Cities world-wide have taken the opportunity presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to improve and expand pedestrian infrastructure, providing residents with a sense of relief and pursuing long-standing goals to decrease automobile dependence and increase walkability. So far, due to a scarcity of data and methodological shortcomings, these efforts have lacked the system-level view of treating sidewalks as a network. Here, we leverage sidewalk data from ten cities in three continents, to first analyse the distribution of sidewalk and roadbed geometries, and find that cities present an unbalanced distribution of public space, favouring automobiles at the expense of pedestrians. Next, we connect these geometries to build a sidewalk network –adjacent, but irreducible to the road network. Finally, we compare a no-intervention scenario with a shared-effort heuristic, in relation to the performance of sidewalk infrastructures to guarantee physical distancing. The heuristic prevents the sidewalk connectivity breakdown, while preserving the road network’s functionality.

世界各地的城市都利用 COVID-19 大流行带来的机会来改善和扩大步行基础设施，让居民感到宽慰，并追求长期目标，以减少对汽车的依赖和增加步行的便利性。到目前为止，由于数据稀缺和方法论缺陷，这些努力缺乏将人行道视为网络的系统级观点。在这里，我们利用来自三大洲十个城市的人行道数据，首先分析了人行道和路基几何形状的分布，发现城市的公共空间分布不平衡，以牺牲行人为代价偏向汽车。接下来，我们连接这些几何图形以构建一个人行道网络——与道路网络相邻，但不可约。最后，我们将无干预情景与共同努力启发式比较，关于人行道基础设施的性能，以保证物理距离。启发式可防止人行道连接故障，同时保留道路网络的功能。