A sustainable strategy for Open Streets in (post)pandemic cities

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. While public space is traditionally shared by pedestrian and cars, the distancing measures imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic have underlined the need for wider pedestrian spaces. Here, the authors take a complex network approach to analyze sidewalk data from cities across the world to evidence a strong unbalance in the space distribution between cars and pedestrian, and propose a strategy to improve urban walkability within a socially distancing context and without compromising road traffic.

Automated summary

Cities worldwide have utilized the COVID-19 pandemic to enhance pedestrian infrastructure, revealing an imbalance in public space distribution and proposing strategies to improve pedestrian environments.