As many riders remained nervous about using public and shared transportation because of COVID-19, city planners, transit authorities and mobility industry stakeholders found themselves scrambling to provide affordable and sustainable alternatives that don't require the use of shared spaces.
As a result, some cities are aggressively implementing bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, at least for the short term.
But even amid reports of people moving out of cities and into suburbs because of the pandemic, experts say many of the fixes put in place to address COVID-19-related transportation challenges in urban areas are here to stay.
"If they promote improvements, such as fewer accidents and less pollution, cities may decide to make them permanent," research company McKinsey & Co. said in a May report.
"I think absolutely there's an opportunity to see some of these become lasting impacts on infrastructure," said Kay Cheng, head of policy initiatives at Spin, the micromobility unit of Ford Motor Co.
Spin is working with cities to introduce scooters as a complement to other forms of transportation. Cheng said she sees an opportunity to show how streets can be dedicated to new ways of getting around.
In Paris, some major roads, such as the popular Rue de Rivoli thoroughfare, have been reserved for bicycles, while others made pedestrian-only, to encourage cycling and limit crowds on public transport.
In Oakland, Calif., authorities closed streets to through traffic via the Oakland Slow Streets initiative to allow for physical distancing for pedestrians, cyclists and others during the pandemic.
In Montreal, bikes are prized alternatives to personal vehicles, as seen through the Express Bike Network, a project calling for several cycling paths in the city. The city expects cycling to account for 15 percent of transit within the next 10 years.
And in parts of New York City, outdoor restaurant dining in the street has taken precedence over vehicle traffic and parking spots.
Consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors and urban mobility services platform provider Wunder Mobility predict more city centers will restrict access to only sustainable and shared alternatives by 2030.
That may be so, but fewer people may be around cities to enjoy such changes in the short term.
In a Pew Research Center survey published in July, about 1 in 5 U.S. adults said they either had changed their residence as a result of the pandemic or knew someone who did.
"We have seen, for the first time in mankind, so many people locked in, in more or less small city center apartments, and I think the experience has driven many people to say, I need to have an alternative to being on the 10th floor of a medium-sized apartment," Nikolaus Lang, global leader of the Global Advantage practice at Boston Consulting Group and director of the company's Center for Mobility Innovation, said in a recent Shift podcast.
He predicts a "hybrid working mode" post-COVID-19, where even as workplaces reopen, a substantial number of people will continue to work from home — and seek out the space offered by suburban living.
But a city exodus does not worry mobility experts in the long run. Many of today's mobility demands will continue long term, even with fluctuating populations, said John Simlett, global Future of Mobility leader at EY.
"There's definitely a will and a move towards encouraging, maybe, less use of transport, maybe, more use of micromobility," Simlett said, "and I think it's beginning to become a pattern which is embedding itself in people's behavior. A part of it is going to carry on post-COVID because they will have changed their behavior patterns so dramatically for such a long period of time."
Still, it's important to implement these changes correctly, said Giovanni Circella, director of the 3 Revolutions Future Mobility Program at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.
"There is a general goal that means we cannot really let our cities just suffocate in an ocean of cars, which could be a very likely outcome if we let cities self-adjust, and if people just drive their car because they're scared of getting on public transit or because there are less options," he said.
One caveat: Congestion could increase if roads are reduced to make way for cyclists but at the same time, more people want to drive their own personal vehicles.
The surrounding ecosystem also is a critical component of consumer adoption of transportation alternatives.
Consumers won't be comfortable trying forms of micromobility if the city isn't conducive to them, for instance, or if mobility stakeholders and city authorities are not on the same page with what consumers need, Circella said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all that can apply to all cities," he said. "In the end, we don't want these actions that do something that promotes either infrastructure that nobody uses or infrastructure that is not potentially interesting to users, or is potentially even damaging to the users, if we think about infrastructure that might be poorly designed and done in a rush.
"An isolated type of infrastructure in a place which is not conducive to do a type of activity usually doesn't really work."
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Bike, pedestrian-friendly transportation changes in cities may last beyond pandemic - Automotive News
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