Climate change, sea-level rise, and associated increases in climate-related risks pose significant threats to transportation infrastructure in coastal cities. To improve resilience of the transportation infrastructure it is necessary to understand projected future climate extremes, inherent system characteristics, and relationships to local and regional socio-economic and socio-political systems. We provide an overview of the theoretical and practical dimensions of the design of climate-...

Demand for public transport has witnessed a steady growth over the last decade in many densely populated cities around the world. However, capacity has not always matched this increased demand. As such, passengers experience long waiting times and are denied boarding during the peak hours. Crowded platforms and the subsequent customer dissatisfaction and safety issues have become a serious concern. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically reduced passengers’ willingness to board crowded trains...

Improving service reliability and reducing cost have always been prioritized by transit agencies and workforce planning is related to both performance metrics. An important workforce planning function is the management of the extraboard operators who cover for absent drivers. Despite its importance, extraboard planning is an understudied area, in part due to the lack of detailed and reliable data. In this paper, using data from HASTUS Daily at the MBTA, we investigate open work caused by...

The explosive growth of ridesourcing services has stimulated a debate on whether they represent a net substitute for or a complement to public transit. Among the empirical evidence that supports discussion of the net effect at the city level, analysis at the disaggregated level from a geospatial perspective is lacking. It remains unexplored the spatiotemporal pattern of ridesourcing’s effect on public transit, and the factors that impact the effect. Using DiDi Chuxing data in Chengdu, China...

This paper proposes a general Network Performance Model (NPM) for urban rail systems performance monitoring using smart card data. NPM is a schedule-based network loading model with strict capacity constraints and boarding priorities. It distributes passengers over the network given origin-destination (OD) demand, operations, route choice, and effective train capacity. A Bayesian simulation-based optimization method for calibrating the effective train capacity is introduced, which explicitly...

Transportation Demand Management (TDM), long used to reduce car traffic, is receiving attention among public transport operators as a means to reduce congestion in crowded public transportation systems. Though far less studied, a more structured approach to Public Transport Demand Management (PTDM) can help agencies make informed decisions on the combination of PTDM and infrastructure investments that best manage crowding. Automated fare collection (AFC) data, readily available in many...

For intelligent urban transportation systems, the ability to predict individual mobility is crucial for personalized traveler information, targeted demand management, and dynamic system operations. Whereas existing methods focus on predicting the next location of users, little is known regarding the prediction of the next trip. The paper develops a methodology for predicting daily individual mobility represented as a chain of trips (including the null set, no travel), each defined as a...

This paper proposes and simulates an integrated autonomous vehicle (AV) and public transportation (PT) system. After discussing the attributes of and the interaction among the prospective stakeholders in the system, we identify opportunities for synergy between AVs and the PT system based on Singapore’s organizational structure and demand characteristics. Envisioning an integrated system in the context of the first-mile problem during morning peak hours, we propose to preserve high demand...

Open governance and open data have given rise to new collaborative tools for public involvement in transit planning. The research presented in this paper extends such tools, adding tangible and interactive features in an attempt to foster interaction, dialog, and social learning. Three tools, representing the impacts of bus rapid transit (BRT) projects at the street, neighborhood, and regional scales, were deployed at a series of public workshops in Boston. A pre-/post- survey design reveals...

For public transportation agencies, the ability to provide personalized and dynamic passenger information is crucial for improving the efficiency of demand management and enhancing customer experience. This requires understanding and especially predicting individual travel behavior in the public transportation system, which is challenging because of the heterogeneity among passengers and the variability of their behaviors. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt...

The near ubiquity of smartphones has the potential to transform how researchers, companies, and public transit agencies understand travel behavior. This research analyzes how an emerging class of automatically-collected data based on smartphone GPS and sensor information – referred to here as mobile activity-tracking data – can be used in a transit agency to better understand travel behavior. Through a collaboration with Transport for London, multiple weeks of mobile activity-tracking data...

This paper explores the possibility of using subway maps as a planning tool to influence passenger route choice to mitigate congestion. Specifically, it tests whether extending the appearance of an overcrowded subway line on the Washington DC subway map would encourage passengers to use other underutilized lines. The experiment was conducted through the Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform, with 3056 participants, producing 21,240 route choice decisions on the official and six...

With results from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and sociodemographic, travel behavior, and Likert-scale survey questions, we investigate implicit and explicit social status biases in the context of mode choice between car and bus. Using a novel two-part experimental design, the differences between implicit and explicit measures of bias are examined to understand how the IAT may complement or improve upon traditional survey methods to capture attitudinal biases. We find that explicit...

Prior research has shown disconnects between the subjective well-being a person experiences during an event and the subjective well-being the same individual remembers once the event has passed. Despite the differences that exist between experience and memory, memory is often used as a basis for making decisions about the future. Measures of utility in transportation decision models have begun to incorporate concepts of subjective well-being. A better understanding of the differences between...

Increases in ridership are outpacing capacity expansions in a number of transit systems. By shifting their focus to demand management, agencies can instead influence how customers use the system, getting more out of the capacity they already have. This paper uses Hong Kong's MTR system as a case study to explore the effects of crowding-reduction strategies as well as methods to use automatically collected fare data to support these measures. MTR introduced a pre-peak discount in September...

This paper studies the impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail (HSR) on population growth and land cover change in the five HSR connected cities - Madrid, Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Cordoba, and Seville - at both regional and local level. The analysis period ranges from 1991 to 2006. The study finds that, at regional level, the population growth and land development process concentrate mostly towards the two largest cities, Madrid and Seville, while other smaller HSR served cities are also...

Urban transit services face a number of challenges from space constraints, congestion, and delays, among other issues. Implementing bus priority at traffic signals or providing exclusive operating space for buses can increase the attractiveness of taking the bus and thereby encourage ridership. The City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was looking to pilot such interventions to demonstrate benefits of bus ridership, but needed a prioritized list of route segments with the largest levels of...

Cities are endowed with and accumulate natural and constructed assets based on their unique histories, which in turn define the choice set of the present. But, common practice is that current behaviour can be described without reference to past circumstances. This work departs from that practice by examining the effects of historical urban rail on current residential location and travel behaviour, from the era of horsecars (1865) and streetcars (1925) to the present in Boston. It uses tract...

In North America, the average individual taking public transportation spends about 45 minute commuting one way each day. This equates to about 398 hours per year and thus ways to reduce travel time are imperative. Rather than attempting to reduce travel time directly, changing the perspective of how commuting time is spent by improving the productive use of time provides a more cost effective solution. This paper explored and measured the extent that bus commuters are currently using their...

In 2009, London Overground management implemented a new tactical plan for a.m. and p.m. peak service on the North London Line (NLL). This paper documents that tactical planning intervention and evaluates its outcomes in terms of certain aspects of service delivery (the operator's perspective on system performance) and service quality (the passenger's perspective). Analyses of service delivery and quality and of passenger demand contributed to the development, proposal, and implementation of...

Passenger incidence (station arrival) behavior has been studied primarily to understand how changes to a transit service will affect passenger waiting times. The impact of one intervention (e.g., increasing frequency) could be overestimated when compared with another (e.g., improving reliability), depending on the assumption of incidence behavior. Understanding passenger incidence allows management decisions to be based on realistic behavioral assumptions. Earlier studies on passenger...