Pedestrian movement modelling for a commercial street considering COVID-19 social distancing strategies

This research attempts to understand the impacts of social distancing on dense urban pedestrian environments through pedestrian movement simulations. It develops a pedestrian microsimulation modelling framework that evaluates three scenarios for a commercial street in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM). The Business-as-Usual scenario mimics pre-COVID conditions with no social distancing protocols. Pandemic Scenario# 1 represents social distancing without any changes in the pedestrian infrastructure. The HRM has adopted a mobility response plan for COVID-19, this generates Pandemic Scenario# 2 depicting the widened sidewalks within the pedestrian microsimulation model. The results reveal that the social distancing strategy in the pandemic scenarios significantly improved pedestrian flow in terms of the reduction in contact violations. These violations are described as instances in which a pedestrian violates the 2 m social distancing rule. The simulation of the first pandemic scenario (no sidewalk enhancement) showed a significant reduction of 43% in the number of contact violations during the one-hour pedestrian simulation of the street. The second pandemic scenario showed a 68% decrease in violations. The conclusions derived from this research support the actions of the municipality as the simulation results indicate that an increase in sidewalk width can influence contact rates and time travelled. When comparing the two pandemic scenarios, the scenario that incorporated wider sidewalks showed a decrease in total travel time and contact rates.