Abstract
Cities world-wide have taken the opportunity presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to improve and expand pedestrian infrastructure, providing residents with a sense of relief and pursuing long-standing goals to decrease automobile dependence and increase walkability. So far, due to a scarcity of data and methodological shortcomings, these efforts have lacked the system-level view of treating sidewalks as a network. Here, we leverage sidewalk data from ten cities in three continents, to first analyse the distribution of sidewalk and roadbed geometries, and find that cities present an unbalanced distribution of public space, favouring automobiles at the expense of pedestrians. Next, we connect these geometries to build a sidewalk network –adjacent, but irreducible to the road network. Finally, we compare a no-intervention scenario with a shared-effort heuristic, in relation to the performance of sidewalk infrastructures to guarantee physical distancing. The heuristic prevents the sidewalk connectivity breakdown, while preserving the road network’s functionality.
Highlights
Cities world-wide have taken the opportunity presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to improve and expand pedestrian infrastructure, providing residents with a sense of relief and pursuing long-standing goals to decrease automobile dependence and increase walkability
City-dwellers had to learn on-the-fly how to move around in the public space of the city, while at the same time keeping a distance of at least 1.5 m from their fellow citizens[5,6,7]. It was at this point that cities world-wide took the opportunity presented by the pandemic to improve and expand pedestrian infrastructure[8], to help people comply with recommendations, and to promote social benefits in terms of health, environmental sustainability, and economics that are associated with active forms of transportation[9,10]
Anchoring our analysis to the World Health Organization (WHO) and National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) recommendations[6,23], we provide a baseline from which to adjust urban infrastructure, considering the delicate trade-offs between the sidewalk and road networks
Summary
Cities world-wide have taken the opportunity presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to improve and expand pedestrian infrastructure, providing residents with a sense of relief and pursuing long-standing goals to decrease automobile dependence and increase walkability. It is precisely on sidewalks that most cities have implemented ad hoc interventions (from temporary sidewalk widenings to complete pedestrianisation) to give pedestrians more space and to avoid large gatherings, measures which serve to provide people with a sense of relief –with evolutionary grounds19– in terms of perceived risk[3,20,21] These interventions have been mostly local and manual, and have not directly benefited from a complex systems approach of treating urban sidewalks as a network, in part due to a generalized lack of publicly available data on sidewalk infrastructure worldwide. Our proposal can either be applied in the context of a pandemic –as an extraordinary and temporary intervention–, or as a long term strategy to rebalance the distribution of public space
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
