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A preliminary analysis of numbers from NYC’s boroughs shows a strong correlation between automobile commutes and Covid cases. There are multiple things happening here. Some of them a commentary on human behaviour, some a little more. Since travel brings us in contact with others at our destinations (stores, jobs, restaurants), the excess drop in travel may have made subway people safer precisely because the subway seems so dangerous. Second, and less obviously, subway-dependent people likely have more geographically-determined circles of contact. Car owners can move freely well beyond their immediate neighborhood.

There’s more. Car use also ends up increasing the density of people on the road. Think about it.  Cars take up the bulk of the space on a typical road, while pedestrians are huddled together on the edges. Remove the cars (parked ones too), and the pedestrians and cyclists suddenly have more space. And that’s exactly what many cities are doing worldwide—Milan, Paris, Berlin, London, Vancouver, Philadelphia and Bogota. Bicycles are cheap, space efficient, and socially distant (unless you’re stuck in a bike traffic jam in the Netherlands). In Australia, they are already the next rare commodity after toilet paper.