Shifting streets COVID-19 mobility data: Findings from a global dataset and a research agenda for transport planning and policy

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a dramatic shift in demand for spaces for safe, physically distanced walking, bicycling, and outdoor commerce. Cities around the world responded by instituting a variety of policies and programs meant to address this shift, such as carving out roadway space for non-car uses, putting pedestrian walk signals on recall, reducing speed limits, and subsidizing bike share schemes. The extraordinarily rapid pace and global scale of these responses—and the public’s reactions to them—suggest that the transport planning, policy, and engineering professions may be at an inflection point with respect to equitable accommodation of non-car transport modes. In this paper we describe an effort to support potential shifts in practice by documenting and cataloging over a thousand COVID-19-related mobility responses into a publicly available database. We provide detailed guidance on using the database, along with preliminary summaries of key variables in the database. We also put forth a research agenda intended to build understanding about the processes that led to these actions, their implications for future efforts to design and implement pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and ways in which the transport professions might evolve in response to lessons learned during and after the pandemic.