Exploratory Analysis of New Data Sources to Assess the Impact of Covid-19 on Urban Mobility

Research Project, 2020

The sudden changes to personal mobility and urban activity across the globe caused by COVID-19 are challenging current principles and practice in spatial and transport planning of the urban environment in many ways: reduced use of public transport, increased demand for cycling and individual micro-mobility, avoidance of shared mobility services, avoidance of popular public routes and spaces, closure of main urban attractors, shift in commuting patterns, increase in local shopping and on-line shopping. Furthermore, what everyone hoped would be short-lived changes can become long term and possibly a recurrent state of affairs. Some of these changes can be observed in Google’s “COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports” (https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/) and other surveys, albeit at an aggregated regional level.

To address these changes, we still miss a more detailed picture of the situation on the ground, i.e. the spatial distribution of activities of people and their mobility patterns, in order to support informed decisions, and possible revision of our spatial and transport planning practices.

The main aim of this project is to investigate the impact of COVID 19 on urban mobility by identifying, acquiring and analysing different datasets collected by public authorities, the private sector, and open digital platforms in Sweden.