See How Travel Patterns Have Changed in Your City
Do people heed the advice to stay at home instead of commuting to work, doing errands, and traveling? Several projects have tried to collect this data, including the recent Apple Mobility Trends project.
It is difficult to find a suitable dataset to answer this question. The New York Times has published maps based, for example, on distance traveled data collected from mobile phones, but the distances mean different things at different places. A shopping trip that takes two blocks in New York can take 10 or 20 miles in the countryside. Their map “When the average distance traveled first fell below 2 miles” paints the entire south in red (for more travel), while another map that links trips to mid-tiers shows a different picture: more travel in the countryside, less in cities and states that place orders for homebody early on.
Apple’s tool only works for a few major cities in the US and for a few individual countries, but uses a different method. Instead of tracking where and how far people have traveled, it uses the number of requests made in the Apple Maps app. How many people in the Bay Area asked Apple for directions today versus a month ago? What about walking trails or public transportation?
There is no easy way to compare cities to each other, but it is interesting to look at different areas to see how sharply or early their curves went down. The public transport trend in Italy has stabilized, with walking and driving levels still low. The New York samples are much more active, albeit well below pre-pandemic levels.
As another approach, Google provides the reports in PDF format about how much time their users spent in different types of places. (PDFs are by state; here , for example , California .) How much time do people spend in grocery stores, retail stores, parks, workplaces, and residential areas? Trends are declining for all of them, but more in some places than others.