CAMMSE UTC Webinar: Countermeasures for Post-COVID Public Transit Service Recovering
Event Date:
August 11, 2021 – 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM
Webinar: Wednesday, August 11, 3:00 – 4:00 pm EST
Countermeasures for Post-COVID Public Transit Service Recovering
Speaker: Qun Zhao, Texas Southern University
Abstract: COVID-19 pandemic has changed all the aspects of our daily life dramatically, including the transportation area. Because of the high density of passengers, which could facilitate the virus spread, public transit service has been hit even harder than any other transit mode. At the beginning of the pandemic, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, countries all adopted several safety measures, including masking, social distancing, as well as stay-at-home orders. All these measures affected public transit and resulted in sharp declines in ridership and revenue. However, with the increase of the vaccination rate, more and more countries started to gradually reopen, and the demand for public transit services also started to bounce back. Therefore, there is a need to investigate how to restore public transit services while minimizing the risk of infection for passengers at the same time. Although many countermeasures and strategies have been applied by different public transit agencies in different countries, and some of which have been approved to be effective, there is a lack of a method for quantitively evaluating the effectiveness of these countermeasures and assessing their feasibilities.
During this webinar, the existing countermeasures on reducing the infection risk of riding public transit will be summarized first. Then, cost-effective countermeasures will be recommended. Finally, a method will be introduced to quantitively evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of countermeasures. The developed method could be a useful tool for public transit agencies to choose the most suitable and cost-effective countermeasures in the Post-COVID-19 era.