More Traffic Free Cities

On Monday, in Traffic Free Cities, we saw how Buzzfeed and the Los Angeles Times had mapped the fall in road traffic in cities around the world. Both Buzzfeed and The LA Times used Mapbox telemetry data to show the impact of Covid-19 on the traffic on our normally busy roads. Mapbox has now used the same data to create their own maps of Where and when local travel decreased from COVID-19 around the world.

Mapbox's maps show where road traffic decreased between the week of January 13th and the week of March 16th. The maps show large decreases in traffic in Europe and South America. In the USA traffic has also decreased in lots of locations. In Italy and Spain road traffic has decreased by about 80%. Rome has seen a decrease of 87%.

Mapbox has also looked at the decrease in traffic over time. The UK and the USA started seeing decreases about a week after traffic in Italy and Spain began to fall. This decrease in traffic over time is visualized on both a line graph and an animated timeline map.




It isn't only the traffic on the roads which has been effected by Covid-19. With many people now working from home and stay-at-home orders in operation the levels of traffic on public transit systems has also dropped dramatically in many cities.

Moovit has created visualizations of the fall in public transit traffic around the world. The Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Public Transit Usage charts the decline in public transit use, as compared to typical usage from before the outbreak of Covid-19. The data for the charts comes from the users of the Moovit app.