Before COVID-19, most people couldn’t imagine how the outbreak would upend our lives. For many around the world, the pandemic has been horrific. They watched loved ones die or become debilitated by the virus or fell ill themselves. Others lost their jobs or suffered reductions in their hours of work and levels of income. Overall, the wide-ranging effects of the public health threat have been devastating, with unprecedented, adverse social and economic consequences. These effects include their influence upon the future of our urban environments.
This past spring, everyone adjusted as governments enacted lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders. Many were fortunate to continue working, albeit from home. One immediate result was a dramatic reduction in the number of vehicle trips in large population centers around the country. The Eugene-Springfield metro area was no exception. Traffic congestion during peak hours disappeared overnight, as did visible smog and air pollution. Our streets were cleaner, quieter, and safer.
Perhaps, we thought, COVID-19 harbored a silver lining. Notable urbanists regarded the upheaval wrought by the SARS-CoV-2 virus as an opening for greater prioritization of paradigm-shifting policies favoring walking, biking and transit, and high-quality public realms. Perhaps, finally, everyone would open their eyes to the benefits of decreased reliance upon the automobile and the value of walkable, mixed-use developments. Perhaps real, rapid, and lasting changes would occur.
The reality is people reverted to their previous driving habits as the economy cautiously reopened through the course of the summer. If anything, some who had relied upon riding LTD buses or ridesharing for their daily commutes chose to use their cars instead out of fear of interacting with potentially infected individuals. Though my observations are purely anecdotal, I believe the volume of traffic on our streets has been on the upswing since early summer and is approaching pre-COVID-19 levels. More objectively, ODOT maintains statistics for observed statewide traffic on Oregon’s highways. While the statewide weekday average traffic volumes this past March were reduced by as much as 43% compared to the year before, as of late-August the average weekday reduction was only 9%.
In response to the virus, the Lane Transit District suspended collecting fares from riders to eliminate lingering between them and the drivers. To further lessen person-to-person exposure, riders enter the buses through the rear doors. Those measures notwithstanding, LTD also reduced service by eliminating some routes and cutting frequency along others to minimize its losses.
The pandemic will eventually be behind us; however, bus ridership may take years to rebound, if ever. This would be an unfortunate outcome of the systemic shock delivered by COVID-19. Even if the virus’s days are numbered, it may have essentially hampered future prioritization of funding for improvements to public transit infrastructure, such as further expansion of LTD’s EmX bus rapid transit network.
While public transit may be destined to suffer a lingering impact, it’s likely many companies will continue to accept or favor working-from-home by their employees, or at least allow more flexible work arrangements combining telecommuting with in-office days and staggered work times. Many of us able to work remotely have enjoyed positive experiences. A continued change in our work behaviors will influence the morphology of our cities (i.e. a move away from continued concentration of office space in downtown cores). Despite the current uptick in daily vehicle trips, it’s conceivable there will be a lessening in traffic as a shift toward a new and different “normal” for office work continues to evolve. It could be a future of car-dependency isn’t our fate and that “15-minute neighborhoods” and hyper-localization may be.
We’re only beginning to imagine the far-reaching effects of the pandemic. It has demonstrated how truly precarious an illusion of balance and normalcy is for something as complex and dynamic as an entire city, to say nothing of our entire civilization. Emergence within a complex system means it exhibits aggregate properties that are more than the sum of its constituent elements (thus looking for comprehensive solutions through a limited and singularly focused lens will always be fruitless). A complex system exhibits self-organization, non-linear dynamics, with each level within a given system following its own rules. The effect of interventions on outcomes in a complex system—let alone the force of something as disruptive as a pandemic—is largely unpredictable.
Though cities are big and complex, they are orders of magnitude more granular and adaptive than countries. In her prescient book Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs posited that cities are the most active and important economic entities. Ample evidence increasingly supports her thesis. The Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force regards cities as the “engines of the recovery,” believing investing in their resilience is the best way to avoid economic disaster. That said, returning to business as usual is not in the cards, especially as the urgency of addressing accelerating climate change and its ominous cascade of effects continues to mount. Cities are more apt than nations to effectively evolve and acclimatize (pardon the pun) to rapid changes in our environment.
COVID-19 has pushed us out of whatever comfort zones we occupied before its unwelcome visit. Moving forward, we will need to gauge our behaviors in response to what it has loosed upon us. How Eugene and Springfield adapt will be a function of how well the implicit rules that govern their ongoing progression toward desired future states perform in response to emerging system properties. Because so much of this cannot be foreseen, the key for planners and urbanists is to develop a practical understanding of the non-linear dynamics that lie beneath all complex systems. Doing so at a very basic, local level offers me some hope for the future we all will share.
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