6 Conclusions

Converting city roadways into pedestrian-oriented public spaces was in some ways an obvious response to the COVID-19 pandemic: Vehicle traffic demand was down, and there was a also critical need for pedestrian-oriented open spaces in many communities. The research we present here suggests that this policy had measurable and meaningful benefits to neighborhoods in Alameda County, California, and that these benefits were distributed in an equitable manner in the sense that the distributin favored marginalized populations. The total benefit to households in the community is estimated at approximately $1 million with disproportionately high benefits going to Black, Hispanic and low-income neighborhoods. There is, however, a disproportionately low benefit to neighborhoods with high Asian populations that might be addressed were the policy to continue, be repeated, or made permanent in some way.

In estimating these benefits, we applied an emerging technique to estimate park choice preferences and utility from passive mobile device data. This technique allowed a more nuanced measure of access that allowed us to consider the converted streets as providing quantitatively different amenities than other city parks. A policy of permanently closing these streets to vehicle traffic may or may not have negative effects on transportation access that would need to be considered against the benefits we measured in this research. But utility-based access measures provide a mechanism to weigh the benefits of access against the costs of travel in a theoretically coherent manner. Adopting such flexible methods of measuring access will help transportation and land use planners better understand the nuances and tradeoffs inherent in a wide range of policy proposals.