The why and how of COVID streets: a city-level review of research into motivations and approaches during a crisis

ABSTRACT

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1500 cities around the world created or expanded public spaces for walking, bicycling, recreation and outdoor commerce to accommodate requirements for physical distancing. These interventions often involved the reallocation of street space dedicated to cars to facilitate active mobility. While research on efforts to adapt street space during the pandemic is burgeoning, there has yet to be an in-depth analysis of the motivations behind these responses. Our international qualitative study conducted a thematic review of existing research on active mobility responses to understand them better. Specifically, our review considered why responses were chosen (four motivations: risk reduction, impact mitigation, demand accommodation and opportunity) and how they were implemented (four typologies: opportunism, crisis reaction, business-as-usual was also a crisis and agility). Opportunism was most common both as motivation and typology of approach. However, elements of the other motivations and approach typologies were critical for developing and implementing responses that more directly addressed community needs and concerns during the crisis. Our findings help inform the work of transportation professionals to make cities more resilient by building their capacity to respond quickly and equitably to future disruptions and ongoing crises.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• transportation planning
• infrastructure
• active mobility
• practice change

Acknowledgements

We appreciate the constructive and insightful comments from the reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Based on analysis of the Shifting Streets COVID-19 Mobility Dataset, which is a collaborative effort to document and describe transport-related responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset is available for download at pedbikeinfo.org/shiftingstreets.

2 Musumeci defines a syndemic as the “synergistic interplay between biological and sociological factors, leading to adverse health outcomes” (2022, p. 1).

3 We note that 3 of the 4 cities mentioned with respect to this typology were profiled in a single paper (Vecchio et al., 2021), and recognise that the authors' interests in cultural supports and public attitudes toward experimentation may have informed their choice of cities and/or led them to de-emphasise other aspects of COVID-streets implementation that might have been relevant to our review.