Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic Management Policies on Public Transportation Systems

Abstract

<p>During the COVID-19 outbreak, the risk of infection is not neglectable in a public transportation system. To satisfy the demands while controlling the spread of COVID-19, public transportation agencies have proposed various rules, such as increasing train frequency and requiring face coverings. In this chapter, we summarize newly developed evaluation methodologies, and evaluate the impacts of COVID-19 policies. We also present key findings regarding the impacts of different policies using these new methods. We find that the goal of stopping the pandemic coincided with minimizing the total delay when the service area was homogenous in infection rate. For heterogenous cities, minimizing the risk is equivalent to minimizing weighted travel time, where the weight is the infection rate. We also find that the results obtained from different models could be different due to their assumptions on the lost demand. If the demand is elastic, closing part of the system can prevent the spread of the pandemic, otherwise, closing will lead to longer waiting time, higher passenger density, and infection risk. <br></p>