Impact of COVID-19 on Local Planning Practices: Focusing on Tactical Urbanism, Slow Streets and Low-Income Communities in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, and New York

In the face of lockdowns and social distancing measures promulgated as a result of COVID-19, the effects on local planning are quite diverse. One of the effects is planners' use of tactical urbanism in their efforts to improve public health. With tactical urbanism being characterized as incremental, temporary, flexible, and easily implementable, it is appropriate to ask whether tactical urbanism-based strategies can help make underserved communities more healthy in times of pandemic. This chapter addresses that question by examining several examples of tactical programs called Slow Streets, Open Streets, Safe Streets, Essential Places, etc. These programs provide temporary public spaces in the streets for exercise and interaction. These programs are led by local governmental entities such as transportation departments in Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, California;Denver, Colorado;Chicago, Illinois;and New York, New York. We review literature to understand the relevance of those programs to tactical urbanism, and we investigate how effectively they are helping improve health in low-income communities during COVID-19. We use interdisciplinary literature on public health and healthy community design to ground our investigation. Interviews and internet-based sources complement the research. The study outcomes suggest that the pandemic forced planners to act swiftly, but that their tactical programs are limited in improving the health of disadvantaged population because the programs lack comprehensive community engagement and alignment with longer term plans. We end by identifying areas for improvement (governance) in tactical urbanism;and by suggesting future challenges (cultural shifts in urban planning and design practice including denouncement of racialized practices) that, if overcome, could help facilitate the transformation of cities in a healthy, just, and equitable manner. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Against the grain: public interests, the parklet, and the university

Temporary/tactical or T/T urbanism is a global movement in urban design and planning encompassing small experimental interventions typically involving diverse actors in the conversion of under-utilised city spaces. Its outcomes include enhancing innovation, urban intensification, community engagement, place identity, and resilience. Yet questions remain about the extent to which large organisations engaging in T/T urbanism may be part of an increasingly legitimised, even sanitised approach to what has been a disruptive element of urban design and planning. In Tasmania, studies of T/T urbanism are limited. The qualitative research reported here addresses that gap and analyses street interviews and participants' opinions about a temporary parklet proposed by the University of Tasmania in the Hobart central business district. Analysed thematically, those views and additional insights from the literature suggest it is possible for a large organisation to engage local communities and serve public interests using T/T urbanism initiatives but that the outcomes are not guaranteed. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Street Experiments and COVID-19: Challenges, Responses and Systemic Change.

Cities have introduced street experiments, among others, in order to cope with the urgent health challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. They are primarily intended to allow people to move safely in urban spaces according to physical distancing requirements. It has been suggested that street experiments have the potential to not only respond to pressing needs, but to also trigger systemic change in mobility. This paper explores urban case studies and demonstrates how pandemic-induced street experiments provide a solution to specific challenges to mobility and public space. There are, however, issues concerning equity and citizen participation. Finally, we find that pandemic-induced street experiments have a higher acceptance among the public and authorities, a more permanent character and a greater embeddedness in long-term planning agendas. The paper concludes that the pandemic stimulated the introduction of street experiments and fostered their potential to enable systemic change in urban mobility.

Lessons from COVID-19 outbreaks for spaces between buildings using tactical urbanism

Several urban agendas related to different urban spaces in cities are documented in the global literature. This research explores social interactions in voids between buildings using tactical urbanism. As part of this study, we examine changes in perceptions of the use of spaces between buildings by comparing critical differentiation factors before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. We conducted an online survey for three months among residents in Egypt using a comparative method based on personal, residential, and district characteristics. The results revealed that during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the spaces between buildings played a critical role. According to the conclusion, tactical urbanism, rapid and low-cost intervention, material availability, and small-scale pop-ups are essential for reducing the adverse effects of COVID-19. These findings confirmed that the longer the outbreak persisted, the more planning shifted to smaller public spaces within walking distance, resulting in long-term activities rather than large areas of land being planned.

Exploring traffic evaporation: Findings from tactical urbanism interventions in Barcelona

Traffic evaporation – i.e. the opposite of induced traffic – is acknowledged as a well-established phenomenon which presents important implications for local urbanism and mobility policies, but there continue to be few academic studies which explore this issue in detail. This paper explores relative levels of traffic evaporation following the implementation of multiple tactical urbanism interventions on 11 streets in Barcelona in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the analysis of publicly available traffic count data, the findings provide empirical support for the existence of significant levels of traffic evaporation following road space reduction. On average, traffic levels on streets with interventions diminished by −14.8 % relative to streets in the rest of the city. In the wider vicinity of intervention streets, traffic levels also decreased slightly on average (−0.9 %) compared to the rest of the city, except on immediately adjacent parallel streets to those affected by interventions, which reported a small relative traffic increase (+0.7 %). Overall, these findings provide further support for street redesign policies which entail the reduction of road space for motor vehicles, and suggest that fears of traffic congestion following such schemes may often be unfounded. From a methodological standpoint, this study also offers a transparent method of evaluating traffic evaporation which could be replicated in future studies.

Cycling during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020, there have been significant changes in mobility worldwide. This chapter gives a short overview of general mobility behavior changes and a detailed summary of changes in relation to cycling and bicycle-related reactions of municipalities in urban planning to address and cater to those changes. Overall, there was a decrease in general mobility due to travel restrictions, school closures, or people working from home. Additionally, similar changes in the transport modes used could be observed in many different countries, with the significantly decreased number of trips with public transport while at the same time private car usage increased. This chapter focuses on cycling trips, which have increased since they offer a socially distanced way of traveling, especially compared to non-individual travel modes. These changes in mobility subsequently influenced accident numbers and emissions. Many cities worldwide reacted to the different circumstances and adopted new, often temporary, infrastructure measures that encouraged people to cycle and walk more. Measures taken include tactical urbanism, pop-up bike lanes and expansion of the bicycle network, the closures of streets and intersections for cars, the adjustment of speed limits, and the encouragement to use bike-sharing. The chapter also reflects on the potential of the pandemic and the urban planning interventions put in place as a catalyst for sustainable mobility behavior. The pandemic has opened the way for further mobility transition toward both active travel modes and environmental friendliness in general. Many changes that were observed will persist and may change the way we move and fulfill our mobility needs in the long-term, as the increase of mobile working or the shift toward virtual meetings continue. In the end, the changed circumstances due to the pandemic worked as a catalyst for implementing such measures, and the cities should further make use of this opportunity.

Riding the wave: Predicting the use of the bike-sharing system in Barcelona before and during COVID-19.

To simultaneously promote health, economic, and environmental sustainability, a number of cities worldwide have established bike-sharing systems (BSS) that complement the conventional public transport systems. As the rapid spread of COVID-19 becoming a global pandemic disrupted urban mobility due to government-imposed lockdowns and the heightened fear of infection in crowded spaces, populations were increasingly less likely to use public transportation and instead shifted toward alternative transport systems, including BSS. In this study, we use probabilistic machine learning in a quasi-experimental research design to identify how the relevance of a comprehensive set of factors to predict the use of Bicing (the BSS in Barcelona) may have changed as COVID-19 unfolded. We unpack the key factors in predicting the use of Bicing, uncovering evidence of increasing bike-related built infrastructure (e.g., tactical urbanism), trip distance, and the income levels of neighborhoods as the most relevant predictors. Moreover, we find that the relevance of the factors in predicting Bicing usage has generally decreased during the global pandemic, suggesting altered societal behavior. Our study enhances the understanding of BSS and societal behavior, which can have important implications for developing resilient programs for cities to adopt sustainable practices through transport policy, infrastructure planning, and urban development.

The Evolution of Sustainable Mobility and Urban Space Planning: Exploring the factors contributing to the Regeneration of Car Parking in Living Spaces

Strategies and actions to promote sustainable mobility must be based on the characterization of the mobility supply and the promotion of decarbonization policies (e.g. the management of public spaces). The presence of parkings, especially in urban areas, has a significant impact on the occupancy of physical spaces. In this framework, referring to the last decades and the recent pandemic, the paper focuses on the evaluation of influencing factors that have contributed to the changes of planned and designed parking spaces in urban areas. Parklets can support post COVID-19 (Phase 3) pandemics by improving the quality of public space and social distancing close to shops and activities, benefiting from this micro-urban regeneration. Moreover, they can be considered as an extension of the pavement and their implementation can encourage the reduction of private traffic by promoting soft mobility (i.e. walking and cycling). The article defines and highlights the features for the identification and planning of spaces where parklets can be implemented, to improve sustainability and support the post-pandemic recovery. © 2022 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)

Applying a Pedestrian Level of Service in the Context of Social Distancing: The Case of the City of Madrid.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a lot of discussion about keeping interpersonal distance to prevent the virus from spreading. To keep this interpersonal distance, authorities at different levels have taken measures to reduce people's interactions, such as reducing capacities, curfews, pop-up cycle lanes, temporary pedestrianisation, and lockdowns. Many of these temporary measures have been perceived from a static view. Nevertheless, in a scenario of "new normality" or in the face of a possible new pandemic, the amount of data (big data) generated by different sources, such as sensors, in large cities has extraordinary potential to be used together with tactical urbanism for quick adaptation. The aim of this study was to gain insight into the aforementioned issues by analysing spatio-temporal patterns of pedestrian mobility and developing a variation of the pedestrian level of service measure; the pandemic pedestrian level of service (P-PLOS). This measure provides a dynamic view of pavement capacities according to the interpersonal distance recommendations during the pandemic. P-PLOS was tested in the city of Madrid based on the pedestrian counter data that was provided by the local government through its open data website. We found that the application of P-PLOS, together with street design, allows for knowing where and when it is necessary to take tactical urbanism measures in order to maintain or improve the level of service, as well as where it is necessary to take measures to reduce pedestrian flow.