The COVID-19 pandemic has not only disrupted the lives of millions but also created exigent operational and scheduling challenges for public transit agencies. Agencies are struggling to maintain transit accessibility with reduced resources, changing ridership patterns, vehicle capacity constraints due to social distancing, and reduced services due to driver unavailability. A number of transit agencies have also begun to help the local food banks deliver food to shelters, which further strains the available resources if not planned optimally. At the same time, the lack of situational information is creating a challenge for riders who need to understand what seating is available on the vehicles to ensure sufficient distancing. In partnership with the transit agencies of Chattanooga, TN, and Nashville, TN, and Prof. Aron Lazka, University of Houston we are rapidly developing integrated transit operational optimization algorithms, which will provide proactive scheduling and allocation of vehicles to transit and cargo trips, considering exigent vehicle maintenance requirements (i.e., disinfection). A key component of the research is the design of privacy-preserving camera-based ridership detection methods that can help provide commuters with real-time information on available seats considering social-distancing constraints.

Publications

1. M. Wilbur, A. Ayman, A. Ouyang, V. Poon, R. Kabir, A. Vadali, P. Pugliese, D. Freudberg, A. Laszka, and A. Dubey, Impact of COVID-19 on Public Transit Accessibility and Ridership, in Preprint at Arxiv, 2020.
   Bibtex Abstract PREPRINT

   @inproceedings{wilbur2020impact,
     author = {Wilbur, Michael and Ayman, Afiya and Ouyang, Anna and Poon, Vincent and Kabir, Riyan and Vadali, Abhiram and Pugliese, Philip and Freudberg, Daniel and Laszka, Aron and Dubey, Abhishek},
     title = {Impact of COVID-19 on Public Transit Accessibility and Ridership},
     booktitle = {Preprint at Arxiv},
     year = {2020},
     tag = {ai4cps,transit},
     archiveprefix = {arXiv},
     eprint = {2008.02413},
     preprint = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02413},
     primaryclass = {physics.soc-ph}
   }
   

   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.