Global City Economic Watch – Lift-off as air traffic picks up
As large-scale quarantine measures are lifted globally, we are providing a weekly glance at different real-time indicators to assess the level of economic activity in cities and understand how much closer to ‘normality’ they are.
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In this week’s edition we look at different indicators within Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Report* on a city-by-city basis and provide an update on the latest flight activity.
Air travel is starting to pick up with more locations allowing tourism. Across the 20 locations we track the number of flight departures increased 3% in the past week alone, up 30% on the same time last month. All locations, except for Beijing and Seoul, whose departures fell by 66 and 6 flights on average respectively, have seen an uptick in the past week.
Six locations - Shanghai, Madrid, Paris, Vancouver, Los Angeles and Vienna saw their average departures rise by double digits – Shanghai the most with 19 and Madrid close behind with an additional 15 as Spanish borders opened up recently.
In monthly movements it is Tokyo and Paris who have seen the largest aviation-related bounce back, Tokyo had an average of 239 departures last week from a low of 117 and Paris saw 146 up from a low of just 36. Dubai, where more routes are opening up has seen the number of daily departures climb from a low of just 5 to 43.
Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Report analyses how visits, and the time spent at different places, have changed compared to a baseline. Here we assess the retail and recreational categories changes across the last month and week.
On average the 18 locations are 25% below baseline, from 42% a month ago – six are less than 20% from their respective baseline. Only one is 50% from its baseline and that is London, however, this data only captures one week of retailers being open and is expected to pick up as more do so, as well as many hospitality outlets from 4 July.
With the lifting of further restrictions last weekend Singapore has seen a jump in activity moving from 58% below baseline in the week ending 17 June to 42% in the week ending 23 June. As with flights, Madrid has seen one of the biggest step changes over the past month halving the distance from its baseline, from 76% below to 32%.
Next week we revisit population mobility through the Citymapper Mobility Index and TomTom Traffic Index as well as the level of restaurant bookings as economies begin to emerge from lockdown and restaurants offer limited seated capacity.
Notes on methodology
*Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Report analyses the how visits and time spent at different places change compared to a baseline. The baseline is the median value, for the corresponding day of the week, during the 5- week period Jan 3–Feb 6, 2020