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The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruptions to the travel and mobility of various population groups worldwide. These impacts were more pronounced for older adults, who, in various countries around the world, were instructed to quarantine for prolonged periods and avoid contact with others. The impact of these disruptions has been differently experienced between countries and geographical regions with levels of economic development and transport infrastructures playing a role. The aim of this article is firstly, to critically synthesise scientific literature about changes in travel behaviour and transport choices of older adults caused by the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in various countries, secondly, highlight the main gaps in the literature and finally, provide avenues for future research and transport policies. Findings indicate inequalities in access to transport explained by built environment design and policies adopted by governments to control the pandemic, as well as socio-economic and developmental factors. The implications of these findings for transport provision and increased mobility for older adults in the post-pandemic world are outlined. Finally, we discuss the importance of active aging policies, which could create more transportation options to support older adults’ mobility needs and access in the post-COVID-19 era in both high- and low-income countries.

The aim of this article is to critically review the scientific literature about the changes in travel behaviour and mobility amongst older adults caused by the COVID-19 pandemic across various countries, identify unmet travel needs and highlight patterns of inequalities in older adults’ mobility. We have collected articles from four academic databases: PubMed, Scopus, Transportation Research International Documentation (TRID), and Web of Science. Papers were considered for inclusion if they were published online in 2020 or later, written in English, and referred to urban or rural changes in travel behaviour and mobility of older adults over 50 years old. We examined the pre-existing models developed before the outbreak and classified the articles based on Musselwhite and Haddad’s (2010; 2018) hierarchy of older adults’ travel needs. The synthesis of the selected articles shows a general decline in literal mobility amongst older adults, an increased share of virtual travel, and their decreased capacity to fulfil different levels of travel needs. Findings also indicate an increased gap in older adults’ mobility across geographical regions with various levels of transport infrastructure and digital capital. We conclude the paper with the lessons learned, the opportunities ahead, and the challenges that must be overcome to achieve sustainable development and the UN Decades of Healthy Ageing goals in the post-pandemic world.

Active travel (“walking and cycling”) is promoted because of its benefits to environmental sustainability and public health and wellbeing. Neighbourhood design, including provision of infrastructure for walking and cycling, can increase social cohesion and can positively affect sense of belonging and pride in the community. This paper investigates the experience of residents living in a suburb of the “Cycling City” of Oxford, UK, who endeavoured to walk and cycle for local journeys. We generated in-depth qualitative insights into regular active travel activity, first through biographical interviews, followed by micro-ethnographic mobile methods with members of the local community to observe and understand how everyday activities on foot or by cycle are performed and experienced. Jensen’s “Staging Mobilities” framework is used to reveal how active travel is “staged from above” and how it is choreographed within the neighbourhood, “from below”. By adopting this framework, we demonstrate how moving beyond the collection of “hard” data of movements between origins and destinations, to a more situated approach generating tacit knowledge from the ground up, can provide a more informed understanding of the broader social and cultural conditions under which active travel operates. This can help policy makers develop both physical and social infrastructures to support active travel so that it may contribute more effectively to increasing community wellbeing as well as contributing to sustainable development goals.

Brazilian cities are typically unequal and car dominated, where poorer communities mainly rely on public transport, walking and cycling. Yet, understanding the experience of using these modes within specific contexts remains limited. In this paper, we illustrate how the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ can contribute to the ‘Accessibility Turn’ in urban research. Focusing on the low-income ‘Cruzeiro-Tronco’ neighbourhood in Porto Alegre, Brazil, we incorporate considerations of equity and social inclusion by applying Jensen’s ‘Staging Mobilities’ framework to examine how mobility is ‘staged from above’ by institutions and ‘staged from below’ by residents. We used biographical interviews and mobile methods to provide in-depth accounts of the lived experience of walking and cycling, showing how residents navigate the spaces and negotiate their mobility strategies in places deemed accessible by conventional ‘objective’ metrics. By applying Jensen’s framework as part of a mixed-methods research approach, we provide a more informative and context-specific account of the accessibility landscape, constructing knowledge with participants about the meanings of accessibility to support more inclusive policies and designs.