Public Transportation

Schedule-based or headway-based control schemes to reduce bus bunching are not resilient because they cannot prevent buses from losing ground to the buses they follow when disruptions increase the gaps separating them beyond a critical value. This critical gap problem can be avoided, however, if buses at the leading end of such gaps are given information to cooperate with the ones behind by slowing down. This paper builds on this idea. It proposes an adaptive control scheme that adjusts a bus cruising speed in real-time based on both its front and rear spacings, much as if successive bus...

Road deaths are forecast to double by 2020, with the burden falling most heavily on low- and middle-income countries and, within those countries, on the most vulnerable and poorest road users. Half of the 1.2 million people killed and 50 million injured in road crashes each year are pedestrians, motorcyclists, bicyclists, and users of unsafe public transport; and more than 90 percent are from low- and middle-income countries. Because these are the areas where rapid motorization is taking place, the issue of safety in increasingly multi-modal environments is now of critical importance,...

Pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers, and public transit users all desire similar roadway design features, at least according to findings from a recent intercept survey of 537 people along a major urban corridor in the San Francisco Bay Area. This research was sponsored by the California Department of Transportation to understand traveler preferences for street design that could increase perceived traffic safety, walkability, and bikability along urban arterials, as well as encourage economic vitality through increased patronage of local businesses. In an open-ended question about street...

While the COVID-19 crisis has devastated many public transit and shared mobility services, it has also exposed underlying issues in how these services are provided to society. As ridership drops and revenues decline, many public and private providers may respond by cutting service or reducing vehicle maintenance to save costs. As a result, those who depend on public transit and shared mobility services, particularly those without access to private automobiles, will experience further loss of their mobility. These transportation shifts will be further influenced by changing work-from-home...