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Traffic congestion on the Bradfield Highway as cars drive off the Sydney Harbour Bridge
Traffic congestion on the Bradfield Highway as cars drive off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Photograph: Russotwins/Alamy Stock Photo
Traffic congestion on the Bradfield Highway as cars drive off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Photograph: Russotwins/Alamy Stock Photo

How Covid changed the way Australians move: more traffic jams, less public transport

This article is more than 2 years old

Well into the second year of the pandemic, our travelling patterns are still in flux, especially in the cities. Is it time for our transport networks to adjust to a new normal?

Despite Australia’s relative success at locking out the coronavirus pandemic, we still aren’t moving around nearly as much as we used to. Public transport has been hit especially hard, as have recreational and urban areas generally.

Only road traffic has really recovered to pre-Covid levels, which experts say could be a short hangover of fears about the pandemic. Or it could reveal a longer-term shift as working from home becomes more accepted.

University of Sydney associate professor Matthew Beck says increased working from home will probably continue for some time, meaning transport networks will need to adjust to a new normal.

Public Transport Victoria is currently seeing just more than half of its pre-Covid passenger numbers. New South Wales is faring slightly better, at just more than 62% patronage. Queensland leads the big states with more than 70% of its pre-Covid numbers.

Compared with public transport, road traffic experienced shorter and sharper dips and has recovered uniformly around the country. On movement in general, there is a clear split between urban and regional areas, with the latter recovering more and faster.

Data on Facebook users shows Australians are moving around less than February last year everywhere except for Queensland. No matter how you measure it, there are more people staying in one place and fewer people “visiting” other locations.

How much Facebook users are moving. Change in people staying put or visiting from other areas from February 2020 baseline.

Western Australia currently shows the least movement, likely due to the recent lockdown. There is also a clear split between regional and urban areas.

This may reflect a genuine migration out of the cities during the pandemic, and that people will only return to pre-Covid “normal” where they can isolate or otherwise feel comfortable.

“There’s been a very small trend towards people moving out of the city to regional locations. For want of a better term, fleeing the urban environment where Covid and Covid transmissions can be a little more profound than those regional spaces,” says Beck.

“In regional centres life has got back to normal. There’s more movement in those regional areas because Covid is virtually nonexistent, whereas in the city the experience of Covid is completely different.”

This is mirrored in data on Google users, which tracks visits to key locations such as transit points, grocery shops and workplaces. People are generally visiting these places more in rural areas than in the major cities, although the data may be more reliable in denser areas.

There is a huge movement divide between regional and urban areas.

Beck says the hit to public transport points is at least partly due to more people choosing to work from home – a shift that the pandemic has caused. But transport networks have also responded with capacity constraints and differing services throughout the pandemic.

“We are getting more people working from home more often, but then when people are choosing to travel to work, they’re not travelling by public transport. They’re choosing the car in greater percentages than before Covid,” he says.

“There is a tentativeness around public transport that probably won’t go anywhere until vaccinations are widespread enough to take effect.”

Data from TomTom satellite navigation systems shows that traffic congestion is incredibly responsive to outbreaks and lockdowns, cratering quickly but bouncing back.

The data shows how much longer a 30-minute road trip takes due to congestion. With few current cases, traffic congestion has mostly gone back to normal after disappearing during the lockdowns in early 2020.

Road traffic has largely recovered

There were just 40 million recorded Opal card public transport trips in the Sydney network last month, compared with more than 60 million in February last year. That figure, however, is significantly up from the 12 million trips recorded in April last year, amid the most severe lockdowns.

But the recovery isn’t uniform across transport modes, with ferries doing especially poorly.

This might be because of the relative affluence of the suburbs serviced by ferries, where residents might be better able to switch to cars. The Sydney light rail was greatly expanded just before and during Covid, so the comparison to the baseline may be off.

“Ferries tend to service parts of Sydney where people live very close to their employment, and/or affluent people,’’ Beck says. “So people that have jobs where they can work from home probably have set-ups where they can work from home. And then if they don’t want to take public transport, you can jump in a car from Mosman or Double Bay and get into the city within 20 minutes. It’s not a huge commute.”

Sydney public transport is only 60% recovered

Victoria’s public transport network had the sharpest and longest dip of the major networks surveyed. And it has also recovered the slowest, with currently just more than half the number of passengers it used to have.

“We are not going to go back to a pre-Covid normal, vis-a-vis working from home,’’ says Beck. “There’s been a massive shift in the market now about the ability for people to work from home and work from home relatively successfully.’’

But lower passenger numbers can make public transport more attractive. And, as other networks have, Public Transport Victoria has created a service to provide real-time capacity levels.

“In terms of the public transport aspect, one of the biggest barriers to people using public transport is crowding,’’ Beck says. “So a potential here with Covid is that actually having less people on public transport makes it more attractive.”

Victoria's public transport is faring the worst of the big cities.

Beck says the impact of Covid and rise of working from home presents an opportunity to rethink some of our public transport networks.

“If we are going to be looking at a future where there is a greater mix of working from home in the daily commute or the weekly commute, then what does that mean just for transport services in local areas?” he asks.

“Instead of people travelling into the CBD for work, if those people are working from home then what does the travel in their local area look like? Are they doing more runs to school or to get coffee and what does that mean for roads in those local areas?

“There’s talk in the public transport authorities about how we can leverage Covid to make a public transport that has reduced crowding. And then, coming out of Covid, how do we maintain travel demand patterns throughout the course of the day, so rather than being incredibly lumpy at the peak how do we make flexible transport so that we can maintain less crowding during the peak?”

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