COVID-19 disrupted how people traveled in cities around the world. Local transportation agencies responded by rapidly reconfiguring streets and roadways in order to ensure residents had safe places to walk, cycle, and socialize and that businesses were able to remain open. Pedestrian and bicycle projects that would ordinarily have taken years if not decades to plan, fund, and build were now moving from idea to installation in a matter of weeks or even days. Emerging evidence shows that these interventions were heavily used and largely welcomed by individuals, businesses, and local agencies alike.
In the US, there is considerable variation in the pace and scale of these interventions, and North Carolina cities’ responses were typically slower and more limited than in cities in peer states. On-going research suggests that cities with faster, more robust responses to COVID-19-induced changes in mobility demand were more likely to have benefitted from concerted efforts by state DOTs to facilitate those responses. As we emerge from the pandemic, North Carolina cities are looking to experiences from the past two years, both locally and from other cities across the world, for guidance on how to respond to future disruptive events. Having policies, supports, and knowledge in place to quickly adapt transportation networks to accommodate changes in travel demand—as might be expected during natural disasters, economic slow-downs, fuel shortages, or future disease outbreaks—is critical to ensuring a resilient, equitable, and competitive future for North Carolina cities.
The proposed research will identify state-level factors that support cities’ efforts to respond quickly and effectively to changes in mobility demand and assess the transferability of other state DOT supports to North Carolina. Through reviews of relevant documentation and structured interviews with local and state officials involved in COVID-streets responses in a sample of states, we will address the following questions:
1) What roles have state DOTs played across the US in enabling local agencies to respond to sudden changes in travel demands and/or needs for alternative uses of public street space?
2) What programs, policies, and resources can NCDOT put in place to better prepare North Carolina communities to respond to future transportation disruptions safely, effectively, equitably, and quickly?
We will achieve these aims by first summarizing the impacts of robust state-level responses on local changes in the four states (Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, and Connecticut), and then by conducting structured interviews with transportation planning and engineering staff in a sample of North Carolina cities as well as with NCDOT officials familiar with state-level discussions about ways to support local COVID-streets responses.
This research will provide NCDOT with guidance for increasing flexibility and adaptability to future transportation system disruptions. The guidance will also include a detailed summary of state DOT responses to COVID-19-induced changes in demand for roadway space, an analysis of the barriers facing North Carolina cities with respect to timely, effective responses to transportation disruptions, and a framework and guidance document about how lessons from other states might apply in North Carolina.
