Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic

The outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic significantly altered the way people move and acquire their 
livelihood in cities. Mobility is, therefore, an essential part of urban life (Golash-Boza and Menjívar 2012; 
Logan et al. 2018) as it shapes an individual’s opportunity to access work, education, leisure, inter alia. 
For many decades, the places of livelihood -collectively referred to in this research as places of income 
generation, education, shopping, socialising, and any other activity considered necessary for the 
livelihood and wellbeing of individuals in the city -have been attached to a physical place. The place of 
income generation is different from the places of shopping or of socialising etc, requiring individuals to 
be inevitably mobile to get access to these places. Accessibility differs among individuals in urban 
populations. The pandemic has resulted in different approaches by governments in various countries 
from laissez-faire approaches to shutdowns of entire public transport systems (Koehl 2020). These 
measures have affected various social groups in different ways and arguably, marginalised groups, 
particularly the lower income groups, have borne a greater burden of accessibility due to the limited 
availability of public transport, upon which a majority depend to get to their places of livelihood (cf. 
Bonaccorsi et al. 2020; Dobusch and Kreissl 2020). As international literature shows, in recent decades, 
accessibility metrics have taken advantage of informational and geospatial advances and the 
dissemination of open data (in the standard GTFS format) on public transportation, informing about the 
characteristics of the services offered (frequency, speed, etc.), so as to allow knowing the accessibility in 
the broad scope of spatial and transportation networks.