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Will digital services make us travel less?

Girl sitting in front of a laptop in her home with a lamp next to her and green plants in the background. Photo.

How do we get access to work, meetings, education, shopping, entertainment, healthcare? Today we can get access to many of these things digitally at a distance, reducing our need for travel and offering a preventative and potentially transformative solution to our transport problems. But what are the actual effects from digitalization on transport? What effects will we see in the "new normal", now when we've gotten used to do most things digitally? How can we capture the sustainability potential that digital accessibility offers?

Just because we use more digital services does not mean that travel is automatically reduced. Digital accessibility offers alternatives to physical mobility, but without adapted instruments and behavioral measures, travel patterns from the pre-pandemic era could once again become the "new normal".

Our researcher Peter Arnfalk has written a report on this topic together with Lena Winslott Hiselius from the Faculty of Engineering, Lund University. A summary is available here (in Swedish).

Peter Arnfalk also joins the podcast “Fokus Digitalisering” where he is talking about the rapidly increasing phenomenon of hybrid meetings and hybrid work forms, and the potential sustainability implications thereof. 

Read the full report (in Swedish)