Public transit resilience to service disruptions

Public transit resiliency, the ability of a transit system to continue functioning in the event of an external shock to a network node, is of growing concern among planners and decision makers. The exploration of resilience can be methodologically enhanced by examination through the lens of connectivity. The concepts of connectivity and resilience are well documented in social network literature. However, resiliency measures, particularly as they relate to public transportation, have never been fully operationalized to help predict how service disruptions at transit nodes or node clusters will impact the function of the transit network. In this paper, the authors use measures of transit connectivity from a graph theoretical approach for multiple levels of transit service integrating route characteristics, schedules, socioeconomic, demographic and spatial activity patterns as an indicator of network resilience. They then apply the methodology to the transit system in Baltimore, Maryland.