Downtown Foot Traffic Saw Strong Recovery in February

The US marked its third anniversary of COVID-19 lockdowns last week, and not many celebrated, particularly those relying on downtown activity.

Springboard’s February report on downtown pedestrian traffic presented what it called, “clear evidence of the contribution that the working population makes to the vitality of downtowns, [which] demonstrates that the ability of downtowns to attract back daytime traffic will determine the extent to which they can bridge the gap that emerged during [the pandemic].”

For the good, Springboard said that pedestrian traffic in US downtowns rose by +3.4% month over month from January to February, compared with a drop of -17.5% from December 2022 to January 2023. It also experienced the largest year-over-year increase since October 2022 when it rose by +22.4%, having come in at a +20.4% spike compared to February 2022.

However, “pedestrian traffic in US downtowns remained -22.6% below the 2019 pre-pandemic level which is a wider gap than in each of the preceding three months; and downtown traffic from Monday through Friday was -25.8% below the 2019 level in February versus -10.8% below 2019 over the weekend,” Springboard reported.

Springboard that whilst hybrid working is now very much established (53% of employees work at home for at least part of the week) a greater number of employees are now returning to the office.