COVID-19 as a window of opportunity for cycling: Evidence from the first wave.

Across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced people to reconsider their habits in terms of how they work, how they interact with each other, and of their mobility. During lockdowns, mobility was in general significantly reduced. Means of collective transportation were used much less, and people preferred means of individual transport. Evidence from some cities suggests that people turned to cycling as a resilient and reliable option with a small risk of contagiousness. This spike in demand led some governments to respond by opening additional bike lanes, reducing the fees of bike-sharing systems, banning cars on selected streets, or giving monetary incentives for the purchase of new bikes. We analyze the bike traffic in Basel and Zurich, two major Swiss cities. Throughout the pandemic, no specific measure to promote cycling was implemented in any of the two cities; we can thus see latent demand patterns exposed when conditions change. As cycling depends on the season and weather, we incorporate these data and correct the traffic counts hereby. We can identify a distinct change in cycling traffic over the course of the day. During the lockdown period, relatively more traffic is observed in the afternoon, possibly associated with leisure activities. Furthermore, there is a short-term drop in the corrected cycling traffic and a fast recovery, demonstrating cycling as a resilient transport mode. Soon bike traffic reached pre-lockdown levels, but no significant increase could be identified, possibly attributed to the absence of explicit policy measures. We furthermore survey a panel of bike policy experts to identify policy actions that could be taken in Basel and Zurich to increase bike usage. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupts life as we know it, leading people to reconsider their travel choices. Given authorities' desire to increase bike usage, it represents a window of opportunity to test new policy measures, increase bike trips of active cyclists, and attract new cyclists. As long as this window is open, people are susceptible to policy measures to reconsidering past choices. However, if no policy measures are conducted during the pandemic, as in the case study, it is likely that bike usage is not increased in the long run. Authorities are well-advised to take this opportunity to strengthen cycling and to lead to a more resilient, accessible, safe, and sustainable urban transport system.

Empirical dynamics of railway delay propagation identified during the large-scale Rastatt disruption.

Transport networks are becoming increasingly large and interconnected. This interconnectivity is a key enabler of accessibility; on the other hand, it results in vulnerability, i.e. reduced performance, in case any specific part is subject to disruptions. We analyse how railway systems are vulnerable to delay, and how delays propagate in railway networks, studying real-life delay propagation phenomena on empirical data, determining real-life impact and delay propagation for the uncommon case of railway disruptions. We take a unique approach by looking at the same system, in two different operating conditions, to disentangle processes and dynamics that are normally present and co-occurring in railway operations. We exploit the unique chance to observe a systematic change in railway operations conditions, without a correspondent system change of infrastructure or timetable, coming from the occurrence of the large-scale disruption at Rastatt, Germany, in 2017. We define new statistical methods able to detect weak signals in the noisy dataset of recorded punctuality for passenger traffic in Switzerland, in the disrupted and undisrupted state, along a period of 1 year. We determine how delay propagation changed, and quantify the heterogeneous, large-scale cascading effects of the Rastatt disruption towards the Swiss network, hundreds of kilometers away. Operational measures of transport performance (i.e. punctuality and delays), while globally being very decreased, had a statistically relevant positive increase (though very geographically heterogeneous) on the Swiss passenger traffic during the disruption period. We identify two factors for this: (1) the reduced delay propagation at an international scale; and (2) to a minor extent, rerouted railway freight traffic; which show to combine linearly in the observed outcomes.