Research project
TRANSAS: COVID-19 Transport, Travel and Social Adaptation Study
- Start date: May 2020
- End date: July 2023
- Funder: UK Research and Innovation
- Value: £468,900
- Partners and collaborators: UKRI, CREDS, Decarbon8, University of Stirling, YOUGov
- Primary investigator: Professor Jillian Anable
- Co-investigators: Professor Greg Marsden, Dr Llinos Brown, Dr Christian Bretter, Dr. Nadia Naqvi, and Dr Malcolm Morgan; with special thanks to Dr Ian Greenwood and Dr Morgan Campbell
- External co-investigators: Professor Iain Docherty, [University of Stirling)
- Postgraduate students: Phoebe Pitcher
This project seeks to address COVID-19 in relation to learning, exploring, and understanding the following:
- How society can better position itself to respond better to similar, unprecedented shocking future events
- How society can adapt to new modes of access to people, goods, services and opportunities
- What adaptations have been possible, how they have been maintained, and how they have impacted the population, as to inform research and policymaking?
- How society can emerge from events like COVID-19 in relation to public and personal finances, employment, IT systems, transport provision, social norms, and more.
TRANSAS addresses these project aims via three connected sets of data collection. These include:
(1) A major 6-wave panel survey which has enabled anticipated and actual behavioural responses of a wide range of individuals; data collection has occurred in London, Bristol, Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Newcastle and wider city region, Glasgow and wider Strathclyde area and other areas of more rural Scotland.
(2) Three waves of qualitative public and business interviews in Glasgow, Bristol, London, Manchester, and Newcastle to enable a more in-depth exploration of ideas generated by the quantitative work which are harder to extract from questionnaires.
(3) A five-wave survey with experts from across government exploring preparedness for the pandemic, responses at the time, and views of what might happen next. Interviews have provided rapid feedback to decision-makers about the state of play across the industry. Additionally, interviews are building our understanding of crisis response, foresight and the importance of the interactions between industry, citizen preferences and the science and policy positions adopted in response the virus.