Neighborhood, built environment and resilience in transportation during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has swept the world, and the unprecedented decline in transit ridership has been noticed. However, little attention has been paid to the resilience of the transportation system, particularly in medium-sized cities. Drawing upon a light rail ridership dataset in Salt Lake County from 2017 to 2021, we develop a novel method to measure the vulnerability and resilience of transit ridership using a Bayesian structure time series model. The results show that government policies have a more significant impact than the number of COVID-19 cases on transit ridership. Regarding the built environment, a highly compact urban design might reduce the building coverage ratio and makes transit stations more vulnerable and less resilient. Furthermore, the high rate of minorities is the primary reason for the drops in transit ridership. The findings are valuable for understanding the vulnerability and resilience of transit ridership to pandemics for better coping strategies in the future.