...and informing development of resilient transportation plans and practices that build cities' capacity to respond quickly and equitably to future disruptions and to on-going crises.

I've got 50 free copies to share, so hit me up if you want to read the paper and don't have a library subscription.

I'll hit the highlights here though: (3)

This paper was a natural offshoot of my work with Carlos Pardo on the #ShiftingStreets Global COVID Mobility Database, in which we gathered and classified responses to pandemic-related changes in transportation demand in 1500 cities around the world.
In a 2021 paper introducing the database, we noted the pandemic's potential to redefine the entire field of transportation. (4)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2021.100322
https://www.pedbikeinfo.org/resources/resources_details.cfm?id=5235

Our goal in the current paper was to figure out how to shape post-pandemic transportation planning practices to support more resilient, equitable, sustainable cities.

We did this through a multi-step process, led by 1st author and wizard Lindsay Oluyede (Arizona State U). We started with a systematic search and screen of published research into city-level motivations, planning processes, and implementation strategies behind COVID streets programs (in English or Spanish). (5)

150 articles became 20 (our screening was necessarily very specific; we go into the weeds in the article if you're into that) detailed reviews of planning processes for COVID streets programs in 28 cities. Through a thematic analysis (https://mural.co/) we identified two central themes from these 28 cities' processes: *why* cities acted, and *how*. (6)

The motivations for actions (the *why*) came in 4 flavors. 3 of them were about addressing immediate threats posed by the pandemic:
- reducing risk of virus transmission
- mitigating secondary impacts of lockdowns
- meeting new demands for walking, biking, & outdoor commerce
The 4th motivation? Seizing the opportunity to advance pre-pandemic plans and agendas (7)

We used a qualitative factor analysis to organize the characteristics of cities' planning processes into 4 *how *factors, each generally describing a particular way of going about planning and implementing COVID streets programs: Opportunism, Crisis reaction, 'Normal was also a crisis!', and Agility.

Then we mapped the *why* and the *how *to see how they fit together (this fig. didn't make it into the paper, but I like it so here you go) (8)

Finally, we discussed how these 8 concepts (4 *why*s, 4 *how*s) related to our goal of informing more resilient, sustainable, equitable transport planning practices, viewing them through a 'coping vs. catalyzing' framework.

Coping is when cities act to tackle immediate problems; Catalyzing is when they used the policy window opened by those problems to also address other, perhaps more longstanding, challenges.

(see, the pic's handy) (9)

(more later...)

Some of the relationships seem quite logical, like that the motivation to reduce risks fed mainly into a crisis reaction response. And that cities with an opportunism-oriented approach to rolling our their COVID-streets responses were largely motivated by a desire to seize the opportunity presented by the pandemic. (10)

But all the other motivations for action (the *why*s) were also linked to crisis reactions! And this was a pretty key finding -- the urgency of the moment seems to have had a powerful influence on how cities responded to the pandemic, regardless of what motivated their responses.

And these top-down, somewhat frenetic crisis reactions happened even in places that had plans in place that could have guided other approaches.

Why? (We're not sure, but we have ideas) (11)

As an aside, one of the goals of resilience planning is for communities to be able to emerge from disruptive events stronger than they went into them. But only a handful of cities' COVID responses were aligned with approaches that support that goal--which is consistent with some of our earlier work suggesting that cities, despite their quick actions, weren't prepared to respond to the pandemic with resilience-building solutions. (12)

Takeaways:
1. We know that transportation planning has been stuck on an unsustainable model for a long time. The pandemic opened up a policy window for shaking up planning practices, and many cities jumped through it.
2. But the prevalence of top-down, opportunistic motivations and approaches to action raise a critical question: *To what extent did the opportunity of the pandemic compete with efforts to address the immediate challenges posed by the pandemic...and for whom? *(13)

3. Based on this study and other work we're going, we suspect that many cities did not have plans in place that could effectively guide them through a pandemic. Fair play, but now we know that disruptions are a thing, and that they can have huge impacts on mobility. Planning must adapt! We (as a field and as communities) desperately need to develop a framework for integrating resilience into transportation plans and processes. (14)

We close by posing critical questions for further research:

- Are more deliberate responses ultimately more effective than rapid ones?
- How can cities become more flexible in crisis situations while staying accountable to the public?
- What circumstances and preconditions allow for rapid, equitable, sustainable response?

Thanks for reading! I have a limited number of links to free copies of the paper; let me know if you need one. (15/end)

My co-author and long-time collaborator on this work, Carlos Pardo, posted about our paper on linkedin. He talks more about what the motivations and plannin gapproaches mean, if you're curious: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/carlosfpardo_why-did-cities-do-covid-streets-and-how-activity-7158105902682636289-15dr?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

@DrTCombs Yeah, for us in #cville it revealed the importance of organizational capacity to prepare for and adapt to whatever hits us, which we are still working through but it is IMO positive and important

@DrTCombs last snapshot of that here: “So I’m giving an update on transportation planning and I don’t think you’ve had one of these for a very long time” https://infocville.com/2023/03/21/charlottesvilles-new-transportation-planner-briefs-council-on-future-process/

@DrTCombs now instead of telling citizens I don’t know what’s happening and no one will tell me, I tell them I know some things are happening and I have a diagram

@Lyle This is a fascinating diagram. I'd love to see the data that gets churned out of it someday!

@DrTCombs it’s incredible how much progress we’re finally making behind the scenes. I’ll ping you when I get another update

@DrTCombs Nicely done, I can access the paper instutionally and I really appreciate the detail you provide. I'm curious about the two cities that removed their interventions, I suspect I'm living in one of them!

@sflkirk @DrTCombs Hey, me too. Strange honor.

@sflkirk alas, I think you are not!
But here's the thing -- we were only able to assess the ultimate outcomes of the particular responses that were reviewed in the literature, and in your case, that response was made permanent....according to our data*

*which could be wrong...which is why we didn't put too much analysis into ultimate outcomes

I'd eat sand to be able to document what happened to every intervention in our database, but that information has been extraordinarily hard to find.

@DrTCombs I wish the changes had been permanent....

@DrTCombs “Normal was also a crisis!” is well put

@Lyle thanks! this one was interesting, and I was glad to see it come through

@thehomespundays I have a limited supply of free links I'm allowed to distribute; if you can't get it through your library lmk