People’s mobility has declined since before the koruna, but there has been no collapse in visitor numbers like in central Helsinki.
Lahti’s city centre maintained its appeal throughout the years of high interest rates. Although people’s mobility in Lahti’s city centre has declined, there has been no collapse like in Helsinki.
Before the koruna, in autumn 2019, the number of visitors to Lahti city centre was 14% higher than this autumn. The data comes from mobile phone user location data provided to Yle by Telia.
Before the koruna, in September 2019, the average number of visits to Lahti city centre was 35 600 every day. Now, in September 2022, 30 500 daily visits were recorded.
The quietest phase was experienced in April 2020, when around 17,800 people moved in the downtown area per day.
Last July’s low number of visitors clearly shows the stagnation of domestic tourism after two busy corona summers.
The biggest change is the increase in remote work, which seems to be a permanent phenomenon.
In Lahti, however, the urban structure has prevented the city center from becoming quieter. There are plenty of apartments in the immediate vicinity of the shops, which increases the vibrancy in the core center.
– There are relatively more housing-related visits than in Tampere or Helsinki, but the number of business visits is lower. This may explain the smaller impact of the corona virus on the number of visits to the center of Lahti and the better recovery, Levä estimates.
Fourth largest urban centre
The city of Lahti is zoning more housing construction near the city center, for example in the Paavola area. The hope is to get even thousands of new residents, which would also be reflected in the number of people moving in the center.
According to data collected by Telia, it can be assumed that shopping in city centers will decrease as shopping online and in large supermarkets increases.
– Centers are turning into urban living rooms, as it were. Events that attract people and services related to spending free time will play an important role in the future, says Alho.
*Data has been collected with Telia’s Crowd Insights service, which compiles statistics on the movements of human flows using the mobile network. The statistics cannot determine the movements of individual people or phones.*
*10/2019-01/2020 data is missing due to changes made in Telia’s network, as a result of which the material is not comparable.*