Virtual environments for analyzing travel behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on the importance of crowd avoidance to understand behavior during a public health emergency. In terms of travel behavior modeling tools, it is not obvious how spatial elements such as crowding should be displayed in discrete choice experiments. In this paper, we argue in favor of using virtual environments. We describe how we have successfully used static virtual environments in two pandemic-related case studies. Extrapolating from these two applications, we discuss how immersive virtual environments could be used in travel behavior research in general, along with the identification of associated methodological challenges.