People Are Walking More Than Ever As Mobility Climbs

More people walked than drove in every major region across the US during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Midwest leading as the area with the largest increase over pre-pandemic mobility levels. 

A new report from Commercial Café using smartphone search data indicates that after an “immediate and dramatic” drop in mobility through April 2020 in the early days of the pandemic, mobility picked back up into the summer before waning as winter loomed. But as summer 2021 began, more people got out walking, this time more so than the previous summer – likely due to continued occupancy restrictions, masking, and the availability and prevalence of vaccines.