Jaime Soza-Parra

Utrecht University | UU · Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought disruptive changes to society. In this chapter, we discuss how participation in activities and travel behavior choices have changed during the various stages of the pandemic through the analysis of data collected through multiple waves of surveys administered in 2020 in various regions of the United States. We pres...

In In this study, we set out to explore how various spatial patterns of travel demand drive the effectiveness of ride-pooling services. To do so, we generate a broad range of synthetic, yet plausible demand patterns. We experiment with the number of attraction centres, the dispersion of destinations around these centres, and the trip length distrib...

That the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in terms of its scale, spread and shocks can be evinced by the myriad of ever-changing responses cities all around the world have rolled out throughout the different waves of outbreaks. Although the threat is similar across the world, it took some time before its reach became global and the waves of outbr...

Reliability is understood in public transport as the certainty travellers have regarding the level of service they will experience when travelling. The travel time, waiting time, or the comfort level they will experience inside the vehicle are some of the most important reliability attributes. Reliability is usually neglected from travel behavioura...

The COVID‐19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown measures have led to an increase in e‐shopping. Using longitudinal data from before and during the pandemic, we find that the number of respondents who shop online at least once per week increased nearly five‐fold between Fall 2019 (11.6%) and Spring 2020 (51.2%). We conduct a series of ordered logistic re...

The most relevant issues related to headway variability in public transport planning, operations and quality of service are reviewed in this paper. We discuss the causes and consequences of headway variability, the alternative metrics that have been proposed to measure it, the preventive and reactive strategies to control headway variability in bot...

This paper explores on new methods for regression models to understand the evolution of headway irregularity of public transport services. In particular, this article analyses and models headway variability evolution in an urban bus service context. This is relevant as headway variability has an important effect on travel time reliability. To do so...

Public transport is affected by different types of randomness which impact the reliability they offer. The source of this randomness may come, for example, from casual uncertainty sources, such as accidents or protests, or from systematic uncertainty, related to service supply, such as dwelling time or travel time between consecutive stops. In addi...

In recent decades, the main focus in public transport operations has been increasing its speed. Increasing speed not only allows for faster trips, but also a higher frequency with the same fleet size, thus reducing waiting times and crowdedness inside the vehicles. This interest in speed has ignored a second key dimension in level of service: relia...

Service reliability has an important impact on the satisfaction stated by public transport users with the service they receive. The main source of unreliability is found in headway variance, which also affects waiting times and distributes passengers unevenly across vehicles. However, it is still unclear how headway irregularity, with its impact in...

Headway management can potentially reduce passenger waiting time and on-board crowding on high-frequency services. In this study, a headway control experiment was conducted and evaluated for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Agency routes 70 and 79 in Washington, D.C. The field experiment is evaluated by performing a before–after empirical evalu...

This paper shows the results of an experiment in which a gate allowing only unidirectional flows was installed on the middle of a Metro platform. The results were very positive: operation of the Metro Line was improved, travel times were reduced, and both regularity and frequency of trains increased. Finally, the perception of the service by its ri...