Abstract
How to meet the daily demand for resident transport while limiting the transmission of infectious diseases is a problem of social responsibility of urban transport systems during major public health emergencies. Considering the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic (COVID-19), a bus timetable system based on the “if early, wait, and if late, leave soon” strategy is proposed. Based on public transport vehicle constraints in this system, the concept of reliability is introduced to evaluate public transport timetable systems, and a model based on an event tree is built to calculate the failure rate of urban bus timetables. Then, the public transport situation in Yixing city is used as an example to perform confirmatory analysis, and the fluctuations in the reliability of the bus timetable during the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic are discussed. The research results show that the method proposed in this paper can obtain the overall failure rate of urban bus timetable by traversing the calculation of each round-trip interval and achieve an accurate evaluation of the reliability of bus timetables. During the early, middle, and more recent stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, the failure rate of bus timetables in Yixing city initially decreased and then increased. In the early stage of the outbreak, the failure rate of the Yixing bus timetable was 7.8142. However, the failure rate decreased to 4.3306 and 5.0160 in the middle and late stages of the epidemic, respectively. In other words, the failure rate of the public transport network in the middle and late stages decreased by 44.58% and 35.81%, respectively, compared with that in the early stage. Thus, during major health emergencies, such as the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak, the reliability of the urban bus timetable system can be improved by at least 35%, and cross-infection at bus stations can be prevented. The research results verify the feasibility and reliability of the implementation of bus timetabling strategies during major health emergencies.
Highlights
Major epidemics involving infectious diseases are serious public health events that can lead to the spread of infection sources across regions and borders and pose a threat to the safety of all human beings [1, 2]
Since novel coronavirus pneumonia emerged in late December 2019, the COVID-19 epidemic has spread to many countries and regions around the world and has had a critical impact on individuals’ daily life, security stability, and socioeconomic status. rough early June 2020, the COVID-19 disease, which has been reported in 188 countries/regions, had led to 420,000 deaths, and over 7.5 million
We divided the extracted punctuality index of the interval travel time into two parts. e first part was the interval travel time in December 2019, which was used to formulate the timetables of bus routes. e second part was the interval travel time between January and March 2020, which was used to verify the reliability of bus timetables during a major public health emergency
Summary
Major epidemics involving infectious diseases are serious public health events that can lead to the spread of infection sources across regions and borders and pose a threat to the safety of all human beings [1, 2]. Taking effective measures to prevent, control, and eliminate the outbreak of major infectious diseases can reduce the degree of social harm caused and ensure the safety of individuals and property and help maintain regional public order and promote harmonious social communication. Taking public transport as an example, in addition to regular epidemic prevention measures such as real-name boarding, passenger temperature monitoring, scattered seating, and the all-weather disinfection of vehicles, developing an operation mechanism to reduce the risk of crossinfection in bus travel and meet the rigid needs of passengers has become an urgent issue for scholars to consider
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