
COVID-19: Mapping Chicago’s Transit Recovery
What did we learn about transportation, about movement itself, when we stopped moving? As pandemic-driven global lockdowns slowed transportation to a standstill—with few if any airplane or train trips, and travel by car dramatically reduced—entire industries teetered, while others flourished. Global trade and supply chain transit came under severe pressure. Tourism lost $1.2 trillion in value. People accustomed to frequent motion faced prolonged psychic and economic challenges.
Now that we are moving again, we are experiencing a mind shift. It began long before the virus, driven by both environmentalism and technology that gives us location intelligence. We are able to see and measure the world in radically new ways. This is transforming our understanding and experience of sustainable mobility and our management of transportation systems—whether of goods, materials, or ourselves.
In other words, we're learning something about journeys and destinations. So, what happens to transportation when we see the world through this new lens?
In the world envisioned by Yi-Fu Tuan, the father of humanistic geography, place is opposed to space—the intimate versus the distant, the grounded versus the expansive. Space is the empty universe, the unmarked, the unknown. Place, in contrast, is created by the human mind, by the social processes of imagining, understanding, planning, and conceiving. So maybe the issue isn't what we learn about motion when we stop moving. Maybe it's what we learn about place when every place, including those we're moving through, becomes infused with meaning and value.
By Ian Koeppel, a cultural geographer and France-based international expert in the transportation industry for Esri.
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