RAPID: Transit Network Disruption, Service Reliability, and Travel Behavior

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Major transit disruptions have become more frequent due to increasing maintenance needs for an aging infrastructure, system failures, and disasters. Both transportation agencies and travelers need better information to prepare for such events. Considering the significant public distress caused by such events, the objectives of this research are crucial to the well-being of our society. Understanding travelers' behavioral responses over time are essential to effective planning and management of multimodal transportation systems for infrastructure maintenance and disaster response. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project will collect unique and perishible data on system performance and travel behavior before, during and after each of the 15 Metro service disruption events (the SafeTrack project) in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area scheduled between June 2016 and March 2017. The analysis will advance our understanding on the impact of major transit service disruptions on a multi-modal transportation system, yielding insights on how to optimize the planning and execution of maintenance events. The field of transportation systems analysis will benefit from the detailed travel behavior adjustment and system-level re-equilibration observations collected from this project. Mass transit may be the only option for many low-income or disadvantaged travelers, and this research will also reveal members of these groups respond to transit service disruptions.The objectives of the research are to 1) collect unique system performance and travel behavior data sets before, during and after each of the 15 Metro service disruption events using state-of-the-art longitudinal behavior data collection methods; 2) test hypotheses on the impact of major transit service disruptions on a multi-modal transportation system; 3) advance understanding of human behavioral responses and system re-equilibration after such disruptions; and 4) systematically discover planning and operations strategies that can minimize the impact of major transit service shutdowns based on this improved understanding of travel behavior. This project will be the first comprehensive study on transit network disruption of this magnitude with complete before-and-after travel behavior and system performance data. Longitudinal travel behavior data produced from this project will also stimulate future research on transit network reliability, resiliency, and incident response. This project will fill a major gap in the literature on multi-modal, multi-dimensional travel behavioral responses to major transit network disruptions. This will also be a first research effort that explores the transportation system re-equilibration (or lack of it) after major transit network disruptions. Understanding how travelers respond to transit service disruptions is a critically theoretical prerequisite toward developing and implementing effective strategies (e.g., how to optimally deploy the reserved bus fleet) that minimize system impact and improve transit system reliability and resiliency.