Residents of Prague 1 are troubled by tourism and transit traffic
A representative survey of Prague 1 residents (N ≈ 759, with a rest-of-Prague comparison group of ≈ 1,053) examining how over-tourism and transit traffic shape daily life in the historic center. One of the headline findings is a reframing of the usual “drivers versus pedestrians” narrative: the real dividing line residents draw is between “locals” and “outsiders” – transit traffic and non-resident parking annoy pedestrians and drivers alike.
Perhaps the most striking result, in retrospect, is that residents reported higher quality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic, when tourist numbers collapsed. With enough distance from the pandemic, it is now easier to acknowledge that, alongside its very real harms, it functioned as a natural experiment – one that would have been impossible to run deliberately – revealing just how much baseline quality of life in Prague 1 is depressed by overtourism.
I wrote the questionnaire and did the supporting literature review, drawing both on the general overtourism literature and on comparable municipal surveys from Vienna and a German city whose name now escapes me. My German made it straightforward to adapt the Viennese questions directly, so that responses could be compared across cities. I also did the bulk of the data analysis. The overall concept and framing came from Daniel Prokop, and Eliška Dvořáková handled coordination with NMS and the fieldwork implementation.
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