Keynote Address
COVID-19 and Transportation: Advancing Multi-scalar, Multi-disciplinary Understanding and Resilience
Based on review of recent transportation research published in TRIP (Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives) and efforts to support response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges to researchers and practitioners are described. The spread of the disease was facilitated by improvements in mobility and accessibility and increased efficiencies in the transportation of goods and people (and their diseases) across modalities within and between communities. In addition to describing the impacts on travel behavior and the non-pharmaceutical responses (social distancing, lockdown, quarantine, etc.), efforts to deploy technologies amidst the legal, institutional and cultural constraints associated with surveillance, tracking, and disseminating data have further complicated response, recovery, research and understanding of the pandemic disaster. There are important connections between this pandemic and other complex, cascading, and continuing threats and hazards such as climate change, sea level rise, and global environmental processes. These challenges provide renewed opportunity for convergence, knowledge exchange and transformation among transportation researchers, modelers, data scientists, and social scientists working on urgent societal problems.
Plenary Address
Virtual Reality as a Tool for Transportation Planners to Engage the Public on Sea Level Rise
Local government officials, including transportation planners, usually rely on two-dimensional visualizations (2D), including charts and maps, to convey future scenarios of sea-level rise (SLR) to the public in coastal communities. Recent visualization applications allow for the use of immersive environments, such as virtual reality (VR) in the planning process. This presentation will summarize recent studies in Florida, Hawaii, and California. VR significantly increased comprehension over 2D maps with 80.3% of participants reported that the experience motivated them to become more engaged on the topic of planning for SLR.
Author Presentations
Traveler Behavior Changes During Transportation Disruptions
People adapt their behavior when disruptions occur. Changes in travel-related decisions can lead to reduced travel and/or transfer volumes to other modes of transportation, routes, and times of day. Some travel changes, such as departure times and routes, are more common and easier to make. Other changes occur at a strategic level and require resources to be successful. Access to resources and other limitations affect these travel changes. Furthermore, the travel conditions during a disruption and restoration of infrastructure and service are dynamic as travelers’ personal situations and their environment evolves. Transportation providers need to understand these adaptations and constraints so that their strategies align with travelers’ needs and capabilities.
Resilience, Automation, and Connected and Automated Vehicles
Breakthroughs in connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies seem poised to revolutionize transportation systems along with the ways we live, work, and build our communities. This talk provides a review of recent literature on CAVs in the context of how the CAV revolution might impact or be impacted by concerns around resilience. It places the role of CAVs in resilient communities in an appropriate context. The discussion is framed around resilience-related challenges and opportunities that stem from the CAV revolution. The review demonstrates that both the challenges and opportunities arise from interdependencies among cyber, physical, and social systems as they evolve in light of CAV adoption. CAV adoption will accelerate the trend of cybersecurity becoming the critical component of the interdependent infrastructure’s resilience. The discussion also provides future venues for students, researchers, policymakers, and regulators to explore.
Resilience of National Highway Transportation System and Control Policy under the Outbreak of COVID-19 in China
We analyze the Chinese national highway traffic resilience and its relationship with COVID-19 severity in China. By quantifying the space and time distribution of highway traffic volume across 29 provinces of China, we divide the research time range into response stage, recovery stage, and bounce stage. We demonstrate that all the provinces show different bounce level and the bounce level is closely related to geographic location, economic development and government control polices. We further verify that more traffic volume loss in the response stage means a fast bounce rate in the bounce stage, which gives a clue to constrain COVID-19 spreading by limiting highway traffic volume. Thus, we build a Susceptible Infection Recovery model to simulate the outbreak and evolution of COVID-19 and relate control policies with the effective spreading rate of COVID-19. We further build two control policies and conclude that a strict control policy would lead to a quick COVID-19 reduction and highway traffic volume decline in the response stage, followed by fast recovery of highway traffic volume in the recovery and bounce stage.
