The Effect of COVID-19 on the Transit System in Two Regions: Japan and USA

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of COVID-19 on bus ridership in Kobe, Japan, and a college city in Virginia, USA, using IoT data to aid transit planning during pandemics.

Contribution

It introduces IoT-based data collection for ridership prediction and compares pandemic effects across two different regions to improve transit system resilience.

Findings

COVID-19 significantly reduced bus ridership in both regions.

IoT data effectively predicts ridership trends during the pandemic.

The study provides insights for transit planning in future health crises.

Abstract

The communication revolution that happened in the last ten years has increased the use of technology in the transportation world. Intelligent Transportation Systems wish to predict how many buses are needed in a transit system. With the pandemic effect that the world has faced since early 2020, it is essential to study the impact of the pandemic on the transit system. This paper proposes the leverage of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to predict the number of bus ridership before and during the pandemic. We compare the collected data from Kobe city, Hyogo, Japan, with data gathered from a college city in Virginia, USA. Our goal is to show the effect of the pandemic on ridership through the year 2020 in two different countries. The ultimate goal is to help transit system managers predict how many buses are needed if another pandemic hits.