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1 May 2020updated 26 Jul 2021 7:56am

Berlin has biggest rise in public transport use and traffic congestion among world cities

By Nicu Calcea

Some world cities are seeing an increased movement of people even before lockdown restrictions are eased, our weekly city mobility chart shows.

Berlin has experienced the biggest increase in both public transport activity and traffic congestion over the last fortnight.

Schools, museums, galleries, zoos, playgrounds and churches are expected to reopen in Germany on Monday for the first time since the lockdown started. Some shops have already re-opened.

Madrid, London and Moscow are also seeing small bumps in activity, although the change is only slight, and could be caused by specific local circumstances rather than people flouting rules.

International travel remains stagnant. Ryanair and British Airways have both recently announced they are cutting jobs due to low sales, with Ryanair expecting passenger numbers to stay under pre-coronavirus crisis levels at least until summer 2022.

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The Covid-19 lockdown: tracking if, when and where the world starts moving again

Restrictions on international and national travel to slow the spread of the virus caused a dramatic fall in global traffic by road, sky and sea. But the picture is not uniform across the world. Some cities in the Far East have avoided a total lockdown and as such have been seeing patterns that are a closer to the norm.

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In order to track the latest situation, this graphic is fed by three key sources. We use Citymapper’s mobility index to monitor public transport use, TomTom’s live traffic index to measure road use, and summary data from FlightRadar24 to count the total number of commercial flights each day.

City transport index chart