Coronavirus: Cars off Sydney roads as northern beaches cluster puts on brakes

The number of Sydneysiders getting about by car and public transport has plunged following the emergence of the northern beaches COVID-19 cluster.

The number of Sydneysiders getting about by car and public transport plunged following the emergence of the northern beaches COVID-19 cluster. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

As the northern beaches prepared to move into lockdown, movement around Sydney by car on Saturday collapsed to its lowest level since May, according to Apple mobility data.

The tech company’s mapping application offered the first, worrying signs of a sharp drop in activity in the country’s biggest city a week before Christmas.

Using January 13 as a baseline, requests for driving directions in Sydney using Apple Maps went from 1 per cent higher than pre-COVID levels on Saturday, ­December 12, to 20 per cent below a week later after news had broken of a new virus outbreak of community transmission in Avalon.

Routing requests through Apple Maps for users of public transport in Sydney also fell sharply — from almost 70 per cent of January levels in the week before the northern beaches outbreak, to 45 per cent after — suggesting public transport use had dropped by a third.

The number of new COVID-19 cases in NSW fell to 15 on Monday from 30 a day before, with all of the new cases linked to the Avalon cluster — an early, positive sign that the state’s rapid response and testing and tracing measures were already having some effect.

 

ANZ head of Australian economics David Plank believed the Sydney cluster would be “contained relatively quickly”.

With the path of the virus so uncertain, Mr Plank said the Sydney experience — and before that Adelaide's — demonstrated that the “government will have to think whether it is appropriate to stop JobKeeper until a vaccine is deployed”.

But Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox said universal vaccination of the population could be two years away, and that the government couldn’t be expected to continue the massive program for that long.

“But we can expect support for impacted sectors of the economy or regions going forward, rather than one-size-fits-all,” Mr Willox said.

AMP chief economist Shane Oliver agreed, saying extending the wage subsidy program indefinitely risked creating “zombie jobs”, where workers were tied to companies no longer viable in a post-COVID world, but which were able to continue thanks to government support.

Economists said that should the outbreak be contained without a Sydney-wide lockdown, the biggest impact would be on tourism as states reimposed travel ­restrictions.