Public Transport Operations After Lockdown: How to Make It Happen?

Abstract

Lockdown in cities across the globe has imposed severe travel restrictions to limit the spread of Coronavirus disease. The travel behavior and operations will not be the same as before due to requirements such as physical (social) distancing. This study analyzes the resulting shortage in supply of public transport (buses) that will likely widen the existing gap between demand and supply. In this work, system optimization models are developed to efficiently reallocate the bus fleet to routes for different levels of physical distancing gaps and travel demand. The proposed models are applied to a real-life network of 34 bus routes of Delhi, considering three types of scenarios: current, practical, and ideal. In the practical scenarios, the additional, idling bus fleets can be allocated to the routes efficiently while maintaining physical distancing. The results show that the Business-as-Usual (BAU) scenario involving the current allocation approach will make it impossible to use public buses even if the bare minimum physical distancing has to be maintained. Further, the models proposed in the study significantly improve the key performance indicators for all scenarios.

The Post Pandemic City: Challenges and Opportunities for a Non-Motorized Urban Environment. An Overview of Italian Cases

“…Despite the lack of a governmental recovery strategy specific to the metropolitan cities, research institutions, environmental and eco mobility associations, have started to release studies, proposals and guidelines for recovery strategies in cities. Some research highlights the social distancing effects on travel modal choices, and how to face the unavoidable reduction of public transport travel demand [50,51] The Italian National Institute of Urban Planning (INU) recently released a document containing some proposals for overcoming the emergency and to re-launch the country. The proposals aim at integrating economic recovery and combat climate change, highlighting the leading role of the metropolitan areas in setting effective mitigation and adaptation strategies.…”

The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Resilience of Sustainable Mobility in Sicily

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Structural equation modeling of public transport use with COVID-19 precautions: An extension of the norm activation model

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