UFTI Transportation doctoral student Sagar Patni and UF urban planning master’s student Juan Suarez conducted a study under the direction of their adviser, Dr. Siva Srinivasan, to track the impact of COVID-19 on ridership in the City of Gainesville, Florida, a college town that is home to the University of Florida and Santa Fe College.
For more than a decade, transit ridership has been on the decline, with agencies scrambling to find novel ways to increase ridership and revenue by partnering with Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) and exploring the role of e-scooters in first-mile/last-mile connectivity. This downward trend has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as ridership demand declines, and worldwide, the pandemic is also affecting public transportation.
As the City of Gainesville went into stay-at-home (as much as possible) orders earlier in March 2020, it was easy to see the decrease in pedestrians, transit, and vehicle movements on the road at the time. Patni and Suarez knew the pandemic would affect the town’s transit system, so they set out to examine the impacts of COVID-19 on route-level transit ridership in Gainesville. In particular, the goal of the study was to determine how impacts varied by land use along certain routes and how these impacts changed over time from March to June of 2020. To do this, the students used data from Gainesville’s transit agency, known as RTS (Regional Transit System).
From their mathematical models, Patni and Suarez found that for the pre-COVID years, the models predicted a demand pattern consistent with the University of Florida schedule. For 2020, the model captures a major reduction in ridership between April and March, and between May and April. The demands for June 2020 were comparable to those of May 2020. The greatest drops in ridership were on university-serving routes compared to routes serving other parts of Gainesville.
This unfunded research project produced a mathematical model that helps explain variation in transit ridership across months, including effects of land use. Patni says that the framework they have created can be used for the remaining months in 2020 to continue to monitor how ridership trends will fare for the rest of the year.
How will the study benefit the City of Gainesville, society, and practitioners?
Patni writes, “As we are still continuing with the work-from-home-type practice to a great extent, practitioners can adopt this approach to project transit ridership for the future months and can simultaneously change the supply side of the services to cope with the decreased travel.”