Examining the Impact of COVID-19 on Ridership for an Agency Running a Demand Response System

Abstract

COVID-19 emerged in December 2019 and changed transportation across the United States, especially for people dependent on transit buses to make trips. Most transit agencies saw a significant decrease in ridership;however, the impact on travel for agencies that offer demand-response transit hasn't been examined completely. This paper examines ridership for a demand-response rural transit system from three perspectives: Pre-pandemic, mid-pandemic, and pandemic-recovery. The paper examines total trips, origin locations, and destination locations at the three time intervals. In addition, the paper develops a transit social vulnerability index (SVI) to evaluate which riders continued to use the service and what factor or factors lead to those decisions. The results of the paper show that transit trip making and passengers of the system were not all affected uniformly. © ASCE. All rights reserved.