The pandemic mobility breach in Barcelona

The pandemic mobility breach in Barcelona
A study of the Catalan newspaper El Periodico, published by journalist and scientific divulgator Michele Catanzaro, using data from the metropolitan Transport Authority of Barcelona, indicates that citizens from the poorest neighbourhoods have been using public transport three times more than the rest of the population during confinement. Low ownership rates of private transport among low-income citizens and impossibility to avoid commuting to jobs are factors cited to explain this trend. However, the map of the most mobile neighbourhoods also features some middle-class tourism-intensive neighbourhoods, whose high mobility rates might be tied to the temporary disappearance of the visitor economy in their neighbourhoods. As higher use of public transport hints at greater exposure to health hazard from contagion, it might be concluded, as indicated by some of the early SMARTDEST assumptions, that the immobilisation of the population (both resident and visiting) may have exclusionary effects as remarkable as those observed in regimes of hyper-mobility.
Access the article of El Periodico (in Spansh): https://www.elperiodico.com/es/sociedad/20200518/el-distanciamiento-va-por-barrios-7963976