How Stay At Home Orders Impact Toronto and Peel Residents’ Visits to Shopping Malls
How Stay At Home Orders Impact Toronto and Peel Residents’ Visits to Shopping Malls
Stay at home orders reduce visits to malls within the lockdown area, but residents travel elsewhere to shop
During the COVID-19 pandemic, stay at home orders were issued in Toronto and Peel regions, forcing residents to stay home. To measure the effectiveness of this, a recent study explores how visits to malls changed according to these stay at home orders.
Using SafeGraph data, researchers found that residents of Toronto and Peel took fewer trips to shopping malls and restaurants in the week following lockdown. We can see, based on when stay at home orders and lockdowns take effect, that this reduction is driven by reductions in visits within the locked down regions themselves.
They also found that there was a significant increase in trips to shopping malls in peripheral regions in this same period, showing that people in these areas were travelling elsewhere to shop when they themselves were under lockdown.
They plotted the visits from Toronto and Peel residents to shopping malls in York, along with when stage 2, lockdown, and a province-wide shutdowns occurred. This allows researchers to visualize how people behave in relation to stay-at-home orders, specifically the frequency of visits to malls in York.
From this data, we can see that stay-at-home orders led to decreased visits to York malls. However, when York went into lockdown, we see the numbers rise, showing that people from out of these regions are flocking to these areas. Once a province-wide lockdown occurs, these numbers drop off again.
Make sure you check out the full research paper:
Jean-Paul R. Soucy, Amir Ghasemi, Shelby L Sturrock, Isha Berry, Sarah A. Buchan, Derek R. MacFadden, Nick Daneman, Nicholas Gibb, Kevin A. Brown (April 26, 021).
Their ability to monitor visits to malls was made possible by SafeGraph’s foot traffic and point of interest (POI) data, which uses Placekey’s universal location identifier. To learn more about how others are using this data and inspire your own projects, join the SafeGraph community.