Life *during* Covid-19
Implications of the novel coronavirus on urban life.
Photo credit: Jeremiah Moss, @jeremoss
At a time like this, there is a tendency among the popular press to write stories that elicit strong emotional responses. Stories abound with titles like “Life after Covid-19” or “How Covid-19 could radically alter urban life”. In a world connected by the Internet, a pandemic has the two-fold effect of amplifying alarmist headlines and expanding the population susceptible to hyperbolic nonsense.
A serious analysis would evade the temptation to cherry-pick snippets from the Wikipedia page on the “Black Death”, or the disease which spread across Europe in the 14th century. Certainly, historical episodes like these produced many important outcomes, some of which we still live with today (for example, water sanitation). Yet the circumstances across time and places are markedly different. For example, to suggest that in the absence of the cholera outbreak in 1854, London would have failed to invest in its public health infrastructure is unconvincing. This is the case of a missing counterfactual (or the fundamental problem of causal inference). Perhaps instead the pestilence narrowed that city’s investment horizon.
As people around the globe are experiencing first-hand, pandemics can serve as wrecking balls for life as we know it. However, the consequences of contagion are perhaps even more pronounced in cities. Cities are the perfect incubators for pathogens. Novel infectious diseases thrive where there are many potential hosts (susceptibility), multiple points-of-contact (transmission), and constrained spatial distances (attack rate). In the US, this is likely why metropolises like New York City have suffered so disproportionately from the novel coronavirus. Density is a fact of life in the boroughs of Queens (~21,000 people / sq. mile) and Brooklyn (~37,000 people / sq. mile), as examples.
At the same time -- and partly as a result of density -- cities are the incubators of ideas. Innovation in public health measures will ripple from the urban core where there is latency for the rapid exchange of information and potentially infinite iterations of trial-and-error policy actions. Cities are the time-tested labs of program implementation and constituent feedback.
Density also correlates with culture. In the US, New York City and Los Angeles serve as the twin pillars of cultural capital. Pandemic-related changes in culture will be observed first in the nation’s cities and only later in the suburbs, exurbs and finally rural America. This short essay is an attempt to reconcile the unobservable future state with the changes already happening before our eyes.
Streets are public spaces too
As cities across the world went into lockdown and shelter-in-place orders took effect, something strange happened. Cities suddenly became quieter. In Paris, a group that monitors noise pollution saw as much as a 90 percent drop in human sounds. In New York City, streets that were typically punctuated by honking horns and truck exhaust were eerily silent. Several people reported hearing birds for the first time outside their windows. A seismometer installed at University of Michigan’s football stadium that measures vibrations of sellout crowds reported a 30 percent reduction in average weekly noise levels, as the campus cleared out.
Government-mandated lockdowns have served as a sort of natural experiment to test what life looks like in the absence of a regularly scheduled 9 - 5 universe. It is an opportunity to gauge the effects of human activity on the planet. Already, there has been a significant reduction in CO2 emissions, nitrogen dioxide levels, and industrial-related smog across the world. People living in Punjab, India reported being able to see the Himalayas from their homes.
At the same time, this is an opportunity to seriously evaluate the consequences of our built environment. Since a return to normal economic life is desirable, we should not expect a continuation of short-term (albeit encouraging) climate trends. For example, following the end of the 2008 financial recession, global CO2 emissions continued on their upward trajectory.
In virtually every city, there is a much more glaring omission than noise pollution: cars. City streets once choked by suffocating traffic jams are suddenly a lot less crowded. Some of this can be attributed to the closure of “non-essential” businesses, which practically-speaking includes everything outside of grocery stores. Those who are fortunate to work remotely have bunkered down in their home offices.
Consequently, social distancing orders have blown up the idea of “rush hour” traffic. In Los Angeles, CalTrans measures hours of delay by calculating how long cars spend on freeways traveling less than 60 miles per hour. From March 2 to April 6, the average morning peak hour of delays dropped 80 percent while the average evening peak hour of delays fell 88 percent. And it’s not just on freeways and interstates. City streets, neighborhood blocks, and local roadways are carrying a lot less cars.
As people spend more time in their physical neighborhoods (and less time behind the wheel), they have finally set their eyes on that most valuable piece of real estate: streets. Streets, by design, are public spaces. However, the American public’s perception of asphalt has remained relatively constant over time. Outside of the vehement voices found on pro-urbanist blogs or the build-more-bike-lanes Twitter brigade, for the majority of Americans streets as “public spaces” is an awkward, even unnatural thought.
A pandemic changes things, however. In California, Oakland closed more than 70 miles of its streets to through-traffic so that people could freely walk, jog, run, ride a bike, or simply just chill. It’s also a sound public-health measure as maintaining 6 feet of distance on sidewalks is virtually impossible. New York City experimented with the idea of shutting down major avenues to vehicular traffic. In Minneapolis, the city banned cars from the lakefront loop around Lake Nokomis so that trail users (i.e., people on foot) had more space to spread out. On April 17, New York City’s Council introduced legislation to open up 75 miles of streets to pedestrians and cyclists. Cities are thus engaged in a massive space reclamation movement.
It’s hard to understate the magnitude of these policy actions. The reallocation of street space usually implies one thing: less room for cars. History is littered with bombed out city council meetings from “overambitious” street-calming projects. Perhaps nowhere have policy makers run into more resistance than removing parking spaces, for example. It is difficult to predict whether this movement will have lasting impact. In pre-pandemic times, even ultra-progressive cities like San Francisco had to fight tooth and nail for wins like the closure of Market Street. Many New Yorkers trembled in fear at the prospect of 14th Street being closed to private car traffic. Hard-fought battles like these will be waged anew.
However, human psychology would suggest that once people get a taste for something, it becomes very difficult to reverse. In 2014, when Jersey City’s city council introduced a proposal to implement a pedestrian-only plaza in its downtown, residents offered plenty of wild prognostications: “people’s lives would be put at risk” one person argued. Another person went as far as to say that restaurants and businesses would never make any money and people were “crazy” for thinking otherwise.
Today, Jersey City’s pedestrian plaza serves as an unrivaled economic magnet for that city. People shopping at businesses along Newark Avenue can leave their children to play in the literal street outside. Right now, city governments should be having serious conversations about how to best accommodate (potentially) massive shifts in mode behavior, including the possibility of dangerously crowded sidewalks or cyclists in streets that ipso facto discourage safe passage.
Cars are king (again)?
Streets with fewer cars will not always produce positive externalities. As roads empty out due to more people staying at home, a new problem replaces the old one of too many cars: oddly enough, too few cars. With less cars on the road, drivers are incentivized to travel at much higher speeds. Already, we are seeing this play out across the US. Average speeds across city roadways are trending up.
For example, in New York City, the city’s automated speeding cameras have issued almost twice as many speeding tickets daily. In Midtown Manhattan, a sports car aficionado totaled his $1 million Gemballa Mirage GT crashing into several parked cars before peeling out on a nearly-empty 11th Avenue. On another occasion, an army of scofflaws on dirt-bikes and ATVs swarmed an Upper East Side neighborhood, even riding down sidewalks which caused pedestrians to frantically duck out of the way.
In a carless city, empty streets produce a certain appeal for free-wheeling opportunists. These are the unfortunate short-term side effects of a temporary lockdown. However, this should not presage a future car-free utopia. As stay-at-home restrictions are gradually rolled back, we can expect a rapid return of cars to the roadways.
In China, as a two-month lockdown came to a close, people were perhaps too eager to return to the roads. Initial reports out of that country suggest that people are shirking public transit and instead relying on private transport at a higher clip than before the virus outbreak. Additionally, new car sales in China are steadily increasing (albeit from nearly zero). One car salesman in the Wuchang district of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, reported “It’s like a boom after a two-month dormancy. I thought sales would be frozen.”
For most people, intra-city transportation has typically boiled down to one of two options: relying on public transit (if you’re lucky enough to live near a station) or owning a car. Not surprisingly, public transit has taken a massive hit from Covid-19. Ridership is down by nearly 100% on some transit lines. Agencies have been forced to cut service levels, reduce frequencies, or, in the extreme cases, suspend operations. This is not to suggest that no one is riding buses or trains anymore. In fact, many “essential” workers including people that restock grocery store shelves, help treat Covid patients, or clean hospitals rely on public transit. In a truly twisted fate, reductions in service levels have caused unsafe crowding on buses and trains, as documented in New York, Detroit, and Miami, which puts essential workers at risk of infection.
While hard to prove empirically, the “perceived value” of a personal automobile will likely increase substantially. People are understandably afraid of contracting a potentially deadly virus; the last place most people want to be right now is sharing a crowded train or bus with strangers. No one knows how people are going to respond once restrictions on movement are lifted. If people seriously stigmatize public transport, then agencies face an existential threat.
Until a vaccine is developed or a therapeutic treatment is identified, people who can choose how they get around will instinctively gravitate towards the option which poses the least risk to their health. This will happen even as public transit agencies go to extra lengths to wipe down doors and hand-rails or run extra-long buses and trains to enable social distancing. A doomsday scenario is one where agencies incur additional infection-control expenses while producing negligible gains in terms of ridership. And because so many municipal governments view “ridership” as the primary metric for success, this will raise life-or-death questions about public transit’s future.
Pandemic-induced cultural adaptation
Culture is the invisible plasma that confounds every model. It is in a state of constant flux and thus is difficult, if not impossible, to measure. At best, we can document some obvious changes from life shortly before the pandemic put the brakes on the economy. These include short-term trends in entertainment and leisure, food consumption outside the home, and general consumer purchasing habits.
Even before statewide lockdowns went into effect, people began curtailing their spending at restaurants and bars. This would suggest that even when restrictions are lifted, there may not be a rush to eat out or plop down on a barstool next to strangers. California’s Governor Newsom seems to have anticipated these changes. Gov. Newsom outlined a set of policies to be enacted at restaurants once California’s stay-at-home orders are lifted, including taking customer temperatures at the door, requiring servers to wear masks and gloves, reducing the number of tables by 50% and providing disposable menus.
In many respects, grocery stores are serving as the test dummies for the post-lockdown operational handbook. For example, several states already require that when people shop for groceries, there are limits on the number of customers inside the store, people maintain a proper distance when queuing up, or store workers are provided appropriate personal protective gear including face masks and gloves. Some cities and states require that customers don face coverings before setting foot inside a store.
At first, infection-control measures like these will feel foreign and even revolting to some people. However, people will be forced to adapt, especially as the health risk remains relatively constant. Many small business owners, including restaurants and bars, are rightfully fearful of their long-term prospects. It may be extremely difficult to not only recuperate the lost revenue as a result of being shut down (or partially open), but also more importantly being able to generate -- or even approximate -- the same levels of revenues prior to the pandemic. Consider how many bars in Manhattan depend on shoulder-to-shoulder crowds on Friday and Saturday evenings. “Social distancing” is a death certificate for much of urban nightlife.
Finally, people are doing much more of their shopping online. How much of this is attributable to the large majority of brick-and-mortar stores being closed and how much is correlated to changes in cultural preferences is still uncertain. Amazon quickly hired more than 100,000 warehouse workers in anticipation of increased demand. At the same time, Uber/Lyft are encouraging their drivers to take up meal delivery, ostensibly to replace their prior form of employment (transporting people) with another (food couriers). The “gig economy” will do what it does best: identify clever ways to utilize underemployed human capital in ways previously unimaginable. It does not seem that far-fetched to imagine a future where former Uber/Lyft drivers serve as personal shopping assistants for the privileged few who can bunker down in their sterilized homes and minimize interfacing with the general public.
Concluding thoughts
I’m reminded of a recent phone conversation I had with my mom (which reminds me, I need to call her again). The main thrust of her argument was that people are going to be afraid of living in cities and that cities will ultimately lose their sex appeal when faced with a seemingly never-ending pandemic. Instead, people will happily flock to the bucolic suburbs and exurbs to wait out the storm. I certainly acknowledge that cities will (and already do) look much differently today than they did on January 1. However, it’s still far too soon to conclude that the majority of people will abandon urban living en masse.
This moment should instead be viewed as a ripe opportunity for policy makers to get creative. Whole swaths of city streets remain empty or nearly empty. Massive surface parking lots are sitting vacant. The proactive city halls are those already engaged in efforts to expedite long-running projects that would otherwise lead to mile-long traffic jams under normal conditions. This includes obvious things like deferred maintenance and repair, but also investments for the future like adding new transit lines or deploying dedicated bus lanes. At the same time, cities have it in their power to literally throw out the old rulebook. What were once viewed as “tactical urbanism” demos can be reimagined as pandemic-related mitigation measures. This time around, the public may be more accepting of these ideas, especially if it means minimizing their exposure to a deadly pathogen.
Cities will once again come to rely on the one thing that makes urban areas so resilient: human capital. In the absence of a vaccine or effective therapeutic, a disease which transcends seasons will require an unprecedented surveillance effort. Testing for community transmission, contact tracing the infected, isolating the exposed, and quarantining confirmed cases is a Herculean task, even under the best conditions. Freedom-loving Americans will understandably shudder at the prospect of a top-down digital-tracing effort like those seen in Singapore or Korea. Consequently, the burden of disease mitigation will fall on the shoulders of every American. Municipal governments may consider conscripting armies of public health workers to assist with contact-tracing, going neighborhood-by-neighborhood, block-by-block. This was achieved in the last pandemic ~100 years ago.
“Life after Covid-19” should not be the primary concern, as we are still living life during Covid-19. There are many short-term, immediate implications, several of which are documented above. These include the reallocation of public space, changes in preferred modes of transportation, and cultural shifts in terms of consuming food and leisure. Municipal governments’ responses (or failures to respond) to these ongoing challenges will serve as the best predictors of the future city.