Towards More Resilient Transit Networks through Monitoring, Targeted Passenger Information and Dynamic Fleet Scheduling

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In the contemporary public transit world of acute fiscal constraints and crippling politics, passenger transit demand in Canadian cities has steadily outpaced the rate of network capacity building over the past few decades. For example, passenger volumes in the Yonge Subway line in Toronto have been on the rise for decades with virtually no capacity expansion in this corridor over the same time period. As a result, our transit systems have increasingly been operating at passenger demand levels very close and sometimes exceeding transit service capacity, which is not only inflicting regular delays on customers but also diminishing the ability of the transit system to absorb demand and supply variations and to maintain network operational continuity in the event of unexpected incidents. This latter issue is related to the notion of "Resilience", which is defined as the system’s ability to absorb shocks and continue operation without a major disruption or breakdown. The proposed research program has an overall goal of improving transit network resilience. First, it aims at enhancing our understanding of transit network resilience and the factors affecting it. To achieve this objective, we will develop an analytical framework to help transit companies analyze and identify network components posing the biggest threat to network resilience. The framework can be used effectively for planning transit network resilience explicitly and objectively. The research program also aims at developing new analytical tools to monitor in real time the current levels of network resilience and even predict such levels over the near future. This capability should enable transit companies to take both proactive and reactive actions to improve transit resilience. Furthermore, the proposed research program will develop strategies to disseminate information to users of the transit network with the objective of diffusing passengers away from most vulnerable parts of the network. Those strategies will define where, when and how information should be disseminated such that specific targets of passenger volumes are achieved at different parts of the network. Finally, the research program will develop strategies to respond to major system disruption, such as a subway line breakdown. The strategies will focus on dispatching buses from across the network to the affected parts and disseminating information to guide the affected passengers. The proposed research program is original, innovative and likely to have a transformative effect by causing a paradigm shift from the traditional focus on transit service reliability, with its emphasis on vehicle delays, into transit network resilience in which we place more emphasis on minimizing user delays.