midwifery students from Italy (n = 93), the Netherlands (n = 51); United Kingdom (n = 35) and Estonia (n = 26). Methods Data were collected in June–July 2020 through an online cross-sectional, bespoke questionnaire and analysed using summary statistical analysis. Results There is a high level of interest across a range of mobility opportunities, especially those of shorter duration. Barriers to mobility comprised finance, caring responsibilities, concerns about fitting mobility activities into the midwifery programme, negative impact on studies and language barriers. The most frequently identified facilitators of mobility included professional perspectives such as interest in other cultures and midwifery in other settings and an endorsement that mobility would add value to their development as a midwife. When engaging in virtual learning, the most preferred resources mentioned by the students were videos, video calls with peers, choice quiz and discussion forum. Conclusions The barriers identified require new approaches to enable all midwifery students to benefit from transnational learning. The survey findings provide insights into midwifery students' perspectives from which a new mobility model can be developed.

The energy requirements of everyday activities such as housework, travel or sleep differ considerably; hence, individual time use – the pattern of activities individuals perform during a day – is crucial for the energy consumption associated with lifestyles. Increasing use of information and communication technology (ICT) in everyday life changes individual time use and thus affects the associated energy requirements. ICT can have increasing or decreasing effects on energy use (e.g. it can reduce transport through virtual mobility or increase transport by creating the desire to travel to places seen on the Internet). Understanding the causal relationships between ICT, time, and energy use is essential to promote its desired impacts and prevent socially and environmentally unfavorable (unsustainable) ones. Despite various approaches to time use across disciplines, no consistent conceptual framework of the impact of ICT on time use and environmental impact exists so far. In this paper, we review existing literature on (1) ICT impacts on time use, and (2) environmental impacts of time use. Aiming to bridge differences across disciplines and methodological approaches, we develop a conceptual framework for systematically assessing the impact of ICT on time and energy use. The core of this framework is the categorization of ICT impacts on the relaxation of time and space constraints to activities, parallelization, fragmentation, substitution, avoidance, and delegation of activities, changes to the duration and manner of activities, changes to the process of activity planning, and generation of new ICT-based activities. In a broader systems perspective, these effects also trigger causal chains which can form feedback loops and thus change time-use patterns with some delay (systemic effects). Changes in time use affect direct energy requirements through the energy used to perform activities (e.g. in the form of electricity or fuels). Indirect energy requirements, the energy embedded in goods, only change if production of goods can be avoided (e.g. if telecommuting leads to fewer cars being purchased). The net energy impact of a given ICT use case depends on direct and indirect energy requirements of the activities performed before and after adoption of the use case. We demonstrate the application of the framework by qualitatively assessing time and energy use impacts of a frequently discussed ICT use case: telecommuting.

Congestion levels have grown substantially in recent years, while the traditional economic response to congestion – road pricing – remains politically infeasible in most locations. Tradable permits are likely to be a more viable alternative, because they do not require a net financial flow from road users to the government. It is therefore the right moment to design and empirically test tradable permit schemes for managing urban mobility. This paper presents and empirically tests a complete design of a market for tradable permits, both in terms of the conceptual set-up of the market as well as its technical implementation. The design is evaluated against a number of criteria, including: transparency and containment of transaction costs, stability of permit prices in relation to the dynamic equilibrium on the mobility market and the prevention of undesirable speculation and fraud. We present evidence of the empirical functioning of this market, using the results of a conducted lab-in-the-field experiment with virtual mobility behaviour and real financial incentives.

The population of mobile users seeking connectivity to the Internet has been growing over the years, spurred by the capabilities of handsets and the increasing rich Internet content and services. Mobility management to enable efficient Internet access for users on the move is thus gaining significance. IETF has standardized several protocols such as Mobile IPv6, Hierarchical Mobile IPv6, and Proxy Mobile IPv6 to provide mobility management on the IP network. With future Internet design initiatives gaining momentum, it is important that these initiatives consider mobility management as an integral part of the design. In this article, we introduce the concept of Virtual Mobility Domain and describe the main features and key strengths of Virtual Mobility Domain that are designed to provide mobility management in a newly proposed tiered Internet architecture. Instead of IP addressing, the proposed Virtual Mobility Domain uses a tiered-addressing scheme to identify a mobile node with a single address regardless of its location. The tiered addressing provides a dynamic address length which brings less signaling overhead and scalable management. We also propose a collaborative network-based mobility management mechanism to provide low-latency handoffs and less processing-overhead on the mobile node compared to the IPv6-based protocols. The proposed mobility scheme unifies inter and intra-domain mobility management by introducing common anchor cloud concept which provides a distributed management and seamless mobility experience. We present comparative qualitative and quantitative performance analysis of Virtual Mobility Domain and aforementioned IPv6-based mobility protocols for Intra-AS roaming support. We examine handoff latency and signaling overhead performance of each protocol based on numerical results retrieved from analytical models and OPNET modeler based simulations. The results from a comparative performance study show the potential for more efficient mobility management under the proposed Internet architecture.

Most existing research about postcards focuses merely on their visual representation, but postcards offer more than only images and texts. We analyse 134 postcards sent from Smyrna between 1895 and 1922 by discussing five interdependent mobilities constituting the New Mobilities Paradigm ( Urry, 2000 , Urry, 2007 ), namely mobility of objects, corporeal, imaginative, communicative and virtual mobility, and pertaining systems enabling them. We aim to show the empirical richness of postcards and a way of looking at them through the concept of mobilities. By this we uncover who were the people sending postcards, for what purposes, which places postcards connected through images and words, and how did postcards function as ordering artefacts in the pre-telephone and internet era.

This article attempts to assess the three leading categories of mobility: terrestrial, virtual and aerial, in order to see whether they constitute categories of a single entity of mobility, or alternatively, they constitute three distinct entities of mobility. This exercise is of significance because of the tendency to refer to ‘mobility’ in a rather general sense. Coping with this question, we will, first, put it within a review of relevant concepts and structures. Then, we will elaborate on the distinct features of each of the three mobility categories through their comparison, highlighting mainly differences among them. This will be followed by a presentation of a somehow opposite perspective through the examination of convergences among the three categories of mobility. These two discussions will lead us to view mobility as one single entity consisting of three categories, since all the three categories are IT-based and IT-dependent, and given that they all share a similar model of mobility cycles for both moving people and mobility systems. Using this approach we will compare terrestrial public and personal mobilities, as well as aerial and virtual mobilities, followed by a discussion on implications of a single general mobility model.

At the outset of this research, two fields of transport research were in the ascendant. The first reflected technological change, considering the growth of new information and communications technologies and their impacts for transport systems and travel behaviour. The second reflected social change, considering the growth in inequality and disadvantage and the contribution of transport systems and travel behaviour to the same. This paper investigates a potential link between the two, exploring the hypothesis that virtual mobility, via the Internet, could provide a viable alternative to physical mobility in reducing mobility-related social exclusion. The paper presents data from a longitudinal, panel-based diary study. Results support the hypothesis that virtual mobility can provide a viable alternative to physical mobility in reducing aspects of mobility-related exclusion, by providing additional accessibility (virtual accessibility) without an increase in physical mobility. Furthermore, there is no evidence in this research to support a link between physical mobility and virtual mobility; and no evidence to suggest a negative effect of virtual mobility for sociability.

With the rapidly increasing ease of access to the Internet in people’s homes, more and more of our everyday activities are being carried out online. While the home has become what might be called a communication hub, open to question is the impact this virtual mobility is having on our physical mobility. The questions we address in this article concern the extent to which network communication is carried out in our homes and this in relation to (1) activities that demand transport, (2) those of us who utilize these options, and (3) the virtual and physical mobility/communication patterns. Data from a nationwide Norwegian sample are utilized in investigating these questions. The dataset comprises 2700 respondents with access to the Internet at home and who answered questions about daily travel and home-based use of information and communication technology (ICT) for purposes such as information-seeking, shopping, paid work, net-banking, chatting and playing games. The analysis indicates that while use of the Internet for many of these activities is common, it varies between groups. We discuss whether virtual activities have physical equivalents – physical twins - or whether these come in addition to previous equivalent activities. It is shown that the relation between virtual and physical mobility varies depending on type of activity and social group, but, overall, that is not very strong. One possible explanation is that many new ICT services and applications do not have as clear-cut functional equivalents – or physical twins – as many of the earlier ICT technologies had, and, if true, will make it increasingly difficult to track down the interplay between transport and communication.

Personal travel is undertaken principally as a means of access. The Internet now provides an additional form of access, enabling many activities to be reached without recourse to physical mobility by the individual undertaking the activity. However, the social and transport effects of this ‘virtual mobility’ are uncertain. Here, it is argued that the incidence and properties of multitasking are a necessary part of the assessment of such impacts. Participation in activities and, thus, change in activity participation will not be fully measured without consideration of multitasking. This paper presents a review, empirical evidence and discussion to support this hypothesis. Emergent from an examination of the literature and examined by new empirical evidence are three observations: (1) failure to consider multitasking leads to the underreporting of key activities; (2) misrepresentation of activity participation tends to be more pronounced for certain groups; (3) lack of awareness of multitasking could lead to flawed measurement and misrepresentation of behaviour change. Further to these observations, study findings suggest that multitasking behaviour varies according to whether the primary activity is being undertaken online or offline. Thus, the consideration of multitasking is likely to have important implications for the study of travel, Internet use and interactions between the two.

In the space of only a few years the Internet has emerged as a mainstream communications medium providing a growing proportion of the population with virtual access to goods, people, opportunities and services. Against a backdrop of highlighting how teleshopping and teleworking alongside traveller information services are advancing as a consequence of the Internet, this paper suggests that the Internet and the virtual mobility it affords must in due course be explicitly addressed within an integrated transport policy. The paper explores the relationships between use of information and communications technology and personal travel highlighting the importance of social issues in gauging whether or not a net positive effect in terms of travel demand and tripmaking can arise from increasing use of the Internet. Suggestions for a policy approach are also made.

This paper introduces a mobility dimension to social exclusion, suggesting a strong correlation between a lack of access to adequate mobility and lack of access to opportunities, social networks, goods and services. This correlation exists as both a cause and consequence of social exclusion. The authors question the likelihood that increased physical mobility, by car or public transport, can, by itself, provide a fully viable or sustainable solution to mobility-related aspects of social exclusion. This paper cautiously suggests that the use of information and communications technologies could enable a new, virtual mobility, enabling an Internet-based increase in accessibility as an alternative to an increase in physical mobility. Finally, consideration is given to the possibility of a virtual mobility-related dimension of exclusion and to the possible social implications of inclusion of virtual mobility in an integrated transport strategy.

This paper presents a view of what transportation and traffic may be like in the year 2042. It is important to consider the future since, even with rapid changes in areas such as communication and mobility, wide-ranging developments can be significantly influenced by political and planning interventions. The author presents possible developments through a mosaic of topics: city, edge city and suburbia development; post-material lifestyles; car use without car ownership; virtual mobility; intermodal transport; hydrogen-powered cars; privatized road network and road fees; and automatic driving. Several of these suggestions may prove to be overly optimistic, but others have already been implemented in some areas.