The above chart from Bloomberg City Lab shows driving, walking, and transit mobility for 12 cities during this pandemic. The data source is Apple’s mobility index, which is based on travel queries within its app. So this isn’t going to capture how everyone is moving about, but presumably it is somewhat indicative. Although I couldn’t tell you the last time I used an app to tell me where to walk. Maybe that’s just me though.

A few things are worth point out. As we have seen before on this blog, Seattleites (do people actually use this demonym?) stopped using transit at a faster rate than most other cities in the US. And according to the above chart, they have also been slower to return to it. This has me continuing to wonder, “why is Seattle such an outlier?” Generally though, these graphs do seem to suggest that people are shying away from transit.

Taipei looks to have fared the best out of this subset of cities, which is consistent with what has been publicly reported about its handling of the pandemic. Taipei has turned out to be an exemplar city during all of this. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that it remembers SARS and knew what to do — the least of which was to simply take it seriously at the outset.

Image: Bloomberg City Lab