Estimation of Pedestrian Flows in Urban Context: A Comparison Between the Pre and Post Pandemic Period

The Covid-19 pandemic, within a few months, radically changed the organization of daily life on a global scale; this has affected all aspects related to everyday life such as home-to-work or not home-to the work trips, accessibility of destination, recreational activities and so on. The need to reduce coronavirus transmission, especially indoors, has imposed the “social or physical distancing” that has required administrations to reorganize roads and sidewalks for public use both to tackle this crisis and to prepare for the future pandemic challenges. Following a previous extensive study devoted to the analysis and prediction of pedestrian flows in urban area in the city of Cassino, a new experimental campaign has been recently designed and carried out in order to validate the previous methodology and/or to highlight new trends in urban pedestrian activities. Comparison between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic data and calibrated models provided an interesting insight on the pedestrian behavioral impacts of emergency measures undertaken during pandemic. It is believed that obtained results may provide a useful knowledge for urban planners and designers to retrofit urban spaces taking into account the new pedestrian attitudes to mobility induced by the pandemic.