Digital Platform to promote sustainable mobility and COVID-19 infections reduction: a use case in the Guadalajara metropolitan area

Abstract

This work proposes a digital platform based in a multi-agent system to plot the different mobility alternatives to counteract the agglomerations in public transport and therefore decrease COVID-19 infections in the GDL. Following the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the face of the health emergency of COVID-19, mainly keeping a healthy distance, the GDL can integrate sustainable mobility as the public bicycle system and reduce the users in regular transport routes to safe levels. For that endeavor, we develop an analysis of the behavior of the trips in the public transport of Guadalajara to explore the possibility of substituting the short transfers of bus travel by bicycle travels using the existing public bicycle infrastructure. We introduce a multi-agent simulation to plot different scenarios of mobility moving bicycles and buses. In this preliminary work, we show possibilities of the simulation integrating as variables not only the risk of COVID-19 infection but also the impact on economy and traffic reduction, CO2 Footprint, and health achieved with this multimodal mobility simulation. Also, the simulation can help to incentivize safer and efficient mobility strategies in the public transport system to reduce the use of private vehicles.