Mitigation of passenger effects of state of good repair projects using automated data sources

Abstract

Legacy urban rail transit systems in North America increasingly face challenges in maintaining their infrastructure to provide reliable, effective, and safe service and absorb future growth in cities, which makes scheduled service disruptions to implement State of Good Repair (SGR) projects imminent. Mitigating the impacts of these disruptions on passengers is important in order to maintain transit ridership in the face of competing transportation network company services. Transit agencies have access to large amounts of passenger and vehicle location data, which provide valuable information regarding passenger travel patterns and service levels. This thesis presents a framework for incorporating passenger effects and their mitigation in planning for SGR project shutdowns using the data sources available to transit agencies, with relevant criteria for informing decisions proposed at each stage of the framework.

The thesis focuses on passenger impact mitigation in two aspects: selection of work plan, and identification and planning of existing alternative services within the system. From passenger travel patterns, the effects of a shutdown can be gaged, and the impact can be quantified in terms of additional passenger hours. This measure would vary by time of day, day of week, and season, and can be used to determine a shutdown work plan which is less disruptive to passengers. For a particular shutdown plan, connectivity within the transit system implies that some passengers could benefit by using alternative services on existing routes instead of station-to-station bus shuttles.

The proposed framework presents criteria for identifying such alternatives and passenger segments which could potentially benefit from them, assessing efficacy of the alternative service with respect to traditional bus shuttles, estimating operational requirements, and evaluating the mitigation benefit of an alternative. The implementation of the framework has been demonstrated for three case studies of recent shutdowns in the MBTA, using data sources available at the agency. Post-implementation evaluation of potential alternatives to shuttle service in two of these case studies shows substantial potential magnitudes of passenger benefit and proportion of passenger impact being mitigated.