Public transit is central to cultivating equitable communities. Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 and associated social restrictions has radically transformed ridership behavior in urban areas. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that low-income and historically marginalized groups are not only the most susceptible to economic shifts but are also most reliant on public transportation. As revenue decreases, transit agencies are tasked with providing adequate public transportation services in an increasingly hostile economic environment. Transit agencies therefore have two primary concerns. First, how has COVID-19 impacted ridership and what is the new post-COVID normal? Second, how has ridership varied spatio-temporally and between socio-economic groups? In this work we provide a data-driven analysis of COVID-19's affect on public transit operations and identify temporal variation in ridership change. We then combine spatial distributions of ridership decline with local economic data to identify variation between socio-economic groups. We find that in Nashville and Chattanooga, TN, fixed-line bus ridership dropped by 66.9% and 65.1% from 2019 baselines before stabilizing at 48.4% and 42.8% declines respectively. The largest declines were during morning and evening commute time. Additionally, there was a significant difference in ridership decline between the highest-income areas and lowest-income areas (77% vs 58%) in Nashville.
Existing literature on the relationship between ride-hailing (RH) and transit services is limited to empirical studies that lack real-time spatial contexts. To fill this gap, we took a novel real-time geospatial analysis approach. With source data on ride-hailing trips in Chicago, Illinois, we computed real-time transit-equivalent trips for all 7,949,902 ride-hailing trips in June 2019; the sheer size of our sample is incomparable to the samples studied in existing literature. An existing Multinomial Nested Logit Model was used to determine the probability of a ride-hailer selecting a transit …
Transportation equity advocates recommend improving public transit in low-income neighbourhoods to alleviate socio-spatial inequalities and increase quality of life. However, transportation planners often overlook transit investments in neighbourhoods with "transit-captive" populations because they are assumed to result in less mode-shifting, congestion relief, and environmental benefits, compared to investments that aim to attract choice riders in wealthier communities. In North American cities, while many low-income households are already transit users, some also own and use private vehicles…
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected travel behaviors and transportation system operations, and cities are grappling with what policies can be effective for a phased reopening shaped by social distancing. A baseline model was previously developed and calibrated for pre-COVID conditions as MATSim-NYC. A new COVID model is calibrated that represents travel behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic by recalibrating the population agendas to include work-from-home and re-estimating the mode choice model for MATSim-NYC to fit observed traffic and transit ridership data. Assuming the change in behavior ex…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Strathclyde（思克莱德大学）；Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学）
With people constantly migrating to different urban areas, our mobility needs for work, services and leisure are transforming rapidly. The changing urban demographics pose several challenges for the efficient management of transit services. To forecast transit demand, planners often resort to sociological investigations or modelling that are either difficult to obtain, inaccurate or outdated. How can we then estimate the variegated demand for mobility? We propose a simple method to identify the spatiotemporal demand for public transit in a city. Using a Gaussian mixture model, we decompose emp…
This paper proposes an approach to analyze the impact of multimodal Public Transit (PT), combining conventional fixed-route transit and Demand-Responsive Transit (DRT), on equality in transport accessibility distribution. We construct a graph model of multimodal PT in Neo4j, based on General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data, modeling DRT analytically (using continuous approximation). We quantify service quality on any location using an accessibility measure, indicating how easily other places or opportunities can be reached. We quantify inequality of accessibility distribution. We state …
Assessing The Spatially Heterogeneous Impact of Recurrent Flooding On Accessibility: A Case Study of The Hampton Roads Region:Part 2 Transit Accessibility
The development of public transportation networks and associated transit oriented development policies are efficient tools to mitigate urban sprawl and its negative environmental impacts, especially in terms of commuting emissions. We study in this paper the trajectories in terms of sprawl and public transport accessibility of the nine largest Chinese megacities, from 2000 to 2030 with projected transportation networks and populations. Using the radial profile methodology, we compare the evolution of population distribution with the evolution of accessibility profiles. We show a rebalancing of…
The city of Honolulu, Hawaii is currently planning and developing a new rail transit system. While Honolulu has supportive density and topography for rail transit, questions remain about its ability to effectively integrate urban design and accessibility across the system. Every transit trip begins and ends with a walking trip from origins and to destinations: transportation planning must account for pedestrian safety, comfort, and access. Ildefons Cerda's 19th century utopian plan for Barcelona's Eixample district produced a renowned, livable urban form. The Eixample, with its well-integrated…
An important aspect of public bus transit is its reliability of being on-time, which has a major impact on bus ridership. Currently, there is no unified national standard to measure bus on-time performance in the United States. This paper proposes a novel approach to improve the on-time performance (OTP) of buses at transit agencies throughout the country, based on factors unique to each agency. In this study, information on 18 public transit agencies data were obtained from the National Transit Database and were verified by the authors after contacting the respective agencies. A correlation a…
This work considers the sensitivity of commute travel times in US metro areas due to potential changes in commute patterns, for example caused by events such as pandemics. Permanent shifts away from transit and carpooling can add vehicles to congested road networks, increasing travel times. Growth in the number of workers who avoid commuting and work from home instead can offset travel time increases. To estimate these potential impacts, 6-9 years of American Community Survey commute data for 118 metropolitan statistical areas are investigated. For 74 of the metro areas, the average commute tr…
Public transit gains and spatially uneven travel demand changes after NYC congestion pricing
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院土木与环境工程系）；Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院城市研究与规划系）；Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学数学院）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院机械工程系）；College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University（北京大学城市与环境科学学院）；Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学城市与区域规划系）；Center for Computational Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院计算科学与工程中心）
Evoluindo resiliência em rotas de ônibus: Proposta de um método para a maximização de acessibilidade em cenários de incerteza por meio de algoritmo genético
COVID-19 significantly has changed the lifestyle in the urban areas. Urban parks reemerged as a savior of leisure activities and social joints under strict social-distancing measures. Thus, there have been significant changes in the thresholds of service distances of urban parks: People have become more willing to visit parks in farther areas. This paper aims to examine the difference between before and after the COVID-19 pandemic by applying a gravity model. We examine variations in the service areas of urban parks, dependig on the accessibility and design components of the park, using a data…
Improving accessibility is one of the major issues in rural and suburban transportation. With the recent technological improvement of automated vehicles, it is expected that automated demand responsive transit and automated demand responsive feeder transit potentially will be options to improve mobility in rural areas. One of the main concerns for the optimal automated demand responsive feeder transit operation is variation of passenger demand. Obviously, changes in passenger demand should alter the optimal operation and will result in different passenger travel times and vehicle operation cos…
