Purpose: Virus epidemics may be mitigated if people comply with directives to stay at home and keep their distance from strangers in public. As such, there is a public health interest in social distancing compliance. The available evidence on distancing practices in public space is limited, however, by the lack of observational data. Here, we apply video observation as a method to examine to what extent members of the public comply with social distancing directives. Data: Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) footage of interactions in public was collected in inner-city Amsterdam, the Netherlands. From the footage, we observed instances of people violating the 1.5-meter distance directives in the weeks before, during, and after these directives were introduced to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic. Results: We find that people complied with the 1.5-meter distance directives when these directives were first introduced, but that the level of compliance started to decline soon after. We also find that compliance to the 1.5-meter distance directives is strongly associated with compliance to stay-at-home directives, measured as the number of people observed on the street. Both indicators of compliance correlate to a varying extent with temporal patterns in the transmission of the Covid-19 virus, temperature, Covid-19 related Google search queries, and media attention to the topic. Conclusion: Compliance with social distancing directives is short-lived and coincides with compliance to stay-at-home directives. Potential implications of these findings are that social distancing directives may work best in combination with stay-at-home directives or place-specific crowd-control strategies and that the number of people on the street offers an easily measurable proxy for social distancing compliance at specific times and locations.