Bike lanes in Bogotá by Dylan Passmore licensed under Creative Commons.

Bogotá adds more bike lanes to fight against the coronavirus. The mystery of the missing bus rider. What could a COVID-19 related recession look like?

Bogotá expands bike lanes to curb infection: The Colombian capital is opening 47 miles of temporary bike lanes to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, adding to the existing 340-mile network. 13 miles of the temporary network opened overnight on March 17 by reconfiguring car lanes. (Sarah Wray | Smart Cities World)

The mystery of the missing bus riders: Sometime around 2013, bus ridership in much of the country began to decline, and by late 2019, national bus ridership was its lowest level since the mid-1970s. A number of trends are the culprit, including the rise of on-demand tech, the changing nature of work, e-commerce, lack of high gas prices, and the suburbanization of the poor. (Emily Badger & Quoctrung Bui | New York Times)

A COVID-19 recession will be different: Macroeconomist Gabriel Mathy argues that the current recession will be the first “services recession,” driven by depressed activity in the service sector associated with social distancing practices. This differs from typical recessions, which are characterized by a collapse of investment spending. Consumer spending on services, from dining out to transportation services, usually increases as a share of one’s spending, but this is not the case with COVID-19. As such, typical economic policy measures must be rethought to react to this new crisis. (Daniel Kuehn | Urban Institute)

Design in the age of pandemics: For thousands of years, humans have looked to physical space to treat and cure sickness, redesigning cities, infrastructure, architecture, and interiors all in the name of minimizing the risk of infectious disease. Diana Budds argues that space, as it relates to infections disease epidemics, isn’t just about quarantine; it’s also a design problem. (Diana Budds | Curbed)

Seattle accommodates curbside food pickups: On March 17, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced that the Seattle Department of Transportation is converting on-street parking spaces near restaurants to temporary loading zones to facilitate curbside meal pickup. These actions come in an effort to support small businesses and accommodate the rise in delivery services, most notably for food, as the city practices social distancing. (Anthony Derrick | City of Seattle Office of the Mayor)

Quote of the Week

“It’s true that we’re still erecting plenty of energy-guzzlers, including the all-glass skyscrapers that are sprouting all over Philadelphia and other big cities. But it isn’t quite fair to accuse architects, or even developers, of ignoring the climate issue.”

Inga Saffron in the Seattle Times discussing new energy saving buildings.

This week on the podcast, USC Professor Geoff Boeing discusses data science in urban planning from housing to street network design.