Why No Updates?

In March 2020, when COVID-19 began to shutdown global travel, we made a decision to put a hold on any updates to Tunnel Time. We didn’t feel right continuing to promote travel to new cities as airlines began shuttering operations and almost every local, regional and federal government was issuing stay-at-home orders.

The main reason people use Tunnel Time is to learn how to navigate a new city. That is, of course, our tag line on the homepage. We completely expected, that like every other company in the travel industry, to see significant drop in traffic and users as COVID-19 raged on. Nobody was travelling, why would anyone need to know how to get around a new place?

Learn How to Navigate… Your City? 🧐

Something unexpected happened; traffic to Tunnel Time increased, and kept increasing. In fact, COVID-19 began a regular and steady increase in the number of people visiting our website. Why? It’s hard to say for certain, but here’s what our data told us:

• There was a steady increase of people searching for transportation info for the city they are currently in.

• Traffic to public transportation pages dropped.

• Traffic to bicycle sharing and e-scooter providers skyrocketed. Like… a lot.

Looking at these data points, we estimate that people still needed to navigate the city they were currently in, but no longer wanted to use their regular method of transportation. It’s very hard to physically distance on public transportation in major cities and ride sharing with a stranger during COVID times isn’t ideal. They began searching for alternatives, overwhelmingly e-scooter rental providers and bicycle sharing providers. COVID increased our traffic by > 1,200%.

New Cities Coming Soon 🏙

We’ve been sitting on a couple cities that are ready to publish and now feel the time is right to continue to expand our offerings. If you have a look at the poster image or header image for this blog post, you may be able to guess the next location.

p.s. Another big reason why there haven’t been many updates is that my wife and I had a baby 👶.