Open Streets and Safegraph Mobility Data

The dataset features SafeGraph data that measures foot-traffic mobility changes around Open Streets in New York City during Covid-19. In addition to the raw counts of visitors to each POI during the week. It contains weekly pattern data collected between May 2nd, 2020, to July 28th , 2021. The point-level POI data is aggregated to census block group neighborhood-level data to maintain a standard level of resolution for all data used for this study. The Open Streets have been manually geocoded in Google Earth and imported the KMZ data as a shapefile into ArcGIS. Once in ArcGIS, the locations of the Open Streets were matched to CBGs, which either bound or intersect with the Open Streets. Since the Open Streets vary in opening dates, we consider the week that a street first opens as an Open Street as Week 0 for each street. For each observation, we consider the time series data three weeks before the week of opening date (Week 0) and six weeks after as our observation period. To create a control sample, we draw a 1 mile buffer area around each Open Street in ArcGIS to minimize spillover effects, and randomly select a CBG that sits outside this buffer area and pair it with each observation. The buffer takes into account the spatial effects an Open Street is likely to have on surrounding neighborhoods, such that a neighborhood that is within a 15-20 minute walk of an Open Street may see increase in walking behaviors after the introduction of the Open Streets Program, even if the Open Street is not located directly within the CBG. <br>